Jennie: If you follow the money, you will understand what is going on. And I think that's true for so many of our anxiety and scarcity mindset. We might not want to think that money has such a big impact on us psychologically, but I can speak for myself that I know it does.
Chrissie: sometimes courage before clarity is idiotic and we land on our asses, but other times it's just a very authentic living in co creative response to the universe where you are just in yes, and energy and following, your intuitive hit and what feels like inspiration
Jennie: we want to help and fix people, but sometimes the healing is actually not through fixing. It's through being, and that's very hard to like quantify, but I personally believe very strongly that there's something about the human connection that is healing.
Chrissie: You're listening to Solving for Joy. I'm your host, Dr. Chrissie Ott.
Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Solving for Joy podcast. I am excited to welcome my guest today, Dr. Jennie Byrne, MD, PhD, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and trailblazer extraordinaire, uh, transforming mental health care with dual expertise in biology, psychology and a vision to tackle some of healthcare's biggest challenges.
She has been an advisor to innovative companies like Wovenly and Overstory Health, co founder of Belong Health, and advisor also to Beginly, which is how we actually got connected. Dr. Byrne was the co founder of Belong Health, and she is the author of two books, Work Smart and Moral Injury, Healing the Healers. All of this, and she continues to be a parent, a practicing psychiatrist who supports clinicians, especially facing burnout, anxiety, ADHD, moral injury. And Dr. Byrne's mission is to connect people, ideas, and solutions to reshape the future of healthcare. I am so thrilled to platform her to share insights with our listeners today. What a pleasure to have you. Thank you for coming.
Jennie: Thanks for having me. I'm so glad we get to talk again. I really enjoyed our chat before.
Chrissie: Me too. So backstory, we got connected through Beginly and they are collecting, um, conversations from clinicians sort of to be provided to Beginly's audience, which is primarily early career physicians who are making some of their most important and consequential decisions. So helping pull back some of the curtains to say, Hey, You can decide again, or you can decide, um, unconventional things. And so I shared a bit of my circuitous path through medicine with Jennie on their podcast, or I don't know if it's officially a podcast, but we'll say collection of conversations on YouTube.
So Jennie I know that you have quite a circuitous backstory too. And, um, I'd love to just kind of contextualize your experience by asking you to share a bit of that with our listeners, um, and see where that leads us in our conversation today about solving for joy.
Jennie: Yeah, sure. Happy to share some things that probably aren't on LinkedIn or a CV, so you can get a sense of all the twists and turns of the story, which continues to twist and turn, hopefully many more years to come.
I grew up in a place called York, Pennsylvania, which is a small town, basically, but it's kind of a place that also has a lot of urban problems, so it's a strange blend of small town but urban problems, and grew up in around a lot of poverty. And I was not poor, but, um, you know, most of the people around me were people in my school were. And, um, I guess that's kind of informed some of the journey because I have a very kind of lived experience of like what poverty looks like up close, even though I've had the advantages, um, not to live in poverty. So that's a little bit of a, unusual upbringing, I think. Um, but as I think I mentioned before to you, Chrissie I did not know I was going to be a doctor when I grew up.
I mean, if you would have asked me as a little kid, that was probably one of the furthest things from my mind. Um, and I actually was a musician in high school and was a music major going into college. So, I thought I was going to do music performance for a living. About the end of the first semester, I realized I wasn't really that good to be in, like, the Philadelphia Orchestra. And so I started thinking about other things. And I knew I wanted to live overseas, again, I was in a small town I really wanted to get out to. I went to Philadelphia, which at the time was a big city compared to where I grew up, wanted to go overseas.
So I lived in France, and my parents didn't want me to go, and I had to sell them pretty hard to get me to go for a semester. I saved up a lot of money to help with costs. And, uh, convince them to let me stay for the second semester. So I stayed for a full year. I didn't speak really much French. I would say hardly at all was totally immersed. Um, really had this wonderful year of freedom and exploration. And I was pretty young when I think back, I was only like just 19 when I did that, which I have a kid who's 18 and now I'm like, wow, that was really kind of a lot for, for 19, um,
And then I came back and I was like, I don't want to be a French professor. You know, I had a great time, but that's not my thing. And I took a class called, um, introduction to brain and behavior. And I just totally fell in love. It was an interdisciplinary class, which was kind of unusual back then. So it had people from different departments. It's from psychology, biology, neuroscience. And I just, I just loved it. Everything about it. And that kind of set me on a path actually into research because I connected with one of the professors and asked if I could work with them. And this was when I was in college and again, I wasn't poor, but I did need to work to pay for a lot of things I wanted to do like traveling.
And so I got a job in the lab and I took care of rats. And I cleaned up their poop and played with them all weekend long. That was one of my jobs. But I also did research in the lab. And I, and I fell in love with that. And I was kind of on this track to become a researcher, a PhD researcher. And there was a guy in the lab and he was an MD PhD, which I had never heard of before. Um, and he said, I think you'd be a really good MD PhD. I think you'd be a good clinical translator and you know, me being at that point, whatever, 20 years old, I was like, sure, I'll do an MD PhD. I mean, I really was looking back. I was really quite clueless. No one in my family had ever done anything like this. Even though everybody was well educated, I was pretty clueless. I was like, sure, I'll do that.
So I applied and it took me an extra year to do the MCATs and to take all my pre med basically as a senior, which as you can imagine is pretty crushing to take all of your pre med classes, like as a senior. Um, so I took a gap year, did research while I was applying and then, um, I, I got into a number of programs and I chose one in New York city because again, I really wanted that experience of being in the big city. Didn't know a soul. New York city didn't have, really had no idea what I was signing up for. To be totally honest with you, I was pretty clueless and you can't kind of hear a recurring theme here already about like, I just take these leaps and I don't really know what I'm getting myself into.
Um, so the MD PhD ended up taking nine years. The PhD part was five years. Basic science, pretty hard, had a very bad experience with my mentor who ended up moving the entire lab to Oregon from New York City in two weeks. He announced it out of the blue to us and said, we're moving and I was midway through my PhD and I chose to continue. And so then I commuted and basically was a hybrid worker before that was a thing. Uh, um. You know, to finish up my PhD and then had a pretty negative experience where he didn't want me to finish and I actually had to go to my thesis committee and have them override my advisor. Whoa. That if you've been in academics, you know, that's like a really big deal.
Chrissie: So devastated for your 20 something year old self that had to face that battle.
Jennie: So, so I, so I got through that and then I was still like wanting to do research. I loved psychiatry. I love neurology. I liked neurosurgery. I did my rotations at Bellevue in New York city, which is like the wild West. If anyone listening has ever worked at Bellevue. Um, but I decided to go into psychiatry because I felt like neurology was a little depressing. Um, back then it was very buttoned up and there weren't a lot of treatments for people. Um, whereas I felt like psychiatry, I was like, well, at least I can talk to people, and the idea that like I could help people, um, through this understanding of brain and psychology to together, I thought that was really cool.
Um, so, you know, so me now in my late twenties in New York city and went into residency, um, and still thought I was going to be an academician. Like many people in medicine, I really was interested in that, but the, the pragmatics and the reality of life just did not mesh with that at all. I found it very stifling. And then when it came time to finish residency, um, there weren't really that many research grants out there. And so they suggested to me in a very kindly way that I do a postdoc. And I was like, you have got to be kidding me. At this point, I'm like 30. I don't know. How old was I at that? I was like 32, 33. I had a kid. I was married. Um, you know, postdoc salaries are like nothing. Um, buried in a mountain of debt because I didn't understand the economics of an MD PhD. I thought that if you had a scholarship, That meant you would never have any debt. I didn't really understand how it worked. Um, so I just did a big leap of faith and my husband at that time and I were like, okay, let's just leave New York. Let's just do something totally different.
Took out a map of the U. S. Literally just started like blocking states off. Like that's too cold. That's too far west. Like, Florida is just too far, like, and came up with a number of states and started visiting different places. And we found Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is where we live now, and just took a giant leap of faith. I took a job doing house calls in psychiatry, which was back then very revolutionary. Um, and, and so the career is kind of meandered. I don't need to go every twist and turn, but you know, there's been a couple other, you Points where I just felt like it was time for a change and, um, just kind of followed the opportunities and what seemed right. And I remember at the time people always would think I was out of my mind. I mean, my parents, I think, still think I'm out of my mind. They still have no idea what I do. Um, they're like, why aren't you just at a job? Like, why are you so restless?
Um, but then it all kind of has come together now, I'd say in the last five to 10 years. And so this meandering path where I followed my curiosity, I think now has poised me. Like I said, you said at the beginning to connect the dots. I really see the ecosystem in a different way than most people fundamentally. I can connect the dots and move things much, much faster and move things in the innovation world. That's like a very pragmatic, high quality way. So I'll stop there again. There's a lot of twists and turns along the way, but it's, it's typically been fueled by kind of a sort of, I don't know where it came from, but kind of a fearlessness to just take a big leap and to see what happens. I've always been pretty fearless.
Chrissie: That makes me smile so much. I definitely, um, feel some sisterhood there. Your habit of leaping into the unknown. Um, I. I get this, uh, sense of courage before clarity, um, that that is, that's part of the theme and it excites me because that feels really alive to me. And sometimes courage before clarity is idiotic and we land on our asses, but other times it's just a very authentic living in co creative response to the universe where you are just in yes, and energy and following, um, your intuitive hit and what feels like inspiration instead of the breadcrumbs that have been set out in straight lines by the systems that we exist in and around and between.
Jennie: You know, I think also just very sensitive to scarcity mindset. So when I'm in a job for a long time where I start to feel like there's scarcity, like, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough of this. I don't have enough of that. I think when that starts to happen, that's when I'm ready to make change because that mindset is very uncomfortable for me. I don't like it. I'm a much more open, generous mindset that's much more aligned with like who I am. And so I think when that might, I'm just very, maybe I'm just more sensitive to that than other people too. Like, I really find that quite unpleasant to be in. Like, I need more and more and more as opposed to I can do more and more and more. Um, I don't know, maybe your listeners can relate to that as well.
Chrissie: Sure. And I was really hearing you when you said, um. you see the ecosystem of health care a little differently than most people. Um, I mean, spending that much time in academics and in research and, you know, assuming like, many good students that you would stay inside the ivory tower, you know, because that's what you've known for the last decade and more, right? And then being somebody who actually ended up in innovative medicine and business and startups and, you know, the world of ideas. It's, um, it's really unique. And then to do that while also practicing psychiatry clinically, um, I love it. I love it.
Jennie: And there's nothing. I mean, I gave up seeing patients for about two years and I went back, um, and did some kind of traditional telehealth for the last couple of years. But then again, I felt like it was just, But I started to feel that scarcity mindset again, like, Oh, I don't have enough time. Or, Oh, I just have to sit here in this chair. Like it just wasn't working. But I really love the human connectedness of seeing patients. That's very important. So again, it was a pivot.
So now my new practice, I work in a much different way with patients. It's more non traditional where I don't feel like I'm just glued to this chair. Um, the way I used to feel. And so again, it's like, I, what I love about the job is that I get to have that inner personal connectedness with individuals, but then I also can zoom way out and kind of influence healthcare at this like super macro level. And it's a little bit behind the scenes. I kind of like that. I kind of, I don't really want to be the CEO right now. You know, I kind of like being behind the scenes at different places and helping shape the way people see things. Um, I'm actually enjoying that. It's, it's almost like this influencer, quiet role, um, as opposed to being the, the leader or the CEO kind of role.
Chrissie: I can imagine different types of advantages to that. This seems like an aside, maybe a little bit of a side trip here, but there's something about when you were, you're telling the story about not really understanding the economic implications of an MD PhD program. And I have a sense of picking up what you're putting down, but I wonder for the audience members who might not, if you would just say a few words about the implications of being, uh, you know, in a graduate program for that long.
Jennie: Sure. So when I was what, 20, 21 making the decision to apply, what I thought was that, um, going to graduate school meant that you would delay going into the workforce. So I understood that. And I thought, well, as long as you have a scholarship to pay for your tuition and you have a scholarship to pay minimal living expenses, it's just a delay of years. But when you get out on the other side, in theory, you're already making a nice salary. So you're not really doing like entry level work. So my understanding was that I would be financially in a very similar place, whether I did the PhD or not, if I had a scholarship. So that's how my simple understanding was, like a scholarship meant you weren't losing out, but as I've come to realize now, you know, uh, what going to education, you know, being in education for, What, from age 19 to 32, basically, what that means is not only are you time wise delayed, and that's a very long delay, and they also told us that an MD PhD would take six years and it took nine.
So they were actually kind of misleading intentionally at the beginning, and I didn't have enough wherewithal to think to interview people who had gone through the program and to like see if that was true. I assumed, well, you said it's six years, of course it's six years. So first of all, there was like a three year gap that was a somewhat just, I don't know if dishonest is a strong word, but I felt like it was misleading.
Um, but what happens is so, okay, so you get a scholarship. So the scholarship pays your tuition. Most people who do MD, PhD are looking for a full ride scholarship, right? Cause otherwise it's very difficult. Um, so your tuition is paid for. But your living expenses Are very, very bare bones, like if sustainable at all. So I lived in New York City. The stipend we got, I could afford 500 a month for rent. Anybody living in New York City, even this was like a long time ago, 500 a month for rent is just like, almost impossible. You have like a cot in the corner of someone's apartment, but like I lived in the med school dorms, even then it wasn't like 500. So the standard of living to try to make it on the stipend for your living expenses is kind of impossible. And so unless you have your family giving you money or saved money or take debt, your standard of living is going to be not really sustainable for a prolonged period of time. So most people either get money from somewhere else or take, or what I did, which was take loans. So basically to have a decent lifestyle in New York City, I mean, not extravagant, but decent, um, I ended up having to take, um, a lot of loans.
So that's one piece of it. Second piece is, and I'm fortunate because I had a scholarship. If you didn't have a scholarship, you're taking all the loans for the tuition as well. The second piece is, um, years in the workforce to get, um, your salary. So my peers who went into law school or finance or whatever, by the time they're 32, 34, they're coming out the gate much, much, they're much higher because they've been in the workforce for much longer, even other professional schools like MBAs or law school.
So my idea that you'd be at the same place coming out is not true. When I interviewed, this has changed, um, over the years, but when I interviewed for my first psychiatry job at like UNC or Duke or those places here, I mean, they were quoting me like 100, 000 a year, which to, you know, a lay person, you're like, Oh, 100, 000 a year. That's, that's not bad. Right. But this is after all the training.
Chrissie: You're like, I've given up a decade of my life. This is barely going to pay my living expenses and loan payment.
Jennie: Um, another thing is by the time you get through a prolonged training like that, many of us have families. So I had responsibility financially, not just for myself anymore. I mean, my, I had a spouse who was making a comparable salary to me, which was helpful because he was an attorney, but some people don't have that luxury. Right? And then you have a kid and you know, Living in New York with a doctor and a lawyer, you know, we needed a full time nanny. So one of our salaries which wasn't mine because I was still in training and my salary was like dirt. So it was really my husband's salary was mainly going to pay a nanny. So even though you have a doctor, you know, we would always joke a doctor and a lawyer living in New York we were like the living poor, the working poor of New York City, which is ridiculous.
Um, so there's kind of like the financial obligations that you, you, many of us have towards our families and some people supported their families at home, right? And they might even have like other people that they're supporting. And then the part that I really didn't understand that I've come to appreciate is, um, most physicians, I think it's very common that in addition to all this, we have not invested any money. So you don't have a 401k when you're in training, you don't have a SEP IRA when you're in training. Um, You know, you have zero, you're not investing, you have nothing vesting towards your future, um, right? And so, so not only are you behind on things like base salary and debt, now you're also way behind on investment. So my husband and I, you know, we like, we looked at each other and we're like, this is crazy. Like we have no savings, not in addition to the debt we have to pay off. We also have no savings.
Chrissie: And so there's just crucial years for compounding.
Jennie: And if anybody has done, you know, basic finance and you look at compound interest and how that works, you can see how missing 15, 20 years. It's everything. Yeah. So I wish I, you know, these were some of the things I wish I had known and again, it's not like my family was uneducated. My dad was actually a banker and yet I had no financial education as a woman. I think it was gender based in part. Like I, I think as a woman, I was taught to have a household budget, but everything else was not something we discuss, right? It's just economics.
And my mom would call, she still calls it this, she says a nest egg. And I like lose my mind whenever people say nest egg, cause she would always say, and she was always encouraging me to hide money from my husband. And like, I was like, you don't understand. I do the bills. I'm like, I'm not hiding it from anybody. I'm hiding it from myself. So stuff like that. Right. And so that, anyway, that's, that's some of like, you know, people don't realize not only do you give up your twenties to be a doctor and you give up a lot of relationships and social things and like the juicy part of your twenties, you give it up and, and then to come out and have this unexpected financial burden that follows you around.
I mean, I just paid my last student loan off last year. 50. Um, and I didn't even have that many loans, but it still took me until 50 to pay everything off. And so I have a kid going to college in the fall. So I've literally about, you know, 12 months between my student loans and probably having to do loans with, we haven't figured that out yet. I didn't have a chance to save for their college. Right? Cause how would you, so I'm still living through the consequences of, of that time financially.
Chrissie: This is so rich, you know, neither of us probably plan to have a conversation so in depth about the financial implications of becoming a physician, but it really touches quite directly on, um, the moral injury, the golden handcuffs, the perceived limited, uh, opportunities, uh, the perceived limited freedom, the limits to our choice are so deeply informed by the ways that we have been unintentionally hamstrung by investing in our education, investing in our social through education, but also investing in community benefit by educating ourselves as caregivers and physicians and space holders for suffering, which we are very, very glad to do for the most part.
Um, but in our particular country in our particular, uh, you know, macro economic situation with the healthcare industrial complex, um, The, the risks do not always outweigh the rewards. In fact, we, you know, we have the reputation that's sort of left over from the fifties and sixties where everybody thinks that, you know, the doctors are out on the golf course and enjoying the many financial fruits of their labor. And I am not complaining about my high earning potential as a physician, but I want to say to people, it is not like that. Um, you know, we're, we're regular middle class and we're grateful for it. And we pay a lot of attention and, you know, we still, we still take those hits. If I could go back in time and just put away the appropriate amount of IRA money. Um, I did a couple of years of my twenties, um, and then it went away. Right? But all of this, if you are listening, do not let anything get in the way of you investing in your future when you are young, do not let anything get in the way of investing when you are young.
Jennie: And, you know, if you don't get it or you think it's below you to think about money as I did, that's why I had to be on the couch in psychotherapy. I couldn't even talk about money until like I was on the couch. Cause it was so taboo in my family to talk about money. You can also. You know, you're smart. You can figure out a lot on your own. I mean, I literally went to some trusted people who knew about finance. I said, just tell me some good books to read. I love to read. Just give me a couple books. I started with three books. Um, some of them were kind of lay press. Some of them were more like, You know, um, academic and just, I just started to learn my, like, you are very intelligent person. You get through med school, like, Lord help you. Finance is not as hard as med school. It's just secretive.
Chrissie: There's so many resources these days.
Jennie: Yeah, so that's, you know, there's always a place to start. Um, and if you're a woman or somebody else who has been taught growing up that you shouldn't talk about money, um, You know, whenever I work with healthcare organizations and something doesn't seem right, I always say, follow the money. If you follow the money, you will understand what is going on. And I think that's true for so many of our anxiety and scarcity mindset. We might not want to think that money has such a big impact on us psychologically, but I can speak for myself that I know it does. And when I'm feeling like money is too tight, and it's not that we're You know, you had said before, like, you, you realize that, you know, um, it's hard for people to say, Oh, well, you're just not on the golf course or whatever. Like I tell our kids, I, you know, I grew up in poverty, right? Everywhere around me. I was like, we're not poor. Like I know, I know what poor looks like. We're rich. Okay. Like, let's get this straight. We're rich. Yeah. And honestly, I tell them, we're not middle class. We're not upper middle class. Like statistically speaking, if you took the bell curve of this country, we are rich, That doesn't mean we have endless resources and we have to make choices and make priorities.
And we have to set our expectations appropriately. I think for me in my generation, and maybe yours, like the problem too, is there's this disconnect between what I expected and what happened. If I had known these choices would have gone here, maybe I would have made the exact same choices. It was that there was a false expectation that I would be financially feeling very, very secure. Doing as well, if not better than my parents and my lifestyle growing up if I did these things and I did these things and it didn't look like that at all. Yes. And so I think it's like sometimes it's not that we're not wealthy or rich or whatever you want to call it. It's more like the expectation did not align at all with what we were sold. It was like, we feel like we had like a bait and switch, right?
Chrissie: Yes, there is some bait and switch there. I recently read Bari Tessler's book, The Art of money, um, which it was lovely. Um, I mean, it's part, uh, exercises and strategy and, you know, getting a grip on it, but it's also a little bit of energetic, uh, you know, approach to money. It's a little bit of woo, which I've shared before. My, my new, um, understanding of woo is wildly opened outcomes. So it can stop being denigrated. But The Art of Money was a good one. We Should All Be Millionaires is another one. Profit First is another one.
Jennie: That's my go to for business. If you're running a practice as a small business, I love that one.
Chrissie: Yes. So, Managing Money. It's one of the ways we solve for joy, managing debt. Um, I mean, I'm like you, my student loans, actually the last of them went away with the, uh, loan forgiveness program, um, 11 months ago. So when I was 51,
Jennie: interesting how angry people were about that, that doctor's loans were getting repaid. I don't know if you followed, I heard a little of that. It's really interesting that that really upset people.
Chrissie: Yeah. I think it, it was, It was a sense of FOMO, or like, I would have chosen differently if you would have told me this was gonna go well. There are no guarantees. No, we take risks and some of us take more risks than others. So I know that, um, you know, one of the things that you mentioned that you're really focused on right now, professionally is thinking about professionalism and thinking about the healers and how, you know, those of us holding space for patients and, you know, Folks who are in the healthcare system might actually be feeling a little, a little bit of moral injury, a little bit of exhaustion, a little bit of confusion or disorientation. Um, what is, what are some of the stories that you might share with us about how that's going for you right now?
Jennie: you know, when I, when I wrote the book, I, it all just kind of came from this place that something was wrong. It just felt like something was wrong. And I kept hearing things that surprised me. Like my kid's pediatrician was unexpectedly retiring age. I don't know how old she was, probably 48 or something like that. Or unexpected conversations with an executive who kind of pulled me aside and said, Hey, I'm thinking to get out of this. I don't want to do this anymore. I just want to like figure a way to like cut back my costs and just retire. Or, you know, like just kind of kept hearing these stories from everywhere across the ecosystem, whether it's a clinician who's just seeing patients or an executive. Or my own personal physicians that were taking care of me just kind of kept hearing things and just feeling like something was wrong.
And so of course I got curious and just wanted to understand it. And that's kind of how I got set down this path. But what, where I'm at with it now is I feel like there's this sense of being wounded amongst many people in the healthcare ecosystem, and healing a wound is different than fixing a problem. And right now, a lot of the effort has been on fixing the problem, right? And burnout, that term lends itself to fix because it's an industrial term. So, What burns out? Light bulbs burn out. Batteries burn out. Machines burn out. What do you do? You recharge the battery. You go get a new light bulb. And just, so even the very language we've been trying to talk about what we feel inside is an industrial language.
Chrissie: I have never, ever Yeah. I've never thought that before. That is actually a really profound insight.
Jennie: And so by using the language of industry, I think we may be unintentionally continuing to wound ourselves because it's not what is, yes, people are exhausted. People are depleted. There's energy, low energy states. Totally agree. If you want to call that burnout, fine. But it's more than that. It's a feeling of being wounded to the point where people want to leave their career that they worked decades just to be able to do this thing. And then after practicing for 10, 15 years, like they're ready to leave? That's profound. I mean, like, Really profound.
Um, so I think this idea of being wounded and then I've been thinking even since the book has come out now about like, how do human beings heal? And if you think about wounds, I think that's a nice metaphor for people to understand. Like, how do you facilitate wound healing if it's a superficial wound? Maybe just kind of take it easy, don't bump into it. Your body, if you're healthy, you'll kind of heal it, right? Once you break the surface, maybe you want to put a band aid on. Maybe you want a little Neosporin. When it gets really deep, you might need some stitches and some antibiotics. And then when you have like a festering wound that's not healing, like, you gotta do something or you're gonna lose the limb. Right. Eventually.
Chrissie: I'm thinking about staging pressure wounds. Exactly. Like, I don't want to get super down into the weeds with my metaphor, but suffice it to say, like, it's working out for me. Like, when you think about his full thickness pressure wound, it's because this, this, this Area has been in contact with an offending source of pressure consistently, and it has not been able to offload. And eventually there is ischemic damage. We are not getting blood. We are not getting oxygen. We are not removing toxins. That is what's happening to the human beings in the system when the pressure is never let up. When we are told to do more with less, see one more patient, no to, uh, blocking off spots so that you can catch your breath. No, the machine must be fed. If it, if it's with your lifeblood, you're welcome. You can stay here.
Jennie: Exactly. And so I think you're exactly right. I love the pressure wound metaphor because we all trained in that. It's very visual. And if you did vascular surgery like me, and you know what those things look like and smell like, you never forget it.
Chrissie: Don't. And they are so insidious too. You're like, what? Is that a spot? Is there something? different here? Oh, it's red. Oh, tomorrow, it's, you know, totally ulcerated. And nothing happened. Nothing quote unquote happened.
Jennie: So when you when you think about it that way, it makes it easier to understand how to heal, right? If it's just a superficial light, very light, this is where the burnout ideas of taking vacation, having flexible time, you know, like, kind of take care of yourself, like, maybe if you're healthy and yoga, yeah, like, if everything else in your life is good, and you're, you're physically healthy, and your mental health is okay, yeah, that probably, that probably will heal you, but for many, many people, it's just more than that. And some people, it's all the way down to that festering wound in the bone.
And so part of the work is in the environment to change the environment, uh, because the wounds will not heal until the environment has been improved. And so a lot of the work I do focuses on systemic level. And what I find at the systemic level is that people are over operationalizing human problems. So often you'll see an operational solution to a human problem. For example, um, one day a nurse makes a mistake because we all make mistakes and orders the wrong thing. Now we're going to have a policy about it and a committee hearing and all of these things. When in reality you just need to talk to the nurse and support them and make sure that, like, it's okay for people to make mistakes too, right? Like, we're not perfect.
And so, there's this leaning on operations in healthcare and this kind of industrial mindset. Like, for example, when I designed my practice, I really tried to turn it upside down because I was like, I want to make this the way I want to make it. Um, and you know, when you put people in those little rooms and they actually call it rooming the patient, like, I cannot believe that is a real thing. And that is the assumption that you stick someone in this little room, sometimes half naked, Sometimes not, you just leave them there, and then, like, someone's gonna knock on the door and walk. Like, where did that come from? Well, it came from the factory floor. It's all operations based. But there's no law that says you need to stick a patient in a little room. There's absolutely no law that says that. There's no reason you need to do that. You can walk to the waiting room and greet your patient. There's no law that says you can't just go out and say, Hi, come back with me. There's so many things like that that we don't even think about that, like, yes, you have to work operations to make those things succeed, but they're so simple. Like, sometimes people just really overcomplicate things at the systemic level.
Um, Anyway, so you were asking about kind of where I'm at with it. So, you know, when I think about healing, I think a lot of healing happens. Yes, the system around needs to heal and be well designed. And that's where I hope my work with these companies, I can help people design or improve how the environment is. But at the end of the day, I personally believe that a human connection is either necessary for full healing or, you know, greatly improves human healing. It does not have to be a time based connection. It can be a, you could even watch a video of me talking and feel connected to me. It doesn't even have to be at the same time, but there's something about human synchrony and human storytelling when our brains get in sync with one another, I believe it is healing. I did my PhD in electrophysiology. That's kind of coming full circle now. We're starting to study energy and electromagnetic fields in the body again, the way we did hundreds of years ago before it fell out of favor.
So I don't know, I can't tell you what it is and how the synchrony works, but I do believe there is something And I saw this in psychotherapy quite a bit, the relationship between the therapist and the patient is ultimately what is healing. It's much less important the type of therapy they do. So there's something that is magical that happens when human beings feel synchronized with other human beings. I believe that is part of the healing.
And so our health care system. I think has actually forgotten that and that's why you see people really going into these wellness spaces and these like more fringe types of practices because they feel connected there in a way that we're not connecting with them the way they used to, right, either because we've kind of forgotten how or our environment isn't set up or maybe we just feel like we want to fix things and it's hard to sit there with somebody and say, I can't make you better and I'm going to be bearing witness with you as whatever is going to happen in your life is going to happen. And we want to help and fix people, but sometimes the healing is actually not through fixing. It's through being, and that's very hard to like quantify, but I personally believe very strongly that there's something about the human connection that is healing.
I did a paper on the placebo effect way back in med school, and I'm anchoring to, to research and write a little bit more on that again, because. Isn't the placebo effect wonderful? Shouldn't we be researching that more? Like, it doesn't cost anything, and it doesn't have side effects, and if we can turn our own bodies on to heal ourselves somehow, like, isn't that an amazing thing? Why isn't that something we are talking about all the time?
Chrissie: So much of that resonates with me. You know, it was the synchronizing and co regulating with people one on one that made my micro practice years such a blessing, you know, and there was no rooming patients. So it's just me and you and our cup of tea on the sofa. It was lovely. It was different. It was very, very human. Um, I think that. You know, our mirror neurons have a lot to do with that, but our electro physiologic mechanisms, the, the invisible part of our beingness, um, is important to. The HeartMath Institute has something to say about this. Lots of, lots of people have something to say about this and until it is accepted and more widely talked about in conservative or conventional halls of wisdom, then it sounds fringe or it sounds a little woo, but the truth is, it just sounds that way until we have the words to describe it, um, more precisely.
I will tell you, and our listeners, a secret secret on a podcast, um, I have been playing around with a, um, like, pulsed electromagnetic field portable device and have shared it with a number of people and I am here to tell you that I, you know, placebo or no, I mean, I'm, I'm not actually suggesting this is placebo, there are observable differences in, um, various physiologic mechanisms when I use this. So I'm going to stop there because I can't actually pretend to explain a lot further without sounding more magical than I wish to sound on my podcast, but I just am with you. Like there are electrophysiologic realities And many of them are about co regulating and being in the presence of another attuned human being.
Jennie: I think the, um, one of the reasons I wrote about this in the book, but one of the reasons we've lost touch is that the, the complexity of medicine or healthcare has exploded and it's just exploding now. And when I was in med school in the nineties, late nineties, I had the feeling like I could almost know everything. Um, not quite. I wasn't quite smart enough to know everything, but I could kind of, like, almost know everything, and now, like, I can barely even know, like, this little sliver, and I do it all day long.
Chrissie: So complexity is exhausting and overwhelming. It is. I mean, we always had people with multiple problems, of course, but it feels like there is just more of that. I mean, as a hospitalist admitting people, um, you know, quite recently, uh, the problem lists are an arm's length long. And they're not each little problems. They are like many problems in multiple systems, which may or may not be from a final, you know, but final common pathway or a common process. It's just, there are so many at one time.
Jennie: And this is a huge change that is worldwide. So, you know, there's a common misperception that it's only in the U S that people are experiencing moral injury and burnout in medicine. And that's not true. If you look at the literature, it's actually very, so I think just the complexity of medicine by itself, even if you were in an economic and an environment that was perfect, just the sheer complexity, um, Makes it more challenging to think about how you have that human synchrony because you're cognitively very overloaded
Chrissie: So then you're trying to access you know the very high cognitive functions of a brain working out pathophysiology and evoke a empathetic presence and supportive response at the same time. It's a very, um, intense request of a human being to do both of those things well.
Jennie: And they're very different cognitive processes, right? And so they're, you know, when I, I don't have it here, I would pull it up for the camera, but, um, the only person in my family that was a physician was my grandfather and he died when I was very little. I didn't know him and he would make house calls. In rural Pennsylvania. And I have all of his stuff, which is really fun. And he, I have his little bag. Then he would go out in the field, and it's literally a doctor bag, and inside is a bunch of little powders, a glass syringe, and a little recipe book.
So, you know, the difference between when he could go in the field with a little bag of recipe cards and mix up medicines and give it to people, To where we are today, not even a hundred years later, this was like post World War II. I mean, think about that for a minute when he, he could dedicate almost his entire visit to empathy and connectedness, because all he had to do was like, well, I have like 10 medicines in here. If one of these doesn't work, I got to send them to the hospital. Like that was his decision tree. So, you know, think about that for a minute. Like how, and that's, that's, that's It's like barely even a hundred years,
Chrissie: very William Carlos Williams.
Jennie: Yeah. Before that, it was like, well, should I bleed him or not? You know, it was kind of like that was about the choices you would have. And so just like the cognitive demands, and this is why I'm very optimistic because I do feel like AI and learning models, if we use them in a, in a high trust, high quality way, we're actually at that precipice where a lot of the cognitive stuff can be offloaded to an AI or another platform so that we do spend a good amount of time with the human synchrony part, and we can offload a lot of this mental math, which I personally have found to be very difficult, and I'm not that old, like, my brain works pretty well, but like, in psychiatry it's nice because we don't have that many medicines, I mean, it's not nice because we should have more, but like, we actually don't have that many treatments, and even the complexity of what we have in psychiatry sometimes can be hard to keep up with, And then you do like an, you know, hospitalist admitting someone from the ER and the problem list and all of the treatments.
And I mean, I, I do think we're at this critical juncture where if we want to reap the benefits of the complexity of, of treatment, we're, we have to offload stuff from the human brain because we can't have every little sub specialist sitting in their little office treating this tiny little piece of the puzzle. That's not how humans work, but when we continue to add complexity, it starts to become like that,
Chrissie: right? It's like the complexity demands a time buffer, and we've been getting the opposite. We've been getting less time instead of more time to deal with the complexity. It's like the system ignores that the complexity exists, but the humans holding space for that complexity actually require some time to think through it and certainly to document it in our, you know, overly litigious context.
Jennie: And I guess I press on the, the, the idea of time, Chrissie, because I think that time is being used as a proxy for so many things that feel broken or wrong inside of us. And I think if you or I, like in your micro practice, let's say you walk in and you had a great morning, sun's shining, you know, everything's great at home, you feel healthy, you slept great, you know, you're just feeling great to be alive and you go in that office and you have tea and you're like, Oh, I love this tea and this patient, like, and you're like a hundred percent. You know, I bet you could connect with a person in under five minutes. For sure.
If you're tired, you didn't sleep well, your mind is distracted, you had a bad day, like, all of the stuff, you know, it might take a lot longer to get the same amount of connection than you would if you were showing up in a different state. So, I think time is used as a proxy for many other things. I don't think we actually, I think we've been tricked into this time scarcity idea with this idea that if we fix time, everything else will fix itself. But I think that's just a trick to keep us in a scarcity mindset. When in reality, if we show up in that way, we don't need hours.
Chrissie: I get what you're saying. So, it's kind of like if you're, if you're deeply present and well, then you can sort of bend time and the time that you spend is almost like nonlinear because it's so deep.
Jennie: You, and you talk about joy, right? I was thinking about that before coming on today. Like for me, joy, I mean, those are like little Little fleeting moments that you catch yourself feeling joy, right? And they're so beautiful when they happen. And so they may only be 30 seconds or 30 milliseconds. I don't know. Like their, their, their joy is fleeting for me often. And so capturing that and putting it in a bottle, it's not really time based. It's, it's much more about the, the moment of connection or the joy of the moment. And that can be very, very short.
So I think I, I guess I challenge people when they talk about wanting more time, I don't think it's actually that we want more time. I think we want to feel different and we think that more time will make us feel that way and maybe it will and maybe it won't, but the more we think I need more time, I need more time. We're actually just putting ourselves right back in time scarcity mindset, which is a closed mindset.
Chrissie: Super interesting. Yeah. I will definitely be spending time with that thought. I love the depth of, of that curiosity.
Jennie: So these are some of the things I try to work out and like, I think, again, I think sometimes we overcomplicate and I think we can have short bursts of human connection that make a huge difference. And if you're a physician or a clinician and you go to work and you have a rough day, I'm sure you've experienced that. You might have one moment that is sheer joy of medicine, and that might make up for that whole crappy day that you just slogged through. If you're on call, and you have that one patient in the middle of the night who's just so grateful, and so beautiful, and so thankful, you know, that might, so, so sometimes these like small acts of kindness, or small gestures, or small words, I think they're really underutilized and underappreciated.
I think if we all actually just did one kind thing for another person that was unexpected. Um, I think that goes a long way. I think moral injury, those little moments actually, they're not going to fix everything, but I, I just think that we underutilize small kindnesses. And so in the book, the thing I recommend is if you're a patient, which all of us are, and you work with somebody that is healing you to tell them, just thank you for all you do and just leave it there. Like just recognizing that it's not just with you in the room, it's what they are doing in society. I guarantee that that will make the person feel something. As long as you're saying it authentically. I mean, not if you don't like them, but if you authentically mean it and you say it, I guarantee, like, that will mean something to them and that will touch them in some way. I think time is a really interesting one. Time is, time is, time is really tricky. I think we also shoot ourselves in the foot a lot with time and the time we do have on this earth, uh, we self sabotage how we use it, right?
Chrissie: Much to learn about spending and investing time, for sure. I love the actionable, um, takeaway of just pausing with your clinician and giving them some recognition. Thank you for all you do, which implies like including the stuff I don't know that you do. And maybe that means the pajama time where you're going to be closing this note later at 10 30 PM after you've put your family to bed. Um, et cetera. Um, any last actionable, um, gems to share.
Jennie: I think, again, like, we have more control than we think we do, uh, we have a lot more power than we think we do, but it really does require stepping out of the scarcity mindset to be able to see it, so scarcity can feel like there's not enough money, there's not enough time, um, Whatever there's not enough of that is something that it's not your fault that you feel that way because our culture is designed to sell you things by making you feel that way. So everywhere you go all around you, you know, the culture and an American culture in particular, as this cult of busy, I call it the cult of busyness. And we're all members of this crazy cult without realizing that we signed up for it.
So another actionable item would be, I would challenge people. Um, when somebody asks you how you are, how you've been doing, you're not allowed to say, I am busy. Say something else and watch what happens to how they respond to you. If you say my life is full, I had a full day, whatever you want to say, but don't say you're busy. Try it for a week. Yeah, try that for a week and see what shifts for you and how other people react to you when you don't use the word busy. Love it. Yeah, that's another one I would say. So, you know, again, it's like having the self awareness to get out of the scarcity mindset, even if it's only for a short amount of time each day, so that then you can look at all of the choices in front of you. And, and set the intention to make things different and, and, and to be healing. But you gotta, you gotta get out of scarcity mindset a little bit here and there. Otherwise it's very difficult.
Chrissie: Thank you so much, Dr. Jennie Byrne. Um, please tell our listeners where they can find you, especially, um, if they're thinking, I would like to sit down with Dr. Byrne and talk about my possible ADHD or, burnout, anxiety, depression, et cetera, trauma recovery. Tell us where they'll find you and, um, what you'd like to share.
Jennie: Sure. So if you're listening and you're like, Oh, Jennie, you know, I'd like to talk to her, but I'm a little nervous or I don't know, or, you know, you can go to my website, uh, which is www. constellationpllc. com. But. I encourage you to, instead of going to the website, be bold and just directly outreach me. Either DM me on LinkedIn, or I'm going to give you my professional text number, and I am very sincere that I want you to text me there. I will respond to you. I will not think it is weird. Um, it is 919. 887 8517, and I encourage you to be bold and make the direct message, but if you're feeling like you're not sure, you can certainly read more about me on LinkedIn or on my website.
Chrissie: I love that. That's definitely the first phone number we've given out on the podcast. Um, so text away. That's amazing.
Jennie: Thank you for having me, Chrissie. Thank you for all you do.
Chrissie: Yeah. Thank you for all that you do and have done and for sharing so much of your, um, absolutely beautiful story with us. I love knowing about your musician background. Oh, by the way, what did you play?
Jennie: I started on violin and I switched to bassoon. So I went to college as a bassoon performance major, which is a very random.
Chrissie: That is, yes. There aren't that many of you. Uh, because right before we started recording, you shared that you're in a band right now. What do you play in the band? Are you all vocals or?
Jennie: In the band, I have electric bass, vocals, and sometimes electric violin for a little fun.
Chrissie: All right. Okay. Well, if we are lucky, maybe we'll link to a little bit of Jennie playing in the show notes. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for this. It has been a delightful time for me and I know that our listeners will enjoy it too. Thanks everybody for tuning in and we will see you next time.
Before we wrap up, I want to take a moment to share something truly exciting. This year I have the incredible honor of stepping into the role of stewarding the physician coaching summit. This is the premier gathering of physician coaches. It is our national conference and international conference. It's a space that has inspired and connected so many of us over the years. I am so grateful to Dr. Kathy Steppen, whose vision and leadership have made this summit a cornerstone for our community. She has built something truly extraordinary and I'm humbled to carry it forward into its next chapter.
The 2025 Physician Coaching Summit is going to be more than a conference. It's an experience. It's a space where we don't just learn, we connect, discover, and renew. And this year it's all happening November 6th through 8th at Savannah, a breathtaking wellness resort in carefree Arizona, just outside Phoenix designed for exactly this kind of experience. It's a place where you can exhale, where you can slow down, stay present and step into deep connection with yourself, with others and what's next.
Our theme this year is having our own backs. It's all about reconnecting with what truly matters, stepping into your power and holding space for growth, rest, and everything in between. Whether you're looking to reignite your coaching practice, cultivate your joy, or simply reconnect with yourself, the summit will meet you where you are. If this speaks to you and you were a physician coach or physician coach in training, or perhaps you're a well aligned potential sponsor or exhibitor, this is the perfect time to join us.
Early bird pricing is available for a limited time until March 1st. And if you feel called to share your expertise, we are open for speaker submissions as well. All the information is available at the physician coaching summit. com. So check it out, grab your ticket and get in Reach out to us at hello at the physician coaching summit. com with any questions. Details will be in the show notes. May we honor what's been built, embrace what's next and have our own backs together. I want to take a quick moment to acknowledge our incredible team. This podcast is produced by the amazing Kelsey Vaughn, post production and more handled by Alyssa Wilkes, and my steadfast friend and director of operations, Denise Crain. Our theme music is by Denys Kyshchuk cover photography by the talented Shelby Brakken and a special appreciation to my loyal champion and number one fan, Suzanne Sanchez. Thanks again for tuning in everyone. May we continue caring for ourselves, caring for others, and may we continue solving for joy. Take care. We'll see you next time.
