You’re coping, until you aren’t.

Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · You’re coping until you aren’t

I’ve written about burnout before. It is a real thing: severe exhaustion, physical and cognitive. It is serious. It often takes years to recover and may change you forever.

I suspect the term is being used interchangeably with exhaustion that is somewhat less severe. I’m okay with that. It’s hard to know how bad it can get until you are there. And exhaustion should not be normal or taken lightly even if it is the type that a week or two of serious rest would remedy.

I don’t have stats on frequency of serious burnout, and don’t even know if they exist, but I have spoken to 3 clients recently who are either in this state or feel at high risk. And I can think of at least one more who has had an extended sick leave for it. That seems high.

Burnout can occur in a number of contexts.

Autistic burnout is the result of years of additional cognitive and emotional labour masking autism in environments that are not (fully) accommodating.

Informal caregiver (or carer) burnout is also well known, a result of the intense physical, cognitive, and emotional work involved in caring for someone with a long term or chronic illness, often with inadequate support. The term “informal caregiver” seems to be the official term to distinguish family caregivers (and similar) from professional caregivers.

What we might term occupational burnout is the result of excessive stress at work. Professional caregivers experience burnout of this type. But so do other professions who experience stress, overwork, etc.

When we discuss burnout amongst academics, it is common to assume we are talking about a form of occupational burnout. Workloads are increasing. Technology has changed the work in significant ways. Changes in employment patterns and job security create additional uncertainty and stress. The work is cognitively demanding.

You are not just an academic

The pattern I have noticed in the small number of clients I’ve spoken to recently looks like this.

Women
Mid-career & successful
Children who have either ongoing or short term additional needs
Elderly parents with care needs
Death of an elderly parent
The COVID related impacts especially in 2020-2022

Yes, all of these women have stressful jobs. They are successful academics with secure employment who have active research programmes involving managing research teams, travel, funding, and publishing.

They have developed ways of managing their work. They are good at saying no, even if they are still doing “too much”.

They are aware of the structural constraints. They are committed to being good colleagues. They are involved in collective action. They also act individually in solidarity with colleagues who are less privileged.

All of that is stressful and the actions taken in the first few years in response to the COVID epidemic affected them as it did all academics and others working in higher education.

You may also be(come) an informal caregiver

These women all have families: partners, children, parents, etc. Their lives outside work involve the normal day-to-day activities involved in caring for self and others, a household, and so on.

What struck me about their stories of burnout (or feeling on the verge of burnout) was that they all reported a sudden and severe increase in their caregiving work.

A teenaged child has a mental health crisis
An adult child has a health crisis that requires support
School aged children have additional needs that are particularly difficult to manage in the context of COVID disruptions and homeschooling.
A parent becomes ill and they need to arrange professional care, and possibly a move.
A parent is dying and they are involved directly in end-of-life care.
They themselves become seriously ill and require hospitalization and other care.

All of them experienced multiple things on this list.

Parents and children having health crises at the same time.
Their own health crisis happening while also caring for parents.

You may also be autistic.

While none of the women I’m thinking of are autistic, as far as I’m aware, as I was writing that introductory section about types of burnout, I realized that many of my clients are neurodivergent in some way: ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism …

The additional stress of masking or managing your neurodivergence in an occupational or personal context in which it is not well understood or accommodated might add additional stress.

Autism, or other neurodivergence, will also likely shape how burnout presents itself. Emotional dysregulation is already an issue with many forms of neurodivergence and also a common symptom of burnout.

You are not weak, lazy, or incapable of doing this job

It is absolutely normal to wonder about those things.

It is distressingly common how often someone will accuse you of one of those things.

You may have past experience of the symptoms of exhaustion and burnout being treated as weakness, laziness, or incompetence. If so, it is even less surprising that you wonder about those things.

The truth is that you are dealing with unreasonable stress, in multiple areas of your life at once.

The primary causes of your stress are not under your control. Your scope for action is limited.

You need help. The amount and type of help available will depend a lot on who you are and where you live.

This is depressing, but it’s important to recognize that the problems are with the systems and structures.

Being clear about the problem leads to better solutions

It would be better to prevent the circumstances from getting so bad for so many people. If you are reading this and not currently suffering from exhaustion or burnout, this might be your focus.

What small steps can you take to improve the circumstances in the contexts in which you live and work?

However, if reading “severe physical, emotional, and cognitive exhaustion” made you think “Oh, that’s what’s going on” or “OMG, I am in real danger of that”, you need to take action to address your personal situation.

While your scope of action is limited it is not nothing. Small actions count.

Reducing your activities

Saying No is an important part of the solution. You may need to be more ruthless about this than you would like.

That might mean taking sick leave. Even if you can’t do that, or your health care provider doesn’t think things are bad enough to justify that, you can reduce your overal level of activity to address the exhaustion.

I helped one of my clients acknowledge that she had to say no to a prestigious and important work commitment. She reported that she could not imagine being able to prepare for it properly given the cognitive fatigue (including lack of ability to concentrate) that she was experiencing. It also involved travel and other elements that would contribute to her fatigue rather than alleviate it. She will have to trust that other equivalent opportunities will arise in the future.

When being ruthless, ask yourself these questions:

Can I do this well in my current state?
How will doing this affect my own health?
How will doing this in my current state serve the people who benefit from this activity?

The consequences of doing something may actually be worse than the consequences of withdrawing, for others as well as for yourself.

If your circumstances involve informal caregiving, the relationship you have with the person you are caring for is important. However, it may also be true that delegating some of the work may enable you to be more present for the relationship.

If you can afford to pay for some of the physical care, or a health-care advocate, or administrative support for the multiple tasks involved in arranging appointments, this may be worth it both for your own health and for the quality of the relationship between you and your loved one.

You may also have friends or family members willing to take care of you by doing some of these tasks, creating a chain of support that distributes the total labour in a helpful way. This chain of support may also reduce your stress levels because you feel less overwhelmed and out of control.

Depending where you live, some of this support may be available from the state. Or you may have insurance coverage that will provide some of this kind of care for you or for your loved one.

Radical rest

If you are exhausted, you must rest. If you are cognitively exhausted, you must cognitively rest.

This might look like doing absolutely nothing. If lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling is not boring, you are pretty fucking exhausted.

You may discover that you have rules in your head about sleep and rest, that you didn’t know you had, but that are not very helpful in this situation. Things like:

I’m not allowed to go to bed before 9 pm
It’s unreasonable to sleep more than 10 hours
Adults don’t nap in the middle of the day
I can’t spend an entire day in bed.
I should be doing things on the weekend.

You might have to do nothing. You might have to sleep much longer than you think is reasonable.

If napping during the day doesn’t prevent you from sleeping, and you are tired in the middle of the day, nap.

If you suffer from insomnia, which is contributing to your exhaustion, speak to your doctor about it. You may need to take medication for a while to get yourself to a place where you can sleep without medication.

Can you change how you do things to make them less physically demanding?
Can you do some things lying down, for example? Can you get a shower chair or bench so you can shower without needing to stand?
What else can you think of that seems absolutely ridiculous but would save energy?

Reducing normal personal care activities

This kind of radical rest may conflict with the basic personal care needed to keep your life ticking over. Feeding yourself and your family. Keeping your living space clean and tidy. Doing laundry. Keeping your body clean.

Ask for help from other members of your household and from friends and family.

If you can afford to pay for help, pay for help. This may take the form of eating more pre-prepared meals, simplifying your meals, ordering take out. It may be hiring someone to clean your home, sending (some of) out your laundry.

You may also lower your standards. You may need to judge the relative stress of lowering your standards against the stress of doing things to your normal standards.