The Value of Values: Burnout Recovery

Is it the forest or the trees?

A few years ago, in the middle of my “mid-life opportunity,” someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer right away.

What are your core values?

I had a bunch of immediate ideas: friends, family, connection, service, flexibility, autonomy, adventure, novelty, growth, curiosity, learning, compassion, grace, etc.

But to be honest, although I could tell you a lot of things that I believed were important, I hadn’t ever considered what a value really was.

I also found out that I was conflating beliefs and values, when they are not the same thing.

Beliefs vs. Values

Beliefs are all the many, sometimes conflicting, things we think are true. I believe healthcare is a right. I believe hard work leads to success. I believe I’m more of an introvert than people realize.I believe x is better than y. Beliefs are opinions, worldviews, and interpretations shaped by our experiences. They often shift over a lifetime as circumstances and companions change.

Values are deeper. Values are ideas so important to us that we alter our lives to live by them. Although their priority may slowly shift over time, values remain remarkably consistent. They are the foundation of who we believe ourselves to be at our best.

Most importantly, when you are living in alignment with your values, you do not care what anyone else thinks about it. You will gladly work and sacrifice to stay aligned with them, because otherwise, what’s the point? Living in accordance with your values gives you deep personal satisfaction and meaning that energizes and validates you, even if no one else understands.

Consider the value of kindness. Would you be kind EVEN if no one considered you kind, or responded to that kindness by liking you? Would you think it critically important to be of service, no matter the hardship or persecution associated with it? A value is a way of living and behaving that you do because it is the very essence of who you are. Beliefs are what you believe, values are WHY you believe it.

So What Does This Have to Do With Burnout?

Everything.

The research is clear that burnout is driven more by organizational misalignment than personal deficiency — and that the mismatch between personal values and workplace culture is consistently one of the strongest predictors of this misalignment. This means the most important thing an individual can do isn’t more self-care. It’s knowing your unique core values clearly enough to see exactly where the misalignment is — and which parts can be reframed, renegotiated, or released without burning the whole thing down.

But most burnout teaching implies that you are the problem and you just need to learn how to set boundaries, practice mindfulness, take more vacation, get better sleep, or start a gratitude journal. And those aren’t bad things — some of them are genuinely helpful.

But for many people, especially high achievers who are already good at executing, those interventions feel like just another checkbox on the to-do list. They may work for a bit, but they’re the first things to go when the overwhelm grows. Then you’re back where you started, except now you also feel like a failure for not even doing self-care properly.

How Values Make Burnout Recovery Actionable

Most people who are burned out already believe plenty of true things about their situation. They believe the system is broken. They believe their workload is unsustainable. They believe something needs to change. But beliefs alone leave you staring at an enormous, amorphous problem with no idea where to start. That awareness, without direction, just becomes another source of exhaustion. You end up trying to fix everything at once, or you freeze because the organizational issues feel so massive that no individual action seems worth taking.

Values change that equation entirely.

When you know that your core value is autonomy, you stop trying to fix the entire toxic culture and start asking a much more specific question: where, exactly, is my autonomy being violated, and what is the smallest move I can make to reclaim it? When you know your core value is connection, you stop white-knuckling your way through isolation and start looking for the specific community — not any community, but the values-aligned one — that gets and supports your efforts. When you know your core value is learning, you stop forcing yourself to perform in a system that rewards productivity over curiosity, and you start building toward a role that lets you do what actually lights you up.

Values don’t just explain the pain. They triage it. Values are the lens for viewing big issues with personal clarity, and then provide the compass to direct your unique path forward. They tell you which mismatch is actually destroying you — because it’s rarely everything at once. It’s usually one or two things hitting a nerve so deep you can’t override it anymore. And once you can name which value is being violated, you can see which battles are yours to fight and which ones you can release, and which people will actually understand what you’re going through — not because they share your beliefs about what’s wrong, but because they share your values about what matters.

This is true in relationships as well. Two people may be deeply “in love” but that can be rooted in very different values, which, when unexamined, can lead to frustrating conflict. Two people may both believe family is important, but what exactly is valued about family to each? Support? Tradition? Legacy? Sharing? Companionship? Growth? Passion? Respect? Love? Getting to the root of what the other person values allows for clearer understanding and communication around the true underlying source of friction.

Values are the difference between knowing something is broken and knowing what to do about it.

Why This Matters for All Behavior Change

This distinction also matters enormously for health, which deteriorates alongside burnout — some cause, some effect. And despite our never-ending attempts to fix it, most of us try (and then abandon) every diet, exercise plan, medication regimen, and behavioral change within eight weeks. This is true even after serious things like a heart attack — unless the change is tied to a deeply held personal value.

Consider someone trying to quit drinking. If the frame is avoiding consequences — the hangover, the embarrassment, the damage — then the next drink isn’t just a drink. It’s evidence of failure. And what does failure make you want to do? Have another drink.

But if the frame is alignment — sobriety keeps me connected to who I actually am — then every day without a drink is a win that generates its own energy. And if you slip, it happens inside a larger story of moving toward something fundamentally important to you, not just running from something. That story holds you.

You’re moving towards the light instead of away from the dark.

My Values Gap

When I finally excavated my own values, I drilled through the layers of what I thought I should care about and finally hit my bedrock.

It took me a month, and a coach to objectively challenge every value I thought I had.

This is not as easy as you might think, especially when you have to start releasing ideas like love or service or connection as a core value. Does this make me a bad person? Yet, if you can’t feel true connection without being authentic, authenticity is more core to your essence than connection. If you can’t be kind without respect, then respect is more foundational.

It turns out that learning is my key defining value. My entire life has been a quest — a search where I will thankfully never have all the answers. It might look like straight As or becoming a doctor or a full passport, but it has never been about those things as goals. It’s an insatiable desire to understand why others tick, why I tick, and how I can learn everything I can about this messy, beautiful world I share for a sliver of time with billions of other living things.

For twenty years, I had organized my life around a system that didn’t share those values. Academic medicine valued hierarchy. I valued autonomy. It valued fixed schedules and routines. I valued flexibility and adventure. Most of all, it valued economic productivity, while I deeply valued the human experience of trying to heal. And what I had learned was that the focus on procedures for revenue generation was not at all aligned with the best patient outcomes for chronic pain. And since my other top core value is authenticity, I simply could not keep showing up and propagating what I truly felt was a dangerous lie.

Those “values gaps” - whether at work or in relationships or in culture at large - create threat signals. Every time a choice butts up against a value you aren’t honoring, your nervous system thermostat recalibrates. The alarm systems regulating pain, mood, sleep, immunity, digestion, and cardiovascular function signal threat. In clinical terms, this process overlaps with what we call central sensitization of the nervous system.

I know this because I lived all of it.

I took a year off after my surgery internship and became a waitress. I switched from surgery to anesthesia. I moved from private practice to academics. I let go of administrative roles. I got promoted, I took a sabbatical. I became a yoga teacher. I did every hippie retreat you could do. I took more vacation. I restructured my work-life balance again and again — over a 20-year period, I went from every other night in-house call for four months in a row to working a month on, a month off.

And I was still burned out - even worse, actually, by the end. I was drinking more. My life was increasingly compartmentalized — work self over here, play self somewhere else, and a growing distance between the two. Without a compass, I just kept reaching for the next thing that might help: a new routine, a new hobby, a new relationship, a new work role. None of it stuck because none of it was anchored to anything. I was reacting to burnout instead of understanding it. I was treating symptoms while the cause — a fundamental misalignment between my values and the values of the system in which I worked — remained completely unexamined.

My body started to speak to me. What was a whisper coalesced over time into a roar — insomnia, anxiety, irritability, overwhelm, exhaustion, and increasingly futile and extreme efforts to cope, pivot, ignore, or just deal. It was unsustainable, like all burnout becomes.

Burnout isn’t just caused by working too hard. It’s caused by working too long in misalignment with your values. Your nervous system knows the difference — even when your conscious mind doesn’t. When you are aligned, long hours can be energizing. When you are misaligned, even moderate demands feel corrosive.

Now I work 20% as much, and save 200% more. I found the value gaps between where I spent my time, my money, my energy and my attention. I now only engage with work and relationships and experiences that allow me to continue to honor my two core values of learning and authenticity. These values represent the constant state of internal and external seeking in which I thrive. Whether through my nomadic gypsy lifestyle, or my desire to continue to learn and grow in my long-term relationships, or my evolving career of service, I am a seeker.

I use my core values as a lens to clarify everything that brings me stress, and to guide every decision I make moving forward. I consider what aspect of the situation is misaligned, and then determine what can be removed or reframed to reorient my experience. If I turn anything tough into an experiment where I can learn how to become more authentic or self-aware or better serve others, I will be IN and inspired. I may not know my exact purpose or plan, but I now very clearly know HOW and WHY I want to go about everything while navigating my life.

And this makes all the difference.

Your Path Forward

I don’t even identify as a doctor anymore.

A doctor has an expert opinion and tells you what you should do. A coach explores what you think is causing your distress, and then helps tie an action plan for addressing it to your unique values and strengths. It’s a journey taken together. And with the coach’s support and accountability - and the newfound clarity and agency of the coached - I have seen radical transformations unfold in ways I would NEVER have been able to predict had I been advising people what to do from my personal “expert” perspective. I get to learn alongside other learning humans. It’s a deeply satisfying thrill to me. It feels like a calling.

The framework I eventually developed to guide this journey through all the things that keep us stuck and struggling is called the TRUST Pathway, and it starts with values for exactly this reason. The first T is for Tether: tether to your values, to what actually matters to you. Not your job title. Not your institution’s mission statement. Not what your partner or kids value. Not what anyone else thinks is the cure for what ails you, based on what has worked for them. Until you know your stake in the ground, every decision is reactive. You’re playing defense against burnout instead of building toward a solution.

Explicitly clarifying two — and only two — foundational values changes people more quickly and more permanently than almost anything else I now do as a coach. Not because naming your values is magic — because naming your values gives your nervous system a compass and clarity. With that lens, a path appears — not a perfect one, but one that makes sense to you. And that clarity alone starts to quiet the alarm, and give you inspiration and power to make the changes only you know will work.

Your answer to your burnout is unlikely to be blowing up your academic career, cutting out alcohol, moving into a van, and becoming a burnout coach. But mine definitely was. I used science to find my perfect solution, and you can find yours too. I can teach you the alphabet and the grammar, but the story you eventually write will be all yours.

What could it be??