Dr. Jessica B. Stern
Jessica is a licensed clinical psychologist, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, and the founder of Three Lemons, where she works with organizations on burnout and sustainable performance. She is also my girlfriend, so read this as a recommendation from someone with an obvious bias and unusually good information.
The problem she works on
Most wellbeing programs ask the wrong person to change
The standard corporate response to burnout is to offer the people who are burning out a resilience workshop, a meditation app and a wellness week. The workload does not move. The meeting load does not move. Nothing about how the work is designed changes, and everybody quietly concludes that the whole category is theatre.
Jessica's starting position is the reverse. Programs fail when they ask individuals to adapt to systems that are making them ill. Her work is with the systems: how teams set boundaries, how leaders create clarity, what norms make sustainable performance possible instead of heroic. It is a design problem before it is a personal one.
She is direct about the limits of the alternative, too. No toxic positivity, no pretending a structural problem is a mindset problem.
The framework
Better, not busier
The argument underneath everything she does is that better work does not require more work. In practice that shows up in three forms: keynotes and multi-session workshops, burnout-prevention audits and longer-term advisory work with leadership teams, and collaborations with brands on wellbeing and product strategy.
She works across healthcare, higher education, corporate, nonprofit and professional services. Organizations tend to call her during growth, transition or strain — the moments when the existing way of working has visibly stopped holding.
Where you'll have come across her
Translating psychology into something usable
She is a regular host on SiriusXM's Doctor Radio, broadcast out of NYU Langone, and has been quoted on stress, burnout and anxiety by the Today Show, Fortune and HuffPost. Her work has reached wider audiences through collaborations with Hoda Kotb and conversations with Selena Gomez.
She also runs a course called Mayhem to Magic on building sustainable systems for your own work, and gives away a stress management workbook to anyone who wants it.
Why I find it convincing
The same conclusion from the other end of the field
I spend my working life arguing that investor relations teams should stop hand-assembling the work a machine can run, because the scarce thing in that job is judgment and attention, and every hour spent building a deck by hand is an hour not spent thinking. That is a productivity argument, and I arrived at it from market data and software.
Jessica arrives at more or less the same place from clinical psychology: the constraint is human capacity, and organizations that spend it carelessly get worse work, not more of it. When two people come at a question from opposite directions and land in the same spot, it is usually worth paying attention. Her half has better evidence behind it than mine.
Where to start
Her site is the real version of all this
Everything above is my summary. If any of it is relevant to your team — or you're just curious what a psychologist who is not selling optimism has to say about the way you work — go and read her properly.
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