Plastic straws, turtles, and burnout recovery
There’s no quick fix for a hole it took years to dig
On a call with a client the other day, she dropped a line that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
She’s a physical therapist—I’ll call her Chrissy. She’s been in practice for 20 years. And she’s tired. Exhausted.
She told me she wanted out, but also she had no idea what to do next. Did she want to stay in corporate PT? Start her own practice? Leave the bedside?
I started describing how I work with clients to get them out of burnout. It takes eight weeks, I told her. In that time, we tackle some very big questions:
Are the values that drive her today the same ones she had when she was 26? Are they ones she believes in, or did she adopt them due to societal expectation?
How does she want to orient herself for the next decade?
How does she navigate difficult conversations with family that considering a change will require?
What does she do with the shame that sometimes comes when considering decreasing patient contact?
Are there effective decision-making frameworks can she use to make a big, uncertainty-fraught, identity-changing decision?
(Side note, the longer I do this, the crazier I think it is that those of us in healthcare are entrusted to make life-altering decisions for our patients, but nobody has ever taught us how to do it for ourselves! Like, it’s crazy that decision frameworks exist—they’re out there—but our training just pretends we don’t need them, since we’re going to be clinicians our entire lives anyway…)
How do we address the uncertainty around every big life decision-the deep, epistemic uncertainty. Like, she can’t know what she doesn’t know about life on the other side of the uncertainty?
And then, once we’ve made a decision, stress-tested it, future-tested it, how do we actually build a step-by-step path out of the burnout. What are the financial runways? How does she (re)brand herself? What should she do with her CV, her LinkedIn? Are there medicolegal considerations for which she should talk to a lawyer? What about tail insurance coverage, abandonment considerations-is there a way to take into account all the small decisions that a big decision engenders?
And then, she took a deep breath.
“I was hoping there was just an antibiotic I could take for 10 days, and it would all get better.”
Plastic straws and single-action bias
Y’all remember when paper straws were all the rage? About five years ago, a pandemic raging, lawmakers decided that the way to fix the heat death of our planet was to ban plastic straws.
Of course, it started before that. With a nine-year-old named Milo Cress.
And with a viral video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck up its nose:
We all suffered for years with paper straws that needed tiny blue pills the minute they touched any liquid, until adult sippy-cup–style lids were invented (and until the pasta industry decided to get into the straw-making game).
Did it work? In one way, yes. I’m writing this blog post at my favorite NYC coffee shop, a pasta-straw in my Vietnamese-style iced coffee:
The most meta picture I’ve ever posted
But have we reversed climate change? Have we averted the seemingly inevitable dessication of our planet?
No.
And that’s because we fell victim to something called the single-action bias.
Put simply, the single-action bias is the tendency to undertake a single (often dramatic) intervention, assume the problem solved, then move on.
In a super fascinating study of people’s reactions to flood risk, Dr. Maya Buchanan and her colleagues out of Princeton and Brooklyn College found that homeowners in flood-prone areas who had already taken one low-cost emergency preparedness measure (think, stocking up food) were up to 80% less likely to relocate, buy expensive insurance, or elevate their homes. In other words, once they’d done one thing, they assumed they’d solved the problem and moved on.
Doing the simple thing made them so much less likely to tackle the much more complex problem of truly protecting themselves against floods.
Fascinating stuff.
And although basically all the research on the single action bias has been in the context of environmental action, it’s got important implications for how we manage our own lives.
Single-action bias and burnout
Unlike a simple infection—and very much like flooding or climate change—burnout is a multi-layer process. It’s not just fatigue. It’s emotional exhaustion. It’s moral injury. It’s role erosion. It involves questions of identity, of financial stability, of legal entanglements, of contractual obligations, of moral compasses.
Unfortunately, our tendency is to reach for the plastic straw ban. We want Chrissy’s ten-day course of antibiotics—whether it looks like a yoga retreat, deep-breathing exercises, or pizza parties and Nurses’ Week donuts.
These do work…to a point. A vacation does sometimes cure our ills…until we come back to the same system that broke us.
And that’s because these single-action interventions rarely address root causes or downstream consequences.
What they do, instead, is give us a false sense of agency. And when they (inevitably) don’t work, their failure becomes our failure. We throw up our hands in frustration. “I guess,” we say, “I’m just stuck.”
Believing that we’ve done something, and therefore we’ve addressed the problem, can forestall the complex work needed to get out of a complex problem. It also creates a relapse risk: just like not finishing a course of antibiotics leads to antimicrobial resistance, failed quick fixes create resistance to trying interventions again.
Second, it erodes our own self-confidence. “If I couldn’t even do my deep breathing exercises right,” we chastise ourselves, “how can I be expected to tackle anything more complex?”—and that leaves the latent, underlying drivers of burnout completely unaddressed.
Scalpel, please
The antidote to single-action bias is, unfortunately, complex.
I mean, if it wasn’t, wouldn’t it just be another single-action bias? (Side note #2: when I started writing this blog post, I didn’t expect it to get so recursive and meta).
As an example: when I launched my coaching business, I fell victim to single-action bias. Despite knowing what it is, despite an entire PhD in the science of decision-making, I believed that all I needed to do was implement the correct client attraction funnel, and then everything would be simple.
I thought this even after a good friend of mine, who’s been coaching for 15 years longer than me, told me that 70–80% of what she does every day is “run the business.”
It would be different for me, right?
And that wasn’t hubris. It was single-action bias. Do the one thing, and you’ll solve the problem.
Starting a coaching business, I sound found out, was a complex thing—an interplay of advertising, social media, mindset work (good god, the amount of mindset work!), finances, legal structures, and, occasionally, actually coaching.
I had two choices when the short course of antibiotics didn’t work for me: I could decide that the business was doomed to fail (which is still always a 3am fear).
Or I could push forward into the complexity, into the messy middle, and decide that this thing—this business of getting people out of burnout—was worth fighting for.
Enough about me. Over to you: What would it look like to stop looking for the single action that’ll cure you? What would it look like to embrace the multistage, surgical, invasive, methodological, and staged approach—the one that works, even if it’s hard.
Because that? That’s where freedom lies.
→ Healthcare folks: Are you ready to get out of burnout once and for al—and into a life you’re in love with again? Don’t fall victim to single-action bias. Check out my free webinar on creating your Burnout Escape Plan, one science-backed decision at a time, here.
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