How (and why) to avoid burnout

Plus one dated pop culture reference and free advertising for senior stair lifts. Why not?

Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here. 

An old television commercial has been on my mind lately. “Falls are the number one cause of injury to senior citizens,” the ad reports. And the ad has a solution: “Just don’t fall.”

A senior in my extended family had a terrible fall in early May. Recovery has been (and continues to be) a long and difficult road for her. And the ad’s solution to falls - to avoid them in the first place - has stuck in my thinking ever since. 

Just don’t fall. 

Solving problems by preventing them from happening is not an original idea. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” as they said in pre-metric days. But my family member’s recent experience has me asking myself regularly: when is the solution to my problems simply not to have the problems in the first place?

Preventing problems requires attention and hard choices. It is also worth the effort. Decades of living with chronic disease have taught me that avoiding disease triggers is challenging, but less challenging than dealing with disease relapse. Decades of working life, both outside and in academia, have taught me that avoiding burnout is hard, but recovering from burnout is even harder.

Today’s small thing to try immediately is not an easy one, as it involves self-reflection (ick). But burnout is awful, so please give this one a try.

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Pause, Assess, and Reset

Here is your three-step process to help you avoid burnout.

1. Pause. Take a weekend off from all work, even email. Can’t do a full weekend? Take a day. Can’t do a day? (Are you sure? Really, really sure?) Take a half-day. 

Create some time and space away from work to get yourself into a calm(er) state. Do some things that remind you of who you are. Go for a run. Eat some chocolate, or some pie, or both. Read a book. Play a board game with your family. 

2. Assess. Once you have had a chance to decompress, answer this:

“If I were given a time-sensitive ‘opportunity’ to take on an interesting new project/activity in the next few weeks, what would my immediate gut response be?”

Position your gut response on the “Oh Scale”. (Yes, I made this up. Yes, I had far too much fun doing so. No, I don’t need a hobby. This is my hobby.)

3.  Reset. Use your response to the hypothetical good thing to interpret your proximity to burnout:

🥳 Not at risk of burnout (or in total denial)

🙂 Healthy distance from burnout 

😐 Starting on the road to burnout

😳 Burnout adjacent 

🤯 High risk of imminent burnout

If you are at 😐 or lower, look at your commitments and calendar and start aggressively editing. This may involve resetting or renegotiating deadlines, scaling back plans, or doing a full-on triage to remove everything that is non-essential. (See my past newsletter on how to triage your to-do list to help you through this.)

And, importantly, be extremely careful about taking on new things at this time - even shiny new things and invitations.

These steps aren’t easy. I get that. But I believe identifying potential burnout and then making the hard choices to act in ways to avoid it is still easier than recovering from burnout.

Just don’t burnout. 

Where do you fall on the “Oh Scale”? Please hit comment and let me know!

Chipping Away: What I Have Been Up To

A quick update on some of my own activities since my last newsletter, since I have your attention:

• I had a great conversation with Heather Ross on the Better Me podcast about how to stay on top of things without burning out. Our discussion covers balancing academia with family life, working with chronic disease, and, of course, chocolate. If you enjoy podcasts, please check it out! 

• My most recent read was Christie Tate’s Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life. I found this one night on my Libby app in the “popular” section and borrowed it without reading the description. I kept waiting for a big plot shift - would a group member turn out to be a serial killer? would the therapist turn out to be a charlatan? - that never came. After I finished the book I noticed that the author’s name was the same as the main character’s. Turns out it was a memoir. I guess the lack of extreme drama is for the best.

• I put my own “available to promise” advice to work and saved myself a good sixty hours next term: when asked, “Do you want to stay on X committee?”, I said no. My administrative service dance card is full for the year. I am really happy with my decision.

Until next time…

Living in Canada, I am heading into the Thanksgiving long weekend. I plan to invest this time in family games, food consumption, and enjoyment of the autumn season. Life moves pretty fast. I will take the opportunity to slow down. And I hope you will, too.

Stay well, my colleagues. 

P.S. Since you are still here (thank you for that!), I have a small favour to ask. Please share Academia Made Easier with a colleague or friend. There is probably someone in your sphere who would enjoy some small ideas to make their academic work a bit easier. I would love to help them with that.

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Loleen Berdahl, Ph.D.: I am a twin mother, wife, runner, cat lover, and chocolate enthusiast. I spend far too much time on Twitter and binge-watching television, and my house could be a lot cleaner. During the work hours, I am the Executive Director of the  Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. I am the author of University Affair’s Skills Agenda column and my most recent books are  Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD and Explorations: Conducting Empirical Research in Canadian Political Science.