Sophie Scott inspires others by sharing her debilitating battle with burnout
Sophie Scott loved her fast-paced media career as a respected medical journalist for the ABC. Not only was she speaking with scientists, doctors and researchers, ‘the brainiest people that you’ll ever meet,’ but she was sharing stories of patients who were going through challenging health periods. “I really valued the opportunity to walk alongside someone either when they were going through a health journey, or getting them to talk about what they’d been through,” Sophie, a Cammeray resident, says.
But it was her job, and her passion for it, that over time saw Sophie herself suffering from her own health condition – burnout. She was feeling emotional, physical and mental exhaustion, and sensed that she wasn’t doing her job as well as she could.
“But the big thing that really differentiates burnout is that it’s not like you feel that way seven days a week,” Sophie says. “So you might feel fine on the weekends when you are hanging out with your friends. But a key thing is that you can’t really switch off thinking about work. That was one of the red flags for me. Even on weekends I was always thinking about work.
“I could never really switch off. What that does to your nervous system, I’ve now realised, is that it keeps you in that very heightened stress state, and you never actually get out of that state.”
She says being in that very stressed ‘fight or flight’ mode over time started to have significant impacts on her physical and mental health. “The thing with burnout is that it’s one of those things that really creeps up on you,” she explains. “You don’t realise how debilitating burnout is until you know what it is.”
With her nervous system overwrought, Sophie had to ‘build it back from scratch and learn how to regulate it again.’ She started daily mediation. “That was honestly one of the crucial factors of getting my nervous system back to a more regulated state,” she says. Sophie also prioritised her health, looked after her wellbeing and developed positive habits like putting boundaries around her time and energy.
She left her job at the ABC in March 2023, and now runs workshops helping other people to protect themselves from burnout, reduce stress, and manage the condition. Sophie is the author of three books and has even given a TEDx talk, How to heal yourself from burnout.
An adjunct professor at Notre Dame University, she also helps people studying postgraduate medicine degrees to become better communicators.
“Change can be scary because it obviously means you’re stepping outside your comfort zone,” Sophie says of her new career. “But the big factor for me was appreciating and having that mindset of embracing change, where you focus on what you’re gaining rather than what you’re losing. So when I thought about what I’d be gaining by having a different career by working for myself and giving talks and having that freedom and flexibility to do the things that I was interested in, there were a lot of benefits in that.”
For more information on Sophie’s seminars, visit: sophiescott.com