Doctor Burnout Prevention: Energy, Boundaries, and the PACE Method With Dr. Judy Wright Episode 178
Dr. Judy Wright burned out more than once before she started paying attention to what was actually driving it. As a family doctor who spent years staying two hours after her last patient to finish charting, she knows firsthand what it costs to keep grinding without ever stopping to ask what you actually need.
In this episode, she talks about burnout prevention, energy management, and the quiet belief that saying yes is just part of being a good doctor and a good person. For high-achieving women in medicine who are still doing everything for everyone, her PACE method and her very honest account of learning to say no offer something more useful than another list of self-care tips.
Highlights
[02:00]: Her residency director told her she was slow because she cared too much about her penmanship. Dr. Wright explains what was actually going on, and why nobody gave her anything useful to work with.
[06:00]: She spent years leaving clinic two hours after her last patient before a single conversation with a colleague cracked something open for her.
[11:00]: The moment she came back from maternity leave, she walked into her clinic and asked for something she had never asked for before. What she asked for, and how she asked for it, is worth hearing in full.
[19:00]: Dr. Wright introduces the PACE method and makes a distinction between time and energy that reframes what sustainable clinical medicine actually requires.
[23:00]: She moved from clinical practice into leadership and immediately repeated every pattern she had spent years trying to break. She explains why, and what finally shifted.
[40:00]: A free stress assessment she has built specifically for doctors who think they are managing fine, because that is exactly where she was every time she burned out.
Three Key Takeaways
1. The problem is rarely time. It is almost always energy.
Most doctors who feel overwhelmed reach immediately for a time management solution. Dr. Wright argues that time is the wrong lens. Everyone has 24 hours. What varies is energy, and energy is renewable in a way that time is not. When she started working with groups of high-achieving women, she found that underneath the complaints about not having enough time was something else entirely: exhaustion, depletion, and a capacity that had been quietly shrinking for years. Protecting your energy, she argues, is not a luxury. It is the prerequisite for everything else.
2. Saying no is a skill that has to be practiced, not a decision you make once.
Dr. Wright is clear that she was not a people pleaser, but she still had work to do around saying no. For doctors who are socialized to help first and for women who are socialized to say yes, declining a request carries a weight of guilt that does not disappear just because you know it is the right call. She offers several practical ways to say no that do not require a single-word answer, and makes the case that every yes has a cost. The question is simply whether the cost is one you can afford.
3. Delegation only works when you know the people you are delegating to.
Dr. Wright is not interested in getting things off her plate for the sake of it. She watched leaders hand tasks to whoever was available and then spend more energy managing the fallout than the task would have taken. What she learned, both in clinical teams and at home with her own children, is that effective delegation starts with knowing people well enough to match the right task to the right person. That takes time upfront. It also, eventually, creates something that no amount of personal effort can build alone.
Guest Bio
Dr. Judy Wright is a board-certified family doctor, burnout prevention strategist, and performance coach based in the United States. She works primarily with high-achieving women leaders, helping them protect their energy, set meaningful boundaries, and continue performing at a high level without burning out in the process. Her PACE method, which stands for Pause, Awareness, Calibrate, Execute and Excel, gives doctors and leaders a practical framework for sustainable performance.
Connect with Dr. Wright on Linkedin.
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