Doctors are often praised for their resilience. It’s become a buzzword in medicine, touted as some catch-all antidote to physician burnout. It’s used in keynotes, wellness programs, recruitment ads, hospital HR emails—everywhere really. “Feeling burned out? Improve your resilience.” But I believe that this emphasis on resilience often misses the mark. Worse, it can subtly reinforce the idea that if you’re suffering, you’re not resilient enough.

But what if the problem isn’t a lack of resilience? What if the very way we talk about it is part of the problem?

As a psychologist who specializes in providing therapy to doctors—and as the spouse of a physician myself—I’ve sat with many doctors who are deeply resilient.

They’ve survived brutal training, 28-hour shifts, unimaginable grief, moral injury, the constant pressure to be composed and competent in the face of suffering. Many of them have coped by pushing through, compartmentalizing, or downplaying their own needs because that’s what the job seems to require. And yet, despite all that endurance, they find themselves burned out, anxious, or just emotionally flat.

And yet still, they’ll wonder: shouldn’t I be able to handle this?

When we frame burnout as an issue of personal resilience, we’re missing the bigger picture. And more than that, we’re placing the burden back on the individual, as if the solution is simply more grit, more mindfulness, more deep breathing.

It’s a bit like handing someone a leaky boat and, when they’re bailing water frantically, telling them to learn to swim better.

This framing quietly erases the systemic contributors to burnout:

• Unsafe staffing ratios
• Excessive documentation demands
• Increasing productivity quotas with shrinking support
• A culture that discourages vulnerability and emotional processing
• The ever-present fear of litigation, bad outcomes, or being labeled “difficult” if you speak up

Physicians aren’t burning out because they’re not strong enough. They’re burning out because they’ve been asked to tolerate intolerable conditions, often with little support or acknowledgment.

Resilience, in this context, becomes a double bind. The more you withstand, the less the system is pressured to change. The more you “bounce back,” the more you’re expected to endure. What looks like strength can actually become a trap.

In therapy with doctors, I often hear versions of the same story:

“Everyone tells me to take care of myself, but no one’s taking anything off my plate.”

“I tried doing more yoga. I still feel like I can’t breathe.”

“They brought in a wellness consultant, but our call schedule didn’t change.”

These are not personal failures. They’re completely rational reactions to a system that too often mistakes performance for well-being and treats suffering as a lack of willpower.

This is where therapy can offer something different. Not a bandaid. Not another thing on your to-do list. But a space to slow down and actually ask: What am I feeling? Why is this hitting so hard? What if it’s not just me?

Therapy, especially from someone who understands the culture of medicine, can help physicians begin to name what’s actually happening, both internally and externally. It’s a space to disentangle your own emotional patterns from the systemic forces around you. To make sense of the exhaustion not just as an individual issue, but as a consequence of deeply misaligned expectations and unrelenting institutional pressure.

Therapy doesn’t erase burnout. But it can validate your experience in a way that’s rare in a medical culture and broader society that is obsessed with pushing resilience as the cure-all to burnout. Therapy can help you understand how your coping strategies—perfectionism, compartmentalization, people-pleasing, overfunctioning—may have once helped you succeed, but may now be contributing to your struggles. And therapy can offer room to process and grieve: for patients you couldn’t save, for parts of yourself that got pushed aside, for a version of medicine you once believed in.

It’s also a space where you don’t have to be the expert. You don’t have to explain or justify. You don’t have to hold it together. That, in itself, can be profoundly healing.

Sometimes, what brings doctors into therapy isn’t a full-blown crisis. It’s a quiet sense that something’s off. It could be a loss of meaning and purpose, a constant irritability that never quite goes away, an overall feeling of numbness and disconnection from your own life. These are often the early signals of emotional exhaustion. And too often, they’re overlooked until something forces a pause. Something like a health scare, a relationship strain, a clinical error.

But it doesn’t have to get to that point. You don’t have to wait until you’re on empty.

What physicians need isn’t another lecture on resilience. What they need is recognition—that their suffering is valid, that it’s connected to real and often unchangeable demands, and that it deserves more than platitudes. Medicine needs systemic reform, yes. But doctors also need spaces where they can reconnect to themselves, where they can feel without judgment, where they can begin to remember who they are outside of the constant demand to perform.

Because the goal isn’t to bounce back faster. The goal is to stop bouncing from crisis to crisis altogether.

Let’s stop telling doctors to be more resilient and start asking: What are we asking them to be resilient to? And is that something we’re OK with?

Doctors don’t need to be tougher. They need to be seen and heard.

Annia Raja is a clinical psychologist who specializes in therapy for physicians facing burnout, identity struggles, and the emotional toll of caregiving. As the spouse of a physician, she combines deep clinical expertise with personal insight to support high-achieving doctors seeking more than symptom relief—those wanting to reconnect with themselves beyond the white coat.

Through her practice, Annia Raja, PhD Therapy, she and her team offer thoughtful, in-depth therapy tailored to the unique pressures of medical life. For specialized support designed for physicians, visit the Therapy for Physicians page.