A few months ago, a student asked me how I keep from burning out on my academic work. This student, a senior, was trying to figure out how to finish out an academic career, and the intense projects that come in the last year of a the degree had the student worried. I shared some of my thoughts then. But right now, I’m in a moment of burnout myself, so I’m going to talk a bit about how I’m coping with it.
There are three rules I impose on myself when I feel myself burning out:
- Do not feel sorry for yourself. No one else really cares that you’re burning out (other than perhaps your closest loved ones, who most certainly care). No one at work needs to hear about how bad you have it, how you just can’t keep up, etc. It’s a sad fact, but most people when they ask how you are only ask because they’ve been trained to ask that question, and they’re going to respond with “me, too” when you say “fine” or “decent” or whatever.
Also, feeling sorry for yourself is like trying to eat one Lay’s potato chip. You won’t go there for a second and just stop. No one does. As human beings, we want a system-thinking excuse (e.g. “everything is hard, so I’m not getting things done” or “life is bad, so I don’t have to try”). If you feed that, it’s going to stay around and get bigger. You don’t snap out of something like that. - Don’t stop working. Even if you do bad work because you’re burnt out, don’t stop doing things you are obligated to do. By all means don’t take on new stuff, and let things that don’t have a deadline go, but if you don’t do your normal work, you ARE MAKING THINGS WORSE. Monday still comes (Tuesday in my case, since that’s usually when my legit work week starts). Your life isn’t going to stop because you don’t feel like doing what you need to do.
- Own that it’s your problem. This is hard even for me, and I’ve been pushing myself on this forever. We get mad when things aren’t going well. Even if we’re sad, the sadness has anger beneath it in most cases, because when we burn out we hardly ever see it as our fault. It’s something else.
But you shouldn’t think you can take it out on someone else. No one is your life is at fault. No one caused you to burn out. People might not be recognizing that you need different things, but you need to talk to them about that and not attack them for it.
In my case, the biggest thing is keeping my passive-aggressive sarcasm to myself. For example, on Thursday, one of my students got on my case about a term that the student thought I wasn’t using right (it was a term that had multiple meanings– I was right, but the student was right, too). I let it go as long as I could, but eventually when the student interrupted me in class, I said “do you want to come up here and teach?”
I shouldn’t have. It was impolite of me. I mean technically, if you believe in “tough love” in teaching, it was the right thing to do, and it was within my rights, but it wasn’t what I should have done.
So that’s sort of a sense of how being burned out works for me. I get tense, I get sarcastic, and I have to work to not feel sorry for myself, to take it out on others, or to stop working. I don’t think I’m unique there. I think that’s fairly typical for people who are burning out.
Here’s where it gets weird for me, and it’s where I’ll add advice that might not actually work for some people.
I have social anxiety. It’s not crippling, and I know some people don’t believe it’s a thing (I get “that’s not a thing” frequently from people about lots of stuff in my life, to which I offer a modest “how the fuck would you know?”), but when I’m stressed out or burning out it’s the thing that comes to the surface first.
Today I went shopping with Julie. We went to Party City, and the place was packed with people shopping for costumes. At first it was fine. I mean I like to shop, and I like spending time with Julie where we aren’t trying to grade or prep for classes, so it was a fun time out. But over time, the sheer number of people in the store became overwhelming. I would turn around and someone would bump into me. People were yelling to their friends with their mouth inches from my ear. The temperature was going up from all the frantic movement of the other shoppers.
I managed to get through that part of the trip without much trouble.
But we also went to Wal-Mart. After about 20 minutes in Wal-Mart, I just couldn’t take it. I had to start looking for open spaces, aisles without large groups of people in them, so that I could get some quiet.
That’s not normal. Wal-Mart isn’t supposed to drain the life from you (insert snarky comments here).
But I know why it happened. I’m worn out from a super-busy week, and I teach one really challenging class where the students, in spite of me telling them not to frequently, are just super-loud. I don’t mind that when they’re in groups. But when we’re trying to have a three hour planning session class and the volume of background chatter goes up to a level far above the sound of my voice every time I don’t yell “hey, stop and listen,” I find myself just worn out at the end.
I need some time without all that noise in the background, some time to collect myself.
And as I burn out, I could claim that it’s the fault of the loud people at Wal-Mart, or the jackass at Party City who decided to yell the same message three times into my ear before basically running over me to get to the person who didn’t hear him. I could blame my students for thinking that whatever thing they were rumbling about at their table was a bigger deal than class.
But it’s not them. We all face stuff like that. I’m not some sort of hero for putting up with it.
I just… am at my wit’s end. I’ve been trying to push through like I’m at 100% when I’ve been sick for almost a month. I haven’t been taking the time for myself. I’ll be fine after a few days at home, in an environment where people don’t call on me to use energy I don’t have.
And so that’s my big piece of advice, my big recommendation if you’re burning out. We all have an “optimal” way of working, of existing, of coping with things. For me, the optimal state is puttering around the house. Already today, since having that encounter at Wal-Mart and Party City, I’ve written this, graded 25 written responses and 25 video streams, prepped a full lesson plan and PowerPoint and made a PowerPoint full of information for a friend teaching one of the classes I redesigned recently.
I’m productive, even when I’m burning out. I also did some housework. Not a lot, but some. I can be productive when I’m in my most comfortable state. It’s not hard. And everyone needs to know what that state is. I doubt yours is mine. I know lots of people who could never get serious work done lying on their stomach on the couch. But I’m a grading inferno when I’m there. It’s just how I am.
And I’m fine. But right now I’m going to check my email one more time, post this blog entry, then I’m going to play a few games and watch some TV, then I’m going to rest.
Because I know I’m frayed. I need time to regenerate.
And that’s no one’s fault but mine.