Dr. Kurren Sandhu

"Burnout isn't a personal failing. It's what happens when nobody ever taught you it was allowed to stop."

— Dr. Kurren Sandhu

The burnout that started before the career even began

Dr. Kurren Sandhu graduated from UCL Medical School in 2017. By his third year of training, he was already burning out — the long hours, the constant pressure to perform, the sense that admitting exhaustion was itself a kind of failure. It is a familiar story in medicine. What made his different was what he did next: instead of pushing through in silence, he started working with a nutritionist and a health coach to rebuild his own health from the ground up. Sleep, movement, food, stress — the basics no one had ever taught him to take seriously.

Then COVID happened. Watching colleagues in emergency medicine burn out in real time — not as an abstract risk but as something happening to people he worked alongside every day — was the turning point. He realised the system was not going to fix this on its own. If doctors were going to survive their own profession, someone needed to teach them how.

The Vital Room: rebuilding people before they break

Today Dr. Sandhu runs The Vital Room, a lifestyle-medicine practice built around a simple idea: most chronic exhaustion, low mood, and long-term health decline trace back to a handful of everyday habits, not a single diagnosis. His approach works through the six pillars of lifestyle medicine — sleep, physical activity, nutrition, stress management, healthy relationships, and avoiding harmful substances — alongside advanced blood testing and biometric assessment to see what is actually happening in someone's body, not just what they report feeling.

One pillar he returns to often in his own recovery, and with his patients, is sleep — including cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), a structured, evidence-based approach that treats the thought patterns keeping people awake, not just the hours on the clock.

Reaching the people who need it most

Dr. Sandhu created SuperNova Student, a free video series to help students protect their wellbeing during exam and training pressure, and CopeWell-19, a course built during the pandemic to help healthcare workers cope with unprecedented strain. His work is supported by the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine, and he has reached thousands of healthcare workers across the UK through his talks and content.

This work carries particular weight for South Asian communities. The MASALA study has found that South Asians often produce less insulin and develop insulin resistance differently to other populations, and the American Heart Association reports that South Asians are more than twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes compared with white Western populations. Chronic stress, poor sleep, and sedentary routines compound these risks — which is exactly the territory lifestyle medicine is built to address, and exactly why Dr. Sandhu talks about it so directly with South Asian patients and audiences.

Credentials at a glance

What this means for the people who see him

It means there is a doctor who has lived through burnout himself, and will not tell you to just push through it. Who understands that in many South Asian households, admitting exhaustion or asking for help can feel like admitting weakness — and who has built his entire practice around proving that it isn't.

Rest is not something you earn once everything else is done. It is the thing that makes everything else possible.

Dr. Kurren Sandhu is one of the people working to make that rest feel possible again.