EP166: Off the Treadmill: Discovering Your True Path with Dr. Dawn Baker

Finding Authentic Balance: A Conversation with Dr. Dawn Baker on Burnout and Rediscovery

In this episode of The Girl Doc Survival Guide, host Christine interviews Dr. Dawn Baker, a board-certified anesthesiologist and lifestyle design coach. Dr. Baker shares her journey from burnout and significant health issues, including a pituitary tumor, to finding a sustainable path forward. They discuss the perils of the 'treadmill of achievement,' the importance of self-compassion, and practical tools for achieving personalized work-life harmony. Dr. Baker emphasizes the value of self-reflection, mindfulness, and developing confidence to break free from societal and professional expectations. The conversation offers valuable insights and actionable advice for professionals struggling to find fulfillment in their careers.

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Dawn Baker

01:02 The Treadmill of Achievement

02:31 Burnout and Health Scare

04:11 The Wake-Up Call

07:03 Self-Compassion and Diagnosis

09:48 Infertility and Stigma

12:13 Work-Life Harmony Tools

14:51 Mindfulness Practices

15:55 Building Confidence and Clarity

22:00 Final Thoughts and Message

Transcript

Christine Ko: [00:00:00] Welcome back to The Girl Doc Survival Guide. I am very happy today to be here with Dr. Dawn Baker. Dr. Dawn Baker is a board certified anesthesiologist, speaker, and lifestyle design coach who helps professionals step off the treadmill of achievement and find a more sustainable path forward. She's the founder of Practice Balance, the author of Lean Out: a Professional Woman's Guide to Finding Authentic Work-Life Balance, and host of the Lean Out Podcast, where she shares stories and tools for creating a life on your own terms. Dawn's path has not been easy. Her own journey through burnout and a serious health scare completely reshaped how she thinks about success, balance, and what it means to live well. In this episode, we'll talk about how to spot the signs that something's off, how to start realigning with what matters, and why balance is different for everyone, if there is even such a thing. Welcome to Dawn.  

Dawn Baker: Thank you, Christine. It's great to be here. I'm [00:01:00] happy to be on your show. 

Christine Ko: I'm really intrigued by this statement of yours about being caught in the treadmill of achievement. May I ask what that looked like in your own life? 

Dawn Baker: Yes. A lot of people can resonate with the idea that when you're a high achiever, you love getting accolades. You love to get good grades, gold stars, and it starts early on, like in grade school where you derive a sense of meaning and identity from how well you do at things.

The treadmill of achievement isn't a bad thing. Achievement gives us meaning and purpose, but the treadmill is a nod to the idea of hedonic adaptation. The idea that when you buy something new, you're really excited and you have this anticipation.

So say you're gonna buy a new car, and then after a while, that happiness you get from that new thing fades. And it's the same with our achievement, so we can [00:02:00] get on this treadmill where we are seeking achievements and the reward for the achievements is more achievements. Then you get in this cycle where you have no energy and you just can't get off.

I found myself there while I was in my residency training. 

Christine Ko: A lot of us in medicine, especially when we're residents, feel that way. Because also you can't really stop training in the US. You worked so hard to get into residency training programs. I wanted to ask you about how you sort of reset, because it sounds like you had burnout as well as a serious health scare. 

Dawn Baker: First of all, regarding what you said about residency, there is a time and a place that we do need to achieve. We need to hustle, we need to work hard, and residency is definitely one of those times. However, in my coaching practice, I see people that are in this residency mode forever. I. They [00:03:00] never leave that mode. They don't give themselves permission after they're finished with their training to actually do what lights them up and what gives them fulfillment. They're years out of training, and they are thinking to themselves, is this all there is? Is this what I signed up for and what I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for in years of my life? I have got all these gray hairs to show for it.

Residency is definitely a time where you do need to work hard, and I was in that place. But what happened to me and how I got a reset is that I went into medicine as a second career. I was an engineer before I was a doctor, and I saw medicine as a way to have location, and time freedom, and more freedom in where I could work than engineering. And I lost sight of that particular vision of medicine. While I was in residency, I got caught up on this thing of saying yes to everything, and I went down this [00:04:00] academic path in anesthesiology. That would've put me into a very specific niche of where I could practice, and what I could do, and the kind of work that I would do.

I was woken up from that by having this illness. I had very non-specific symptoms. I had infertility. I had a lot of fatigue, depression, and energy management issues. I really did think that it was related to stress and burnout, but it turned out that I had a full-blown pituitary tumor, and it was large. I have permanent infertility from this, and I had blindness. I have some peripheral permanent blindness, and it affected my academic performance and just basically everything in my life. That was the wake up call that I had to say, what am I doing? Why am I on this path to do this niche specialty? Back to my original vision, that was how I reset myself. 

I had surgery, [00:05:00] and then I had a recuperation period, and I spent a lot of time by myself and I had a lot of time to think. So I had a forced period of stillness and alone time, which is what a lot of people need in order to contemplate and remember why they're doing things and take stock of their values and their vision and what they're doing. I had like a forced period of that. 

Christine Ko: Thank you for sharing all that. I'm glad that it sounds like you've come through, right? You're cured from the pituitary tumor. 

Dawn Baker: I had surgery. I do have to take replacement medications every day of my life, and it's a small trade off for living life. It's been great. I've been doing well for over 10 years now. It's been about 14 years since this experience.

Christine Ko: I'm glad you're doing well. Were you misdiagnosed for a period? 

Dawn Baker: I delayed my own true diagnosis. I was told that my symptoms were stress related and that probably I had a [00:06:00] hypothalamic type of amenorrhea because there was some blood work that was steering away from the direction of a pituitary tumor. I had a rare kind of tumor that stained for prolactin, but it did not cause an elevated blood prolactin. And that's one of the first things that they check when you have amenorrhea, prolactin. I didn't have elevated prolactin, but I was told by physicians that I should have an MRI, and I should be scanned.

I was too busy to get my own MRI. I delayed it for months and just assumed that I was going to try to fix myself by learning better stress management techniques and things of that nature, all the while still trying to go to work and to wake up at 5:00 AM to go do workouts and to just be the person that I wanted to be for everyone. Not really even myself, but for everybody else. 

Christine Ko: Then you finally got the scan and you got your diagnosis. And how [00:07:00] did you feel about that at the time? I. I. 

Dawn Baker: It's weird, but I actually had a lot of relief because I thought that what was going on with me was an invisible problem. Once I realized it was something medical that I could actually do something about, it actually did bring about a sense of relief. But the other thing was I had gone through a long period of severe self-hatred, like, why can't I cut it? Why am I having problems with my energy levels and my fatigue, and why am I having trouble doing procedures with ultrasound?

I didn't realize I was blind. It had come on so gradually that I didn't realize how much it was affecting my procedural abilities at work. I was going through a lot of comparison, feeling very bad about myself. Once I got that diagnosis, it was almost like I could open myself up to self-compassion. I had never been self-compassionate; I had always been worried [00:08:00] about what everyone else thought. Comparing myself to other people, trying to see how I can measure up, wanting to be the best and be the coolest and be the most smart, and all of the traps that a lot of people fall into.

Another big realization that happened was that I was able to love myself and to say, it's okay. You made some mistakes. You have this health problem, and treat myself the way I would treat a family member or a friend. 

Christine Ko: Thank you again for sharing that and being honest and vulnerable about that. You had this period of self-hatred. Do you think that contributed to delaying your MRI and things like that? You didn't really prioritize yourself enough?

Dawn Baker: Yes. I would chalk it up to just being busy and being distracted. But what is the undercurrent of that? Because you're not caring about your own personal wellbeing. There was a financial aspect being a resident and being very [00:09:00] frugal. I've had other friends that have had medical issues that are physicians too, that they have ignored. We're one of the worst people about getting symptomatic diagnostic tests but also getting screening tests ourselves.  

Christine Ko: As doctors, it's almost like we just think that it's not possible for us to get sick, which is really silly when I say it out loud. Also because I think a lot of times doctors who do get sick don't talk about it. So even if someone has a chronic illness or a more acute thing that needs surgery and then is treated with medication, we don't necessarily talk about what medicines we're on, what surgeries we've had. So there is this sort of prevailing idea, at least I think I had it, that all doctors around me do not have any diseases at all, which makes no sense logically.

Dawn Baker: Infertility is a huge epidemic among women physicians and other women professionals. It's not talked about very much. It's just like what you're saying where people don't want [00:10:00] to expose that vulnerability and say, I'm struggling. I have this problem. There's definitely a lot of stigma behind infertility for various reasons, and yet it's the same as any other medical problem.

Christine Ko: Yeah. I had secondary infertility, actually, for a time. You say there's a stigma. I guess it relates to you feel like maybe you're like failing as a woman, if part of it is having children and giving birth.

Dawn Baker: What you're getting at is hustle culture or the lean in culture, a culture of invulnerability and of looking perfect. And people feeling, I'll rest when I get time. And they're never gonna actually get time to do that.

Christine Ko: People think they'll have time at some point to rest or think about what really matters, and then there just never is that time. Do you think that is more common for female physicians?

Dawn Baker: I've never been asked that question before, but I do think [00:11:00] that women physicians have another level of roles. When I talk about balance, I see it as different roles, and they're playing a part in a musical piece. You have the violin, the viola, the cello, maybe some wind instruments, and those are all your different roles. I think that women physicians hold more roles than male physicians because, let's face it, if we have children, we have more of a caregiver role in many instances. Now, this isn't true across the entire board, but I would say that in general we hold more roles. We might also be doing caregiving for an aging parent or hold a very special role as a sister to a sibling or something like that. And so in that sense, yes, I do think it is more difficult. And then on top of that, [00:12:00] there's this feeling that we still don't have all of the same opportunities, and so we need to prove ourselves. And that makes us not rest in general as a group of people. 

Christine Ko: Do you have any recommendations or tools on how to address that kind of thinking?

Dawn Baker: Yes, I do. I wanted to, in the writing of my book, give people some tools for how they can find their own kind of work-life balance. Work-life balance is gonna be different for everyone, and it's different for different seasons. Like we talked about training versus being a maybe a young attending versus being a seasoned attending versus whatever's going on in your personal life. You may be having children that you're launching because they're older and they're going into adulthood, or you may have young children or there's a time and period where people don't have any children, and they're spending their free time traveling, and [00:13:00] maybe that's part of their value system. So it really all starts with spending a lot of time learning about yourself. That's my number one recommendation. And that can look like many different things. It can look like spending time by yourself. A lot of people recommend this, and it doesn't have to be fancy. It can just be like five minutes every day, spending time in quietness and silence with your thoughts.

We all have a few minutes that we can do that either in the morning or before bed or some other time during the day. Maybe it's before you get out of the car. To go home to your family after you've done your job and you've been very present with the people at work. And then you need to reset yourself before you're present with the people at home. It also looks like learning your values, learning what it is that at your core you care about and that you stand for, so that you can make better decisions. You can say yes to the right things and no [00:14:00] to the things that don't align with your values. And then developing some sort of regular mindfulness practice that allows you to be centered and be in the present moment and not always be thinking about your to-do list or worrying about things that you did in the past. So spending some time with the present moment, and that can look like lots of things. I love dispelling the myths of mindfulness being this difficult, elusive thing that people who are busy can't do and can't practice because there are lots of practical ways that you can do this. Whether it be a short breathing exercise or a small guided meditation, it can just be a few minutes a day. The real key is consistency with these things and not just practicing them one time. It's putting in the reps every day.   

Christine Ko: Is there any evidence that shows that even just a couple minutes, like you're saying, but repeated over time, is [00:15:00] useful? 

Dawn Baker: There is evidence that even short meditations will help people, as short as five minutes maybe. I sometimes will do these check-ins with myself that are two minutes long where I just focus on a sensation, like one of the senses. You can focus on your sense of touch by rubbing your fingers together or your hands together, or you can focus on your sense of vision by looking at something or staring at something. You can do that for a really short period of time. There are lots of studies that show that short meditations help people with their blood pressure, stress levels, or perception of time, their feeling of wellbeing in general. It's difficult to study that. But people do try to study it. 

Christine Ko: What do you think is the biggest barrier or the hardest part of coming out of that treadmill of achievement and into a more sort of purpose driven life? 

Dawn Baker: The most difficult thing that I have seen in my practice of [00:16:00] coaching with other people and knowing myself is developing the confidence to be different and allowing yourself to do something that is off of that golden path that you think that you have to follow.

Developing confidence is a practice we can develop. You don't have to be born with confidence. There aren't just innately confident people and not confident people. It's a skill you can practice, similar to what I talked about before where you learn more about yourself, you practice mindfulness. You question the rules that you're following and learn the mental flexibility to say, I don't know that this belief about this particular career path is helping me, is this really something that I believe in? Is it true? Does everybody believe this? Where did this thought come from? Where did this [00:17:00] rule get formed in my head? What culture made this rule? Was it from where I was brought up, or was it from my work? The workplace culture and those kind of things. 

The other thing with confidence is remembering how to embrace challenge. So if you do something different and become a beginner again. If you adopt something, say you wanna learn a new skill related to art, or you want to take up a new sport, you wanna learn how to play pickleball. Go out and do this and embrace it for the challenge of just learning something new. And that actually bolsters your confidence that you can then apply to negotiating, getting rid of a particular role at your job, for instance, or negotiating part-time, changing your FTE, getting the courage to start your own practice and leave the employed physician situation, something like that.

Christine Ko: Your answer about confidence [00:18:00] surprised me a little bit because I wasn't expecting that, but that makes a lot of sense. You said a little earlier: sit with yourself, get to know yourself, understand what you really want. I have found sometimes it's hard to know what I want, even just in something simple like what do I want to eat as a snack? It's not such a big deal, right? I can eat a bite of this, like an apple, a banana, you know, whatever, cookies. But, for larger things like career decisions, what do I really want? Do you have advice for people on how to identify what they really want instead of just going along the path of medicine, the treadmill of achievement, the train of training?

Dawn Baker: I love that you brought that up, because we are used to letting go of what we need and what we want when we're a resident. Think of all the times you feel like you need to eat or go to the bathroom and you don't. We get used to that. Just like you said, you're not alone. So many people can't even make a decision [00:19:00] because they're used to subjugating their needs to everybody else or whatever the situation is. It can be patient related or family related. One of the keys you already even talked about was practicing making small decisions and recognizing when you're making it.

I actually talk about this in my book, in the chapter where I talk about doing hard things and embracing challenges. When you make a decision, recognize that. You can even make a decision journal and decide what we're eating tonight. Make the decision. Or, I'm going to decide to go this specific way to work. Those are very basic, but they help you to put in the reps for the bigger decisions. Recognizing all the decisions you make, 'cause you make many of them every day, but you don't always know that you're making them.

You also mentioned getting to what I would call clarity of, what do I want? Clarity really comes from having a regular mindfulness [00:20:00] practice that we've already talked about. It's not something where when you are sitting in meditation, all of a sudden, poof, your idea comes to you. It's more that you put in a regular practice, and it can be something small and something every day, and it can be just even like taking a walk with yourself every day where you are quiet. You don't scroll your phone, you don't listen to a podcast, you don't listen to anything. You listen to the sounds that are around you. That can cultivate a sense of awe and a sense of timelessness. And then later on, the epiphany comes to you. You gain clarity by doing the regular everyday habits of taking care of yourself, and then the clarity comes. 

Christine Ko: Nice. May I ask what your mindfulness practice is? 

Dawn Baker: I have gone through different iterations of things, but I would say that my most regular practice is taking a walk because I live on an 80 acre homestead. [00:21:00] I travel to work to a city center, but when I am at my mountain homestead, there's wilderness all around me. So each day, I will go out and take a walk by myself in nature where I'm by myself, even if it's short. I listen to the birds, I listen to the trees rustling. We have a stream. I listen to that water sound. That is the main thing I'm doing right now. But I've gone through different practices at different times in my life.  

Christine Ko: It sounds like you definitely feel a difference over time when you're doing that consistently versus not. 

Dawn Baker: Yeah, absolutely. I think that you notice after you've been doing something regularly, almost every day. You do that for a couple months before you notice a difference. I have noticed a huge difference in myself since I started doing these kind of things. 

Christine Ko: You've shared a lot with us. Thank you for your honesty and the vulnerabilities that you've shared. Do you have any final [00:22:00] thoughts?

I. 

Dawn Baker: My message to your audience would be to remember that you have permission to make your life look whatever way you want it to look. Just because you are a physician, you don't have to have a specific type of job that meets a specific kind of hour criteria or has a certain look or wear certain clothes. You are in a position now where you have the ability to design that. All you need is to know a little bit more about yourself and cultivate the confidence to take action and design your life the way that you want.

Christine Ko: That's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for being here and sharing your story. 

Dawn Baker: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.