What Burnout Looks Like When You’re Still Showing Up | Episode 196
Dr. Jillian Bybee has been a pediatric ICU doctor for 10 years. She’s also a certified coach, a speaker, a podcaster, and a GME wellness director at a 60,000-person health system. She burned out twice before she figured out what she actually needed. Now she helps other doctors do the same.
Dr. Jillian Bybee is a pediatric ICU physician, certified coach, and host of the Humans Leading podcast and Substack. She serves as GME Wellness Director at a large health system in Michigan and coaches mid-career women physicians navigating burnout and career pivots. Find her at jillianbybeeMD.com and on Instagram @lifeandpicu.
Timestamped Highlights
00:01 From wanting to be her own pediatrician to the PICU
02:30 Three-year fellowship, 28-hour shifts, every other night call
04:00 Screening herself for depression and telling her program director
06:30 A research year that became a recovery year
10:00 How she stopped identifying herself by her title alone
12:00 Her first faculty job and how the yeses started stacking up
14:00 How she evaluates opportunities now vs. how she did at the start
17:00 Exiting roles well: knowing your why before you leave
20:30 Growing her own coaching practice outside institutional red tape
22:00 Building a wellness curriculum for the PICU from scratch
27:00 What getting her first executive coach unlocked
29:00 What five minutes in a basement conference room can actually do
32:00 Active stress management and the book Burnout by the Nagoski sisters
34:00 Signs of burnout that don’t look like burnout
37:00 Burnout first whispers, then runs you over like a bus
38:00 Learned helplessness and why no one is coming with a magic wand
Three Key Takeaways
Burnout doesn’t always look like falling apart. Sometimes it looks like optimizing. Listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Cramming more into every gap. Rushing even when there’s no reason to rush. Dr. Bybee calls this a constantly activated stress response, and it often goes unrecognized because it looks like efficiency. For high achievers especially, the warning signs can hide inside the habits that got you where you are.
Five minutes is enough to start. Not 10 minutes. Not a lunch break. Five minutes. One of Dr. Bybee’s clients locked herself in a conference room basement to read for five minutes, and that small act gave her the language to ask for more. It set an example for her team. It changed the culture of a whole practice. The size of the action matters less than the decision to take it.
Only you can change your life, but you don’t have to do it alone. Learned helplessness is a real symptom of burnout. The feeling that nothing will change, that no one cares, that asking for help is a burden. Dr. Bybee makes the case that most people in medicine actually want to help. They just don’t know how until you let them.
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