Reduce Burnout by 30% with Mindful Self-Care

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Physician Jessie Mahoney discusses her article “Learning to trust your body again: Healing the hidden wounds of medical training,” exploring how the culture of medicine conditions physicians to ignore their basic bodily needs in the pursuit of excellence. Jessie explains how this disconnection erodes trust in self, contributes to burnout, and undermines both personal well-being and professional leadership. She shares how rebuilding trust through mindfulness, acceptance, and compassion allows physicians to heal, lead sustainably, and model healthier practices for patients and teams. Listeners will walk away with practical strategies for honoring their bodies, shifting perspective with small changes, and embracing presence over performance.

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Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back Jessie Mahoney, pediatrician and coach. Today’s KevinMD article is “Learning to trust your body again: healing the hidden wounds of medical training.” Jessie, welcome back to the show.

Jessie Mahoney: Thanks. I am happy to be here.

Kevin Pho: All right, what is this latest article about?

Jessie Mahoney: This article is about learning to trust your body again. And the backstory is that recently in the last year, twenty years after having been in the ICU a couple of times as a pediatrician mom with two young kids, I went back to work with a personal trainer to try to do the physical therapy that I never did.

I was too busy. And what I have learned from this experience is literally that so many of those ways that I approach things, like just sacrificing myself and not listening to my body, have actually become literally a part of my cells and a part of the way that I move. And as I have worked with this amazing person, I have started to realize that it is also like a body untraining.

And so while I showed up because I was going to get stronger (I am in my mid-fifties, when you are in menopause, you are supposed to build that muscle and eat your protein), I thought, “Well, I need to do this so I do not break down.” And it ended up being this totally different experience than I expected.

And I think for so many of us in medicine, we do not listen to our bodies. We do not even know how. And it made me really start to think about all of this hidden curriculum of medicine and what we have learned, and that these wounds from way, way, way back are still here thirty years later. And what happens if we do not tend to them?

Kevin Pho: So I definitely hear you, and I am sure a lot of physicians listening to you now can relate with that because medicine is rooted in self-sacrifice. Right. And when they say self-care, self-care often comes last. Now I think that you, I am sure, talk to so many different physician clients. Just give us a sense of what kind of examples have you heard? What kind of stories have you heard about physicians sacrificing themselves physically and having them come to regret that later on?

Jessie Mahoney: Really, I will just say awful stories. And so many physicians, I used to think it was uncommon to be a physician who ended up in the ICU in their thirties. It is actually not that uncommon. And I think a huge part of my story was that I just did not take the time to go in, and I waited and waited and waited and waited because there was no time. And I see this where people defer preventive care; they get cancer. There was that recent article about how women live longer than men except in medicine.

And you just see so much autoimmune disease and also just catastrophic, life-changing medical issues from one, neglect and two, from the system itself. So from the lack of sleep and from not being able to use the restroom and from the intense ongoing levels of stress and fight or flight.

So interesting because we tell our patients, right. We would never tell them to do things like that. We know they are harmful and yet we do them to ourselves and almost glorify them when people do not take time off. I actually scheduled somewhat emergent surgery at the end of a day, and I worked all day and did not eat because I was like, “Well, I need to be NPO, so I will just go at 5:00 p.m.” and that makes no sense at all. Right, it was not an elective surgery. But this thought that I just thought that was normal. And then you start to recognize that it is not normal when you see other people do it.