After a SoMeDocs lecture on the psychology of flourishing, we found ourselves wondering whether medicine’s favorite word for professional distress has become so broad that it sometimes prevents us from seeing what physicians have actually lost.
We talk about burnout constantly in medicine. The word has become large enough to hold almost anything: the physician exhausted by an impossible schedule, the clinician who loves seeing patients but dreads everything surrounding the visit, the doctor who has lost control over when and how the work gets done, and the accomplished professional who has checked every box and cannot understand why the career they worked so hard to build no longer feels particularly satisfying.
They may all describe themselves as burned out. Their experiences, however, can be remarkably different, and the solutions may be different too.
At SoMeDocs, we spend a great deal of time talking with physicians about their careers. The conversations happen in our communities, during lectures and networking events, through the articles physicians submit, and with professionals trying to build something beyond the traditional boundaries of clinical medicine. We hear about leadership, entrepreneurship, private practice, burnout, career pivots, visibility, creativity, and the search for greater autonomy. Beneath many of these conversations is a recurring sentiment that can be difficult to name. Something about the work feels off, even when the résumé still looks impressive on paper.
Your next commute, walk, or charting break could come with a smarter soundtrack. Explore our directory of expert-led podcasts created by healthcare professionals with something meaningful to say.
A recent SoMeDocs lecture on the psychology of flourishing, delivered by Dr. Michael Wiederman, gave us another way to think about what we have been hearing.
Wiederman studies how psychological research can be translated into practical ways of living and working. During his lecture, he discussed flourishing through several basic human needs: contribution, choice, capability, and connection. The words themselves are almost disarmingly ordinary. Yet once we began applying them to the stories physicians tell us, they offered a remarkably useful lens through which to view modern medical work.
Consider the physician who still loves caring for patients. She believes in what she does and knows that her work matters. Contribution is alive and well. Yet almost every other aspect of her working day has been decided for her. Her schedule is packed according to productivity targets. Appointment lengths are predetermined. Administrative tasks spill into evenings. Insurance requirements influence clinical decisions. Time off creates an inbox that waits patiently for her return. She may still have tremendous purpose while possessing remarkably little choice.
She might call herself burned out.
Find the lecture your brain has been waiting for. Use our new filters to explore expert-led learning by topic, interest, and the questions pulling you in.
Another physician has spent years becoming exceptionally good at something difficult. He trained through medical school, residency, perhaps fellowship, and then accumulated another decade or two of clinical experience. Yet his working environment increasingly rewards speed and volume. There is little time to think deeply, teach, develop new skills, mentor younger colleagues, or pursue the questions that once made medicine intellectually exciting. He remains capable by any objective measure, but the experience of growing, stretching, and using that capability in meaningful ways has begun to disappear.
He might call himself burned out, too.
Then there is the physician who spends the entire day surrounded by people and feels strangely alone. Patients arrive one after another. Messages populate the inbox. Meetings fill the calendar. Colleagues pass in hallways or appear in small rectangles on screens. There may be hundreds of human interactions in a week without many moments of genuine connection. The informal conversations that once happened in physicians’ lounges, at nurses’ stations, over lunch, or while walking between hospital floors have been squeezed by efficiency. Mentorship becomes another calendar appointment. Friendship becomes something everyone promises to get back to when the schedule settles down.
That physician may also use the word burnout.
A curated resource which promises to bring a lineup of experts that speak about how to invest, where to invest, and how to minimize loss.
And then there is contribution, perhaps the most complicated of all. Medicine is inherently meaningful work, which makes it easy to assume that anyone practicing it should experience meaning automatically. Yet purpose can become obscured beneath enough layers of documentation, billing requirements, metrics, prior authorizations, staffing problems, and institutional demands. A physician can know intellectually that caring for patients matters while feeling increasingly disconnected from the reason they entered medicine in the first place.
Eventually, many of these experiences collapse into the same vocabulary. “I think I’m burned out.”
Perhaps burnout has become useful partly because it saves us from having to describe the specifics. It is a shorthand understood immediately within healthcare. Yet shorthand can blur distinctions that matter. A physician starving for autonomy may need something very different from one who has lost a sense of connection. Someone craving intellectual growth may not benefit from the same intervention as someone who no longer experiences meaning in the work. A vacation might temporarily relieve exhaustion while leaving every condition that produced it untouched.
For women in healthcare ready to stop waiting for permission, this curated resource brings expert-led lectures on negotiation, advancement, resilience, mentorship, and the strategies needed to break barriers and lead with authority.
This is where Dr. Wiederman’s discussion of flourishing became particularly interesting to us. Flourishing was not presented as permanent happiness, relentless positivity, or a personality type possessed by people who happen to have figured life out. It was grounded in whether the conditions of a person’s life allow fundamental psychological needs to be met over time.
That framing matters enormously in medicine because the profession has traditionally placed great emphasis on the characteristics of the individual physician. We select people for stamina, achievement, discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to tolerate delayed gratification. Training reinforces endurance. When those same people begin struggling years later, the proposed remedies can still focus heavily on what the individual might do differently: become more resilient, manage time more efficiently, practice mindfulness, exercise, sleep better, develop healthier boundaries.
Those things can be valuable. They can also leave a much larger question untouched: What happens when the environment itself repeatedly interferes with contribution, choice, capability, or connection?
AI is moving fast. Our course helps healthcare professionals keep up, with expert-led conversations on advocacy, automation, women leading in AI, ethics, regulation, and the questions medicine can’t afford to ignore.
No amount of meditation can create meaningful control over a schedule designed without your input. A wellness seminar cannot manufacture collegiality inside a workplace where everyone is too overloaded to speak to one another. A yoga class cannot restore a sense of mastery to work that has become monotonous. A resilience module cannot answer the physician who is quietly wondering whether the career they built still reflects the life they want.
The framework also helps explain something we frequently see among physicians who begin creating outside traditional clinical roles. A doctor starts teaching and suddenly feels energized. Another begins writing. Someone launches a practice, builds a company, mentors students, hosts a podcast, joins a professional community, or develops expertise in an entirely new area. From the outside, adding another activity to an already busy life might seem like an odd response to professional exhaustion. Sometimes, however, the new pursuit restores precisely what had disappeared.
Teaching may restore contribution. Building something may create choice. Learning a new field may awaken capability. Finding peers with similar interests may rebuild connection. The additional work can feel surprisingly energizing because it feeds a part of the person that has been hungry.
This does not mean every dissatisfied physician needs a side venture, nor does it absolve healthcare organizations of responsibility for working conditions. It suggests that “work less” is sometimes an incomplete answer to professional depletion. The quality of our work lives depends on more than the number of hours we spend working. It depends on what happens to us during those hours.
Perhaps that is why the idea of flourishing feels more ambitious than the language medicine usually uses around wellness. Preventing burnout asks how we keep people from reaching a state of depletion. Flourishing asks what conditions allow them to remain psychologically alive, engaged, connected, and capable of growing.
Those questions lead somewhere different. Instead of asking only whether physicians are coping, we might ask whether they have meaningful choices about how they practice. We might examine whether experienced clinicians still have opportunities to develop and use their abilities in ways that feel consequential. We might look seriously at whether the architecture of modern healthcare allows relationships among colleagues to develop at all. We might even ask physicians, with genuine curiosity, whether they still feel connected to the contribution they once imagined making.
These are harder questions than asking whether someone has completed a wellness module. They may also produce more useful answers. Dr. Wiederman described his role as something of a translator between research and real life, and that idea stayed with us after the lecture ended. Research can give us frameworks. The value comes when those frameworks help people recognize something in their own lives that they could previously feel but could not quite name.
Join our private community to explore publishing, real estate, wealth-building, creative projects, & everything that keeps us curious, ambitious, and a little more alive.
For physicians experiencing that vague sense that something has gone missing, perhaps “Am I burned out?” does not always have to be the first question. It may be more revealing to ask where choice has disappeared, where capability has stopped growing, where connection has thinned, and whether contribution still feels visible beneath everything required to get through the day.
The answers will differ from physician to physician. That is precisely why they matter. Medicine has spent years trying to understand how to keep physicians functioning inside increasingly difficult systems. The psychology of flourishing invites a larger ambition: building careers, workplaces, and professional lives in which the people doing the healing have a reasonable chance of remaining whole themselves.
Dr. Michael Wiederman’s full SoMeDocs lecture, “The Psychology of Flourishing,” explores the research behind these ideas and practical ways to apply them in everyday life. For our team, the lecture gave language to conversations we had already been having for years. More importantly, it left us asking better questions after the hour was over.
No amount of meditation can create meaningful control over a schedule designed without your input. A wellness seminar cannot manufacture collegiality inside a workplace where everyone is too overloaded to speak to one another.
