Growing up, Dr Liza Osagie-Clouard had a very clear ambition. Watching her older brother, whom she idolised, play with his Meccano sets, she too wanted in on the nuts and bolts — but of people, not construction pieces. “I knew from the age of five that I wanted to fix people,” she says.

A clear type-A personality, she excelled at school, came in the top 5 per cent of her year at King’s College London, where she studied medicine and went on to specialise in orthopaedics. “I thrived on the physicality and hands-on nature of the surgeries, where the whole team would work instinctively and together, like a dance, barely speaking.” Craving more academia, she went to study stem cell medicine in New York, becoming a national academic fellow, writing papers and holding conferences. It was during this time that she met her husband and had a baby.

Back in the UK and working in the NHS (“which holds a very dear place in my heart”), she wondered why there wasn’t the same kind of “concierge medicine” that was “de rigueur in New York, where patients have one doctor who knows them literally inside out, and can spot the tiniest of changes in them, and in some cases suggest a preventative treatment plan. I thought this is how medicine really should be practised.” So in February 2020 she launched her own concierge medicine practice, Solice Health, while maintaining her NHS workload.

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Then Covid struck. All doctors were redeployed to frontline service. “I wasn’t used to seeing death as an orthopaedic surgeon. That changed,” she says, bluntly. At the same time Solice Health was really taking off, so she decided that her “second baby” — the business — needed her full-time attention.

To begin with it was just her. “It was typical start-up vibes,” she says. “I was doing everything.” Not that it was stressful, she insists, “because I was enjoying everything, I could deliver on everything, just as I always had done.” But as the business grew, and she employed more staff, took on more patients and expanded into more countries, the workload grew.

By November of last year she started noticing some changes in herself, but brushed them off, too busy to really stop and think. She rarely found time to eat during her busy day and lost about 22lb. “I noticed that I was feeling quite physically weak, that I couldn’t pick up my son as easily as I had been able to.”

Then there was the lack of sleep. Emails and workload — including patients in different time zones — kept her working until 2.30am, before she got up again at 6am. Even that wasn’t enough. She found herself waking up at 4am feeling inspired to read up on conditions that were affecting her patients on the research portal PubMed. “I was getting between one and two hours’ sleep a night,” she says. “And in a way, I thought, I used to do all-nighters as a junior doctor, it’s no different to that. I took a perverse sort of pride in it.”

In the office she was “functioning at a high level for eight to ten hours a day”. But at home in the evenings and weekends she was a shell of her former self. Not only did she feel “extremely tired, like a ghost, when I walked in through the door”, but also her mood was terrible. “In the park at weekends I’d be furiously typing into my phone.” On a family holiday she remembers sending her son and husband off to the beach to play while she did more emails. While she was formerly described as being so laid-back she was horizontal, now “I was snapping all the time — not just occasionally. I was highly anxious the whole time. It was just my baseline.”

She was suffering from migraines and heart palpitations. Her periods became irregular and she started noticing hair loss. Then in March this year it came to a head. One Friday night her son, eight, said: “Mum, you’re always angry.” Then he turned and walked away from her. Something finally clicked. She realised that, like many of the high-powered patients she treated, she was suffering from burnout. Despite being all over the minutiae of her patients’ symptoms, she had missed the warning signs in herself, driven by her innate need to keep performing.

Burnout, which Osagie-Clouard believes is dramatically on the rise (“life is tricky and we’re all running around at full pace”), is recognised by the World Health Organization as an “occupational phenomenon”. It is a state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. While we’ve heard about the dramatic stories — such as Arianna Huffington, who ended up passing out in her bathroom in a pool of her own blood owing to her extreme exhaustion — Osagie-Clouard says her own burnout was more insidious. “There was no explosion, although my husband later told me he thought I would work myself to the brink of collapse. But this crept up on me and was chipping away at me,” she says. She says that ultimately, left unchecked, she probably would have experienced more severe consequences, not least considering her family history of heart disease.

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Our collective stress levels appear to be rising. In a recent survey by Mental Health UK, 91 per cent of UK adults experienced high or extreme levels of pressure or stress at some point in 2024. The same report also found that one in five UK workers reported needing to take time off work owing to poor mental health caused by pressure or stress. A separate study by Mental Health First Aid England revealed that 63 per cent of UK employees show signs of burnout, including exhaustion and disengagement.

The next day Osagie-Clouard told her colleagues. “It was hard, and I was nervous because I was admitting I wasn’t infallible. She was told to take a few days off to start with — the family went to France — and to not check her phone. Then she was assigned her own doctor, who treated Osagie-Clouard in the way that she would treat a patient: running blood tests, prescribing rest and recovery practices and generally doctoring the doctor back on an even keel.

It was nothing she didn’t know. “I tell almost every patient that they almost certainly need vitamin D, but I wasn’t taking it myself. No surprise, my bloods came back with a deficiency, as well as high levels of cortisol.” While breathwork sessions are often included in client care packages, she hadn’t made time for it herself. Now she has a Solice practitioner whom she works with. “I get up a 6.30am and instead of emailing straight away I go into the bathroom and do 10-15 minutes of breathwork.”

She rates infra-red mats for their ability to help reduce inflammation in the body, “but my son and my cat used the mats I had at home”. Now she takes regular ten-minute breaks with sunglasses on and headphones over her ears to block out noise on her mat in her office. “The team call it the ‘Dr Liza breaks’, and it is amazing how much that can restore you.”

• I was a high-flying GP, before burnout. Here’s how I bounced back

She also recommends contrast therapy — using heat and cold such as a sauna and ice bath — to her patients once or twice a week to help reduce stress. While she hadn’t been doing them herself, despite a venue being moments from her central London office, she now takes advantage of a cryotherapy studio next door. “It’s four minutes at minus 196C and I’m good to go,” she says, laughing.

Perversely, Osagie-Clouard is grateful for her burnout, which has forced her to slow down considerably from her old ways — although her life is still not what many of us would consider to be relaxed. “It’s hard to pull back from feeling like you always have to squeeze in one more email, one more home visit, but actually this is more sustainable. I’m a better doctor because of it.”
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