Mark: A recent Gallup poll found that burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take a sick day and 2.6 times more likely to be job hunting. But what if the real cost isn't just to companies, but to our very biology? And the cure isn't a vacation, but a total system reboot. Michelle: Wow, those numbers are staggering but also… not surprising at all. That feeling of being completely spent is so common. But a total system reboot? That sounds both terrifying and exactly right. Mark: It’s the core idea behind the book we’re diving into today: Powered by Me: From Burned Out to Fully Charged at Work and in Life by Dr. Neha Sangwan. Michelle: And what's fascinating about Dr. Sangwan is her background. She's not just a physician; she's also a trained mechanical and biomedical engineer. Mark: Exactly. So she approaches burnout not as a personal failing or a psychological quirk, but as a systems failure. She looks at the human body and our work lives like an engineer trying to figure out why a complex machine has broken down. Michelle: I love that. It takes the blame out of it. It’s not that you’re broken, it’s that the system you’re operating in is flawed. Mark: Precisely. And her deep dive into this subject began when her own system experienced a spectacular, and frankly terrifying, failure.

Michelle: Okay, I’m intrigued. What happened? Mark: Well, picture this. It’s 2001. Dr. Sangwan is a young, ambitious internal medicine physician at a hospital. She’s responsible for 18 critically ill patients a day in a chronically understaffed environment. The culture is driven by these unwritten rules: "Do more with less. Faster is better. Success requires struggle." Michelle: That sounds like the mission statement for modern work culture. Mark: It really is. And it was grinding her down. She describes this one moment that gives me chills. She’s on the floor, and she asks a cardiac nurse, Nina, to replete a patient's potassium. A few minutes later, she asks Nina the exact same question. Nina looks at her, confused, and says, "I told you, I already did." Dr. Sangwan had no memory of the first conversation. Michelle: Whoa. That's not just feeling tired. That's a cognitive blackout. How terrifying. Mark: It was a full-blown system malfunction. Her brain was too overloaded to form new memories. And it gets worse. Around the same time, she's dealing with a bullying colleague. She goes to her department chief for help, and his response is basically, "He's influential, you're not. Just focus on being more efficient and discharging patients faster." Michelle: And her boss just blew her off? That’s brutal. So she's being told the problem is her, not the toxic environment or the impossible workload. Mark: Exactly. She was being told to override her own internal data—her exhaustion, her sense of injustice, her cognitive slips. She pushed herself harder and faster until she hit a wall. She was put on a compulsory three-month medical leave for burnout. Michelle: It makes sense why this book is so highly-rated and has resonated with so many people. It's written from the trenches, not from an ivory tower. She’s not just theorizing about burnout; she’s reverse-engineering her own collapse. Mark: That’s the perfect way to put it. She realized burnout wasn't just about being tired. She defines it as a fundamental misalignment of our inner and outer worlds. We're constantly overriding our internal feedback to meet external demands, and that creates a massive energy drain. Michelle: Okay, so if burnout is this massive system failure, it sounds completely overwhelming. Where does someone even start to fix it?

Mark: Well, this is where her engineering brain kicks in. She argues that the solution has to be an "inside-out" job. You can't fix the whole world, but you can fix your own internal navigation system. She breaks it down into five key energy levels that act like an internal dashboard: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Social, and Spiritual. Michelle: An internal dashboard. I like that. It’s a very clear, systematic way to think about it. Mark: It is. Let's start with the most basic one: Physical Energy. She tells this story about a 33-year-old CEO named Alex she sat next to on a plane. He’s just been voted out by his own board, and he's a mess. He’s pounding gin and tonics before takeoff and admits he’s living on a cocktail of Xanax, Ambien, and painkillers. Michelle: He’s numbing the symptoms. Mark: Completely. He’s ignoring all the signals his body is sending him—the headaches, the insomnia, the back pain. He’s trying to solve a system-wide energy crisis by cutting the wires to the warning lights on his dashboard. Dr. Sangwan realized that our bodies are constantly talking to us, but we're trained to ignore the language. Michelle: So it’s like our body is sending us push notifications—a headache, a tight throat, that pit in your stomach—and for years, we’ve just been swiping them away as spam. Mark: That's a perfect analogy. She even shares her own experience. For years, she would get this feeling of throat constriction. She just pushed through it. Only later did she realize it was a reliable signal. It would happen whenever she was about to enter a conflict, or felt like a failure, or was unprepared. It was her body's early warning system, and she was ignoring it. Michelle: But how do you even begin to learn that language again after ignoring it for so long? It feels like trying to learn a foreign language without a dictionary. Mark: You start small. You start by getting curious. And it's not just about the physical. The same applies to Mental Energy. She tells this incredible story about a leadership workshop she was in, a "fishbowl" exercise where people give you unedited feedback. Michelle: Oh, that sounds like my worst nightmare. Mark: Right? And a colleague tells her, "Neha, your energy is chaotic. You're always in a rush. It's hard to connect with you." And Neha's first instinct is to be defensive, but she forces herself to listen. The feedback shatters her, but she realizes it's true. Her workaholic, "faster is better" mindset was creating a force field around her, draining her mental and relational energy. Michelle: So the "reboot" starts with just listening. Listening to your body, listening to how others experience you, without immediately judging it or trying to fix it. Mark: Exactly. You have to gather the data from your own dashboard before you can do anything else.

Mark: And that's the next level of the game. Once you start listening to your own signals, you have to start managing the energy of your interactions with others. And that's where it gets really interesting. Michelle: This is where the real-life drama comes in. Mark: Absolutely. Dr. Sangwan introduces a concept called the Drama Triangle. It’s a dysfunctional communication pattern with three roles: the Persecutor, who blames; the Victim, who feels helpless; and the Rescuer, who swoops in to "help" but often just enables the whole cycle. Michelle: Can you give an example? This sounds very familiar. Mark: She gives a classic hospital example. An ER doc, Dean, calls her, the internal medicine doc, to admit a patient. He's abrupt, gives her incomplete information, and hangs up. Neha feels dismissed—she's the Victim. Dean is the Persecutor. Instead of calling Dean back, Neha goes to her friend, Luke, to complain. Luke listens and validates her, becoming the Rescuer. Michelle: Oh, I have absolutely been the 'Rescuer.' You think you're the hero, but you're actually just fueling the fire. Mark: Precisely. Because now Neha feels justified, Dean is still annoyed, and nothing is resolved. The whole system is drained of energy. The way out, she says, is for any one person to step out of the triangle. Neha could have called Dean back directly. Luke could have said, "I hear you're frustrated. It sounds like you need to talk to Dean." Michelle: It requires taking responsibility instead of just reacting. Which leads to the highest level on the dashboard, right? The Spiritual Energy. Mark: Yes, and she defines this in a very practical way. Spiritual energy is about connecting to your deeper meaning and purpose by aligning your life with your core values. Michelle: But isn't it a luxury to prioritize 'spiritual values' when you're just trying to get through the week? Mark: You'd think so, but she tells this incredible, powerful story about a company called Jaipur Rugs in India. The founder, N. K. Chaudhary, saw that women weavers in his community were being exploited and treated as "untouchable." His core values were dignity, family, and hope. So he built his entire business model around those values. Michelle: How so? Mark: He eliminated the middlemen and employed over 40,000 women directly, paying them fair wages and, crucially, providing education for them and their children. He didn't just see them as labor; he saw them as family. One woman, Shanti, said of him, "To me, he is more than my mother and father. To me, he is God. He has given me life." By aligning his business with his deepest values, he didn't just build a successful company; he transformed an entire community. That’s spiritual energy in action.

Michelle: So when you put it all together, the book is arguing that burnout isn't a condition to be 'cured' with a vacation. It's a compass. It's your body and soul's way of telling you that you're going in the wrong direction. Mark: Exactly. It's a crisis of personal power. The book's ultimate message is that you can't be 'other-powered'—by your job, by society, by your to-do list—and expect to thrive. You have to become 'me-powered,' generating energy from the inside out by aligning with who you truly are. Michelle: That’s a profound shift in perspective. It’s not about adding more self-care tasks to your list; it’s about changing the very source of your energy. Mark: And it starts with listening. Michelle: So a great first step for anyone listening might be what the book calls an 'N=1 experiment.' Just for one day, notice one physical signal—like that afternoon headache or that tightness in your chest—and instead of numbing it or pushing through, just get curious. Ask yourself: 'If this feeling could talk, what would it say?' Mark: I love that. It's simple, it's immediate, and it's powerful. We'd love to hear what you discover. Find us on our socials and share the one signal your body is sending you. Let's get this conversation started. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.