On Limits and Endurance and Burnout
How to tell yourself “I got this” and bring receipts.
Academics are feeling it these days. As 2021 comes to a close, we will soon be looking at two years worth of pandemic-style work patterns. For most everyone, the job is harder than before and there is less material reward, a combination that causes folks to question their motivations and goals for doing just about any job. There are other workers out there who no doubt face even tougher situations — health care is certainly one, child care and early-childhood education is another — there is, nonetheless, a need for folks in all areas of academic work to consider, anew, their limits and what it means to hang in there.
I’ll save talk about why we might want to hang in there — the motivations for doing this job with intention and focus even as it gets harder — for another day. For now I will simply say I think there are plenty of good reasons in times like these. Change is happening, and predictably powerful forces are resisting some of the progressive changes that many of us have been working to bring about for a long, long time. So the work is tough right now.
A question I get asked a lot lately is about burnout: how do you see it affecting people? how can we avoid it? It is these important questions I want to focus on today.
I will personalize them, so as not to generalize but rather to invite others to do the same. What are the ways I keep going?
My mental and physical strategies for enduring and avoiding burnout all have roots in my life as an endurance athlete as well as an academic. But I don’t think you have to have a background as a distance runner or cyclist to make these work because I know others who do similar things and don’t ride bikes or run long distances. I will lay out a few things that work for me with the hope that others may find them useful.
Look out to the horizon, take a long view, and be realistic about what the journey will do to test me.
Mentally, one of the toughest things about the time(s) we are living in now is not knowing what will come next. Our conceptual horizon for predicting what will come next is short. It makes it very difficult to plan things very far in advance. Will I be able to go home for the holidays safely? Will I have disruptions in the Spring? will I be able to make the research trip I have planned in May? all of these are difficult to answer and have been for some time now. And that feeling of so many unknowns is anxiety-producing.
One way to deal with that is to make a regular practice of looking up to the horizon that is my current work and career journey and being honest about where I want to go and how the journey will test me. Getting that straight, including a sense of what it will feel like to be in the middle of something long and difficult, does really help when I am feeling stressed.
I find that academics only rarely do this, by the way. Instead of look to the horizon they look at their feet. And believe me, I get that. I’ve done it myself for long stretches of time. But it makes me disoriented doing that…just moving day to day without a sense of direction. You can lose motivation and lose your way. So I have to remind myself…look up! And make a plan for where I’m going to go and anticipate where the path will take me, whether it’s through a swamp or up a mountain. This way, I can prepare for what will test my limits.
Take inventory. Pay attention to my capacity and my perceptions of it. Be specific and honest about how much and how hard I am working.
On a long run or ride, I find I can spend a lot of time feeling anxious not about how I *currently* feel or how hard I’m currently working, but rather about how I *will* feel later. I’ve wasted a lot of time worrying about that. This is my brain telling me stressful horror stories about how bad things are going to be. But…here’s the important thing: many of them are worst-case-scenario cautionary tales that NEVER HAPPEN! Sneaky brain.
Meanwhile, if I’m busy listening to these worst-case-stories that my brain is feeding me, I don’t stop to notice that I’m feeling…fine. Good even. And it’s a beautiful day. Etc.
So what do I do when those feelings start to creep in? I do a reality check. An inventory. If I’m pedaling on the bike, I’ll start from the top, I’ll run things down: head? eyes? shoulders? arms? lungs? legs? bum? feet? How’s it going?
Most of the time, all these systems are… fine. No pain. Active use but not at full capacity. Often, this kind of rundown makes me feel quite good. And I can talk back to Dr. Doom in my brain with some evidence in hand to say: settle down man. Things are fine. We’ve prepared for this, brain. We are not overcooking it. We’ll be ok.
Now here’s the thing: I can do the same thing with work as an academic. An overfull inbox and a pile of grading to do and a few approaching deadlines can produce the same kind of doom narratives…but if I have that long horizon AND I do a rundown, take inventory, I can get out of that doomy headspace. So I make it a habit to check in.
Often I will realize: “you know what, it’s only four or five of the twenty or so emails in my inbox right now that really ask anything of me. The others don’t. And of those four or five, a few are tasks that only take a few minutes like scheduling a meeting or resetting a password. A half an hour and the list will be down to just two messages that really demand careful phrasing, reading and responding.” Two. Emails. C’mon, brain. We got this.
Understand and Be Clear About Your Work Volume and Work Intensity and Make Choices Accordingly
A workout is hard when it is long or when it is intense, or both. Academic work is the same. As my email example alludes to, not all of the tasks I have lined up for a given day are equally demanding. It is important to know, though, how my work will test me at any given time. That can take some time to get to know about myself, by the way, especially when I’ve moved into new job roles or take on new responsibilities.
So I make it a habit to monitor both the volume of my work — how much time it takes up, how many repetitions of things I need to do — and the intensity of the tasks I’ve got lined up to do. I want to be sure that my planning, scheduling, etc. takes these factors into account. I need more time to recover from intense work tasks. High volume tasks, if they are low intensity, might be done at different times of the day when I don’t need as much energy and focus. The key is to not treat all the work I must do as the same. Because it is not equally demanding of me.
Be Clear, When I Hit a Limit, About What Kind of Limit It Is So I Can Recover
Work, recover. Work, recover. That is the cycle we have to plan for in order to keep going. No matter what it is, there’s no more work after a while if I don’t recover from the effort.
When I hit a limit, there are a number of things that might stop me or cause me to feel like I have nothing more to give. It is important to try and know — and eventually anticipate — what these limits are, what they each feel like, and how I can recover from them. I think about two types of physical limit on work: bonking and cracking. Both, not surprisingly, have origins in my life as a cyclist.
A “bonk” is running out of fuel, out of calories. Nothing coming from the engine room. Recovering from a bonk is a matter of eating. Refueling. Topping off the tank.
Cracking is different. Cracking is when I’ve loaded up my body with the waste products of fatigue. Cracking is the body rebelling when I ask it to do one more pedal stroke or take one more stride. Recovering from cracking is a matter of resting. Letting my body do the repairs to defrag, clean up the mess, fix frayed edges. Bodies are remarkable in their ability to do all those things if we give them time.
So when I hit, or even when I am feeling like I am approaching a limit: which is it? am I cracking or bonking? the remedy and what I should do next will depend on which one it is.
Now these are physical phenomena that happen to endurance athletes but there are real analogues to them in the world of academic work too, I find. Cracking is when the work has been so intense for so long that I literally can’t work up to the standard I expect of myself any more without a break. I’m making bad decisions, or I’ve slowed down so much that everything is a slog, or I making more mistakes. It is time to rest. Let the neurons that have been firing hot for so long slow down and reset.
Or maybe I am bonking? maybe the creative fuel tank is empty? maybe I need to talk with a mentor, read something that inspires me? or go for a walk?
Burnout Is When You Can’t Recover
Burnout happens, I think, when it is no longer possible to fully recover. It’s a chronic rather than acute case of hitting limit(s). And because of that, I don’t think I can avoid burnout just once. I have to work over time and every single day to avoid it.
Avoiding burnout is a matter of employing all of the strategies I talk about here, every day, and making a habit of them. Making my decisions about work based on a routine like this: 1. where am I on my journey? what is my horizon? 2. how am I doing today, right now? take inventory. 3. what is my workload asking of me in terms of volume and intensity? do I have a schedule and a pace that will allow me proper time to recover? 4. am I at capacity or approaching a limit? if so, what kind of limit? what do I need to do — feed my fuel tank? rest? — to avoid hitting my limit?
If I make time in my day to ask all of those questions I feel better about the choices I make, whether the choice is to work more or to rest. I often find that I have capacity I didn’t notice before, especially as I quiet the spectres of future doom and worst-case scenarios. Over time, in fact, I have built up a different kind of memory bank. It is full of accounts of hard work, survival, and achievements. Moments when I have been tested and met the challenge. I draw on these to compare my current status regularly too.
This way I can tell myself “I got this” and bring the receipts.
