This post is a different format than usual. Typically I write something and then record an audio version. However, when I invited Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch to share something about her experience of burnout, she preferred an interview. The text is an edited transcript of the interview. The audio has also been edited. Myriam and I talked on 20 March 2024. I decided to publish this in the summer when readers/listeners have more capacity to engage with something like this. Not only is it long, but it may be emotionally and cognitively demanding, especially if you are also experiencing symptoms.
I learned a lot from this conversation and I think you will too. Fixing this requires systemic changes that are out of our control. That is frustrating, or even enraging. As Emily and Amelia Nagoski point out in their excellent book on the topic, you can’t fight for those systemic changes when you are suffering from burnout. If listening/reading is distressing, take a break. Look after yourself. Acknowledging the problem is the first step to fixing it, even if it’s not obvious how, or if, it can be fixed. Making things 5% better is worth it.
Table of Contents:
- The Interview
- Introducing Myriam and her context
- How did you know you were burnt out?
- Concerted efforts to prevent burnout
- But it gets too much
- Seeking medical help
- Circling back: Solidarity, saying no, and the limits of personal choices
- What to look for and when to seek help
- What recovery looks like
- The next phase of recovery: returning to work
- What recovery teaches about signs & prevention
- The limits of individual efforts to prevent burnout
- The most important question to ask yourself
- Circling back to the original incident
- Small steps & being prepared
The interview 00:02:35
Jo VanEvery
Before we start into the main topic, I want to reassure the listeners that I understand the conditions that you’re working in.
Jo VanEvery
Working conditions in academia right now are not fantastic. What that looks like specifically varies depending on where you live, what kind of institution you work in, and what your employment status is. Your ability to manage your workload will also vary depending on a lot of other personal factors, including family circumstances, local networks, access to health care, access to mental health care, and so on.
Jo VanEvery
So my goal in doing this interview and sharing this conversation is to help listeners identify when things might be getting more serious, and to have a bit of a frank discussion about what recovering from burnout looks and feels like and how it affects you and your work. And my hope is that this helps you the listener, advocate for yourself, and your colleagues.
Jo VanEvery
I am well aware that structural change is necessary. But structural change to prevent burnout and other physical and mental illnesses caused by stress and overwork will take time. And we also need to take care of ourselves and our colleagues and advocate for policies that enable us to do so in the short term.
Introducing Myriam and her context 00:03:32
Jo VanEvery
So I have invited Myriam Houssay-Holzchurch, who has been a member of the Academic Writing Studio for several years, Myriam has recently returned to work part time after an extended sick leave to address burnout. So hello Myriam, and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed about your experience of burnout as an academic.
Jo VanEvery
I was thinking we should probably start with that sort of institutional, geographic, whatever context just so that other people can relate what their situation is to yours a little bit. So maybe… I know you are a geographer. I realized I don’t know very much about what kind of geography you do, or what your work is, like your academic work is. And I also think it will be helpful to just give a little very brief primer on what it’s like to work as an academic in France or in the particular kind of institution you’re in.
Myriam
Thank you, Jo. And thank you for having me. It’s great to be here and discuss these really crucial issues, I think. Of course, my experience has some specificities, but hopefully listeners will find commonalities in our situations.
Myriam
Maybe to start by framing the French situation that is still all too often understood from abroad, as like a haven that has escaped neoliberalism, etc. I’m sorry, it has not. We, we have undergone over the last 20 years, rapid and brutal neoliberalization and a voluntary destruction by the various government of French higher education. This has been described by some very serious and level headed scholars as carpet bombing of French higher education. So it gives you an idea of the intensity and of the changes, maybe especially because we were relatively protected before that, but we experienced the full force of the intensity of neoliberalisation.
Jo VanEvery
So just a second, my understanding is that the employment status of academics in France certainly was, like you were civil servants. Is that, is that correct? And so it seems to me that that is just part of the neoliberal kind of destruction of public services is, is is part of that and it took a particular form because of the particular way you were set up?
Myriam
Well, indeed, most of the vast, vast majority of our universities are public and tenured faculty is, we are civil servants. However, more than a half teaching academics today are not civil servants, are precarious academics with the like differently shaped brutality of “you can’t have a full career as an adjunct”, you can, “you have to stop being an adjunct because it’s not…” like, juridically possible after four or five years. So
Jo VanEvery
Right. Right.
Myriam
So there’s a lot of turnover. A lot of young people in precarious conditions, they don’t stay in precarious condition, but they don’t also don’t stay in academia, right.
Jo VanEvery
Right. You’re in one of the permanent positions?
Myriam
I am in one of the permanent positions. I’ll get in…. But just to finish on the national context, we are a very centralised kind of academia, everything depends on the minister, almost, meaning that there is no negotiation on salary, no negotiation on workload, no negotiation on what’s, whatsoever at local level. And being a little bit caricatural here. But basically, if I want to change the number of hours, I’m teaching as permanent faculty, we have to change national law, and most of the time to change the majority at the National Assembly. So it’s very little leeway there.
Jo VanEvery
Yeah, yeah.
Myriam
And we, we still have very low tuition fee. So we have a lot of students. And by a very low I mean something around 300 US dollars a year, including access to full health care. So that’s like nothing. And it’s, there is no selection to enter university. As long as you have finished high school and have got the baccalaureate (the end of high school exam, something that 80% of a cohort does) you have a right, a legal right of access to university.
Myriam
So we deal with a lot of students, which is great. A lot of them have, like a lot of needs, because they’re first generation, because, a lot of reasons. And there is less and less of us and by us, I mean faculty and staff to care for more and more students. So there is like this discrepancy there.
Myriam
And as for me, well, I’m a full professor, I’m a white and cis woman, which also means that I have extra, extra work, because we have gender equality laws, meaning that you have for instance, to have the same number of men and women sitting, sitting in committees. But as I’m in geography and in geography, the we are only 27% of women full profs. So it means we do twice the administrative work than men do, without compensation of course.
Myriam
I’ve had three children, they’re all adults, but still financially dependent now. And I’ve all, I had all the shiny toys of so-called Academic Excellence. I went to the right school, right University, got the right award. So I’ve got, I’ve got all of that.
Myriam
I’m teaching what would be the equivalent of three courses per semester, it doesn’t work exactly the same way. And the teaching time is, again nationwide, the only working time that is counted. Service work, supervising work and research time are not counted, leading to all the invisible work that takes up hours, and of course leads you to burn out.
Myriam
And I just stopped, last September, leading a team of 60 people on the research time, on the research side. I also just stopped sitting on national committees, which is basically like one more month of work. I was on several editorial committees and of course this is not compensated in either in time, nor money, which maybe explain why I’m a union member. [Laughter]
Myriam
Then my own work, to finish like this sort, this short self introduction, I have work… well, I’m an a human geographer doing critical geography, mostly in post apartheid cities in South Africa. So I’ve got some long distance long term relationship with South Africa. That means also, that I have to travel, I have to travel far. And for a long time, because I’m doing some kind of social geography that is close to anthropology with ethnographical methods, etc. And more recently, for various reasons, including limiting my flight, my extra continental flights, I have moved to a research work that is more about critical epistemologies and pedagogies. Basically, that’s it.
Jo VanEvery
Oh, really interesting, really interesting. And I think that, you know, there’s, I can see some commonalities with what people are experiencing in other countries. Definitely in terms of the shift in numbers of students and the ratio of students to faculty and staff, to look after them.
Jo VanEvery
I think you also get it varies a lot by institution, but that thing about numbers of, you know, more first generation students and students with extra needs and all that kind of thing coming in. That’s, that’s definitely something I think a lot of people are facing, and then you know, just the workload.
Jo VanEvery
So I think one of the big differences, which you highlighted is that depending where you are, how you deal with those structural things, and where the structural things are happening is very different.
Jo VanEvery
So sometimes, there is a lot of leeway, even at lower levels within the institution to allocate work differently, or whatever. Sometimes it is, you know, the negotiating will happen in an individual institution around at least some of those issues. Other places you do have national bargaining, I mean, in England, we, I think there’s still national bargaining for wages, even if some of the working conditions stuff is local. But, you know, in the US and Canada, it’s almost always, you know, just at the institutional level, right?
Jo VanEvery
So, the variation, you know, there’s a lot more, there’s a lot more variation in where, where, wherever structural stuff is happening, and where your point of access to changing that is. But even where, you know, you are in a situation that the, you know, the negotiation around those things happens at the local level, there are still national kind of contextual factors that limit those, how that happens, right?
Jo VanEvery
The legal situation that you mentioned, but also, just, you know, the funding probably comes from a higher level or whatever. And, you know, there’s a whole set of bigger things influencing what’s happening in that context.
Jo VanEvery
So I suspect that your experience on a day to day basis of what it’s like, may be very similar even if it’s hard to, you know, even if the whole structure of the, of what, around that is very different.
How did you know you were burnt out? 00:15:33
Jo VanEvery
So, um, so, let’s just start with, so you went off on sick leave, six months ago?
Myriam
I went off on sick leave a year ago. Mid March 2023, for three months.
Jo VanEvery
Okay. So what was happening in February, March, January, February, March 2023 that kind of led you to be like no, no, no, no, this is, this is bad. I need to, I need to stop completely like, what got you from “Oh, my God, things are terrible, but it’s terrible for everybody” to “Oh, my goodness, I need sick leave.”
Myriam
This is maybe why my, this is one of the specificities of my situation maybe, which is why I’m going to answer you the other way around. I, 15, no, now 16 years ago, I had the first experience of like physical, physically crashing from overwork.
Myriam
By physically crashing, I mean, like literally falling on the floor, and passing out during during the defense of a Master’s thesis. And I was sitting and I was just [unclear].
Concerted efforts to prevent burnout 00:16:57
Myriam
So realising that there was an issue there, so for 15 years, I was really aware of how, that I was in danger of burning out. So I did all the right things, which allowed me to last that long.
Myriam
So I had, you know, all the, all the stuff: I was doing yoga, I was meditating, I was eating well, I was sleeping well, I was saying no to huge loads of things.
Myriam
I had, really, numbers of “I will not review more than one thing a month”, “I will not sit on more than x committee, PhD committees”. And I did respect that. Right.
Myriam
So I was already very worried of the situation because of this crash. And, and then, eight years ago, with a good friend of mine, we made a conscious decision.
Myriam
We were two female full profs. And we decided together that our role as female full profs was to act as shields for other people. So that younger faculty, precarious faculty, students, doctoral students, could take shelter.
Myriam
And that we would do that and that we could not, we were very aware of that, from the beginning, that this would not, it could not last long, that at some point, we would need to step down. Because before breaking, right? And that other people would have to act as shown or there would be no shields, but that we would have done what we could.
But it gets too much 00:18:58
Myriam
Except that as I, well, except that there was a pile-on at the end of the period. Since September 2019, I had family issues with very serious health issue for my last child. Then we had the pandemic. Then we have an acute political crisis and direct attack against my lab by the National Minister of Higher Education, and some extreme right wing who actually sent a lot of death threats to my friends. Not me, because I was not named there. So there was this sort of general and friendly atmosphere. [Laughter]
Jo VanEvery
I think we might say the shit hit the fan, at that point.
Myriam
That’s exactly, yes. So there was this. Ah, and I hold on. We hold on pretty nicely there. And then in January, the end of December and January, what probably precipitated my burnout that was already well on its way.
Jo VanEvery
Absolutely, yes.
Myriam
Was that my father died. Um, it was not a matter of grieving and sorrow. It was a matter of physical exhaustion because we were privileged in the fact that my father died at home, and my mother and I spent nights with him, you know, during his last days, but a week of having very light sleep, less than three hours a night is not exactly conducive to wellbeing.
Jo VanEvery
No, not at all.
Myriam
Yep. So I started noticing how I was like on the next level of burning out after that.
Myriam
Then after his death, and you know, the moment when you have to take care of everything, which you do, because that’s obviously a priority. And then starting in February, I noticed that I was not sleeping, that I was feeling depressed and crying.
Myriam
Of course, I had reasons to cry, but I was crying quite a lot.
Myriam
I also noticed cognitive impairments. I was forgetful, like, you know, the “Why am I in this room? What did you just say? What am I supposed to do now?“, you know, there’s sort of moments of absence, that were becoming more and more frequent, I could not concentrate that much.
Myriam
And a really good measure of my tiredness is how many typos I have, make when I type. And it began to be really awful there.
Myriam
There was other physical symptoms. Of course, I was exhausted, I did not eat a lot, I do not want to eat a lot. So a lot of feeling depressed kind of thing.
Myriam
And then really, what told me that this was something else was that, to put it mildly, I started to hate people, which is like, not me. But it was hard to be with people. It was hard to talk with people. I felt ignored. I felt resentful toward colleagues.
Myriam
I felt that, I mean, not those colleagues that you love to hate, but colleagues, you really do appreciate. I did not want to speak to them. I considered that they, when they went… I also felt that they were, they were, as usual, offloading their problems on me and I was like, “Oh, my sweet summer children, this is nothing.” You know, not being considerate anymore towards my colleague.
Seeking medical help 00:23:26
Myriam
So I’m like, no, this is this is something else. And then I’m, I called my doctor for an appointment, like recognizing that I was at a later stage. And there was this funny moment, I had this doctor secretary who asked me if this was an emergency or something structural in French, it would be “C’est un urgence? Ou c’est un probleme du fond?”. And I say, well, it’s structural. So, which of course it was. And I had my appointment a month after because among the…
Jo VanEvery
pas un urgence (trans: not an emergency)
Myriam
Yeah, welcome to France. And welcome to the the acute destruction of one’s fabulous health care system,
Jo VanEvery
Same thing is happening in England. Right? If it’s not an emergency, you can wait a month, right? Like, there’s no in between.
Myriam
A month is like a good thing. If you’re looking for something else, it’s going to be much longer.
Myriam
So I saw her and she was like, “Okay, you’re burnt out?” I’m like, Yeah. And she was, “I have been watching you for a while. Because all these, you know, physical ailment of tendonitis, or, more typically tendonitis that happened to you, like every year in May or June, it’s a bit of a pattern, right?” I was like, yes, there is a pattern.
Myriam
So she, she actually thought at first, that I would refuse a sick leave, and started to, I don’t know, even like, fight with me, “you don’t need a week off, you need more than that. Maybe I’ll give you, have a month off right from now, because you…”, I was like “yeah give me three months. I’m fine with that.” And she was like, “okay”, which means that, you know, this particular history, this specific history of my burnout meant that I had no denial, because I knew where I was going. And I had no guilt and still have no guilt whatsoever about burning out because I knew of the structural reasons for my burning out. And so, I’ve compared to…
Jo VanEvery
It sounds like as well that, you know, that that reaction from your doctor, is that, you know, she was also aware that you were, you know, you were on the edge of that but that you were keeping going because you had reasons.
Jo VanEvery
So in a way, it’s a bit like, there’s an English idiom where we talk about coming to the end of your rope, right? It’s almost like you were aware, when you talk, the thing you said about eight years ago, you and a colleague have, you know, made a conscious decision that even though you knew it would be more work for you, you were going to make an effort as full profs to protect women that were in less secure and less senior positions from some of the terrible things. But that was partly made knowing, like you knew the impact that was going to have on you.
Circling back: Solidarity, saying no, and the limits of personal choices 00:26:57
Jo VanEvery
And so, you know, by the time you got to this point, you were, you had been through several rounds of, not so much maybe denial isn’t really the right word, but a kind of acknowledgement, but refusal, because you know, you were prioritizing something else.
Jo VanEvery
You were prioritizing the care of colleagues over certain, you know, to a certain extent, you were trying to make a kind of balance between how much am I willing to, “I know, this is going to be damaging to me in some way. But I’m willing to take a bit of a hit for that, in order to do these other things”. And you had come to a point where it’s like, I can’t take any more hits, I’m done. I have to, I have to stop and recover.
Jo VanEvery
So I think for some listeners, because when you said, you know, that you had, you and that colleague had made that decision, I think there are a lot of people listening, who, who are making that decision in some way, like a lot of people will, you know, the form their what we might call their denial takes is to say, “but I can’t do otherwise because if I say no, these junior or precarious colleagues will end up taking the brunt of things”, or whatever.
Jo VanEvery
But I think what’s interesting about your story is that you actually weren’t just kind of falling into that, that you and a colleague actually sat down and talked about it, and kind of made a pact and a very conscious decision. So that although you’re saying like some of that wasn’t recognized by, you know, the official system, right, you’re not getting extra pay, you’re not getting whatever, right, a time off from one thing in order to do these other things. You did have recognition from someone right, like each other. And I suspect that was important in being able to keep going for that long, right? That it was a kind of act of solidarity, it wasn’t you feeling… And it was very consciously chosen, aligned with values that were very important to you. Right.
Jo VanEvery
And so, that, and I think, so that even the same actions can look very different in different circumstances, right? So for you to take those actions in a context of solidarity, and solidarity with a colleague doing similar as a conscious act of solidarity with junior colleagues. And then also, to have very consciously made that decision based on your values, and assessing the risks, knowing the risk you were taking, is very different from kind of feeling like you’re being swept along by this, and that nobody recognizes that, that you’re kind of alone with those values, right?
Jo VanEvery
That as much as the institutional structure did not recognize or appreciate your values, you did have colleagues that recognized and appreciated your values. I think that’s, that’s a kind of, I think that do you think, does that feel right to you that that made a difference in terms of how long you were able to last before this kind of fell apart?
Myriam
Yeah. Well, the, the, I don’t think I needed like the recognition of my colleague. We were really, we had solidarity. We were in solidarity with one another. And we knew it was, I don’t know, I’m not maybe I need to think a bit more about that. It was not a matter of recognition in the term that “Oh, you’re doing that you’re like, a good person“.
Jo VanEvery
No, no, no, no.
Myriam
Yes. No, I’m, er, it’s. We know what we’re going through. We know why. And we’re in that together.
Jo VanEvery
Yes.
Myriam
And yes. And there was also something that helped me last so long is that by, and of course, it’s alignment with my values. It’s another thing that I avoided, was the cognitive dissonance that we know adds to burnouts of having to do things you don’t believe in or that can even run contrary to your beliefs and values that I don’t think I ever did.
Jo VanEvery
So you did, the things you said no, the things you said no to, you said, yes, you were aware you were saying yes to more things than was perhaps reasonable, but given the circumstances, you were doing that, but you were not saying yes to things that were not aligned with your values.
Myriam
Exactly. There, to give you a very specific instance, there is a committee on which again, there’s supposed to be gender parity. And I was one of the three people, (the other three, there was my friend, and the third one) were the only three people that could fill that seat. And that seat is empty and has always been empty. Because we decided that that committee was not relevant, was not in line with our value, did not deserve, was not a priority for our time and energy. So people say, “Oh, but institutionally speaking, we need someone”, and we’re like, no, actually, we’re, fuck no. [Laughter]
Jo VanEvery
Exactly. It’s like, institutionally, you don’t need this committee. It’s not doing…
Myriam
Right. I mean, we don’t think this kind of committee is relevant. We think it’s basically another bullshit job. We’re saying no, and the seat is empty. Because we’d rather have our time, sitting in a PhD committee for a student that needs an important, socially important subject and that’s where our time should go!
Jo VanEvery
Right. So that raises like a really important question about that, you know, like, because it is aligned with your values, because I know that you have very strong feminist values.
Jo VanEvery
So the idea that there should be gender parity on committees, or at least, though, you know, perhaps, proportional to the, you know, the idea that we should have equal numbers, even though we don’t have equal numbers of staff, right, is that’s, that’s a funny definition of equality. But anyway, “we’ll make these people work harder“, like, okay.
Jo VanEvery
But, but the general underlying principle of gender parity, and, you know, women, you know, being on these committees that make decisions is something that’s important to you. And so you are actually taking those decisions on a committee by committee basis, and in solidarity with your colleagues to say even you know, even though the principle of gender parity and meeting, you know, the institutional principle of having women on all the committees we do agree with, but this particular committee, we don’t think is a priority, there aren’t enough women to fill all these seats. And therefore, some, we are not going to continue to pretend that we can achieve this goal, while we still only have 27% women in the professoriate. Right. And, therefore, we’re going to let some of those, right.
Jo VanEvery
So it was again, a conscious, it wasn’t just a kind of, Oh, my God, I’m too much. I’m saying no to this one. It was very consciously about what’s more important and and weighing up your values, and also being in solidarity with the other people who would be asked
Myriam
Yes, and no, absolutely. It’s a committee by committee basis. And it’s even more than that. There were committees I sat on for a while, because, when that was important, when I felt that was important, for… And then they started to do more and more bureaucratic stuff. Not making important decisions, you know, just basically validated bureaucratic stuff. And I was like, no. And so I went out of those committees to shift to others. So it’s not only the committee by committee basis. It’s like when, where and when? At some point, it, again it, that we’re interested in…
Jo VanEvery
Can, is this … but is this doing effective …? Is this effective? Is my being here actually achieving something?
Myriam
At this moment? And if I’m from very local committee at a department level, to nationwide committees, like this is when and where I can make a difference.
Jo VanEvery
Right? My point, you, the the reason you brought this up was to say that you think that, that kind of approach was protective of you in terms of burnout, because, because the cognitive dissonance of doing work that felt meaningless or trivial, or was actively counter to your values would have actually taken a greater toll that was, am I correct? And that was the point you wanted to…?
Myriam
That is totally it.
What to look for and when to seek help 00:36:40
Jo VanEvery
Okay. So at the point where, so just to go back to, you know, some of the things people might look for at the point where you need to go and make the appointment with your doctor, one, one thing to consider is whether you tell a white lie about whether it’s urgent or fundamental?
Myriam
What if it’s both?!
Jo VanEvery
If it’s both then say it’s an emergency, right? So it’s kind of like, you know, I’ve had heart disease for this long, I am currently having a heart attack, right. So, you know, when you’re currently having the equivalent of a heart attack, you need to say it’s an emergency, so you get the quicker appointments. So that’s one thing we learn.
Jo VanEvery
But the other thing is that some of the symptoms may look like, you may decide, oh, well, you know, my father just died, of course, I’m depressed. Of course, I’m crying, whatever.
Jo VanEvery
But you were aware, because you were already aware. So it’s, it’s a good thing to be aware, like, what your normal patterns are. So that, you know, when it’s worse than that.
Jo VanEvery
The cognitive, the cognitive decline, or the cognitive… Another client had said, before she went out on burnout leave, that cognitive fatigue, right, so that inability to concentrate, the and the sort of short term memory issues you were having, that kind of thing.
Jo VanEvery
And then you also talked about things that you once liked, you talked about people that you once liked, enjoyed talking to, and didn’t mind telling you what was going on, that all of a sudden, you were very short tempered with them. You were very, right, like it shifted like you started to hate people that you didn’t like.
Jo VanEvery
I think that other client had said, you know, she used to really love writing. She was actually on sabbatical when she went off on burnout leave. And she was just, she used to love writing. And she just found it really hard to focus and concentrate on her writing. Like that was one of those symptoms for her.
Jo VanEvery
So I think that kind of abrupt change that not so much, you know, I’ve got these annoying colleagues, and they’re more annoying than normal. But hint, these colleagues never used to annoy me. And they’re not doing anything different. But I am reacting differently. And taking that, seriously, is a, is a sign that you want to go.
What recovery looks like 00:39:11
Jo VanEvery
So you got signed off for three months, that other client also got signed off for three months. It seems to me that three months is a pretty standard, “If you’re burnt out, you need three months”, which might sound scary to a lot of people because it is a big chunk of time.
And what do you do when you’re on that three months leave? Like what what does recovery look like?
Myriam
Okay, first you do nothing.
Myriam
I spent, I don’t know, maybe two and a half of the three months like literally lying on my couch doing nothing for the first month. You know, like staring at the ceiling and the ceiling stares back.
Myriam
I couldn’t even read. I couldn’t read because I couldn’t follow the story. And I couldn’t handle, and I mean fiction, reading fiction was too hard. And I couldn’t handle the stress.
Myriam
One interesting thing is that when I started reading again, reading fiction. I started by reading stuff, by rereading actually, so I knew what was going to happen. Because otherwise my body could not handle the suspense of this imaginary character within a book. Like oh my god, what is going to happen? I couldn’t. I it would send me into panic attacks.
Myriam
And it was really interesting because I knew what was happening so I was watching it happen to my body. So the panic did not reach the conscious mind. The conscious mind would reply “Oh, this is interesting.” But my body like froze, my heart started racing because I I mean because there was a bit of suspense in a novel.
Jo VanEvery
I’m gonna say that your long practice of meditation was part of what helped you keep the mind body separate in that instance and that not everybody would necessarily experience it that way. But yeah, so so nothing, nothing at all, lying on the sofa bored out of your mind.
Myriam
Yes, nothing at all. Oh, I mean, I was, uh, my, my mind was totally blank. Really, and my body was not there.
Myriam
I have another friend who just underwent burnout, and she slept 17 hours a day for the first month.
Myriam
So that is something that actually surprised me, the sheer physical dimension of it, which was explained to me by my doctors and other people that cared for me, is that, they told me that burnout is physical first. It’s like you runs out of fuel. You’ve been running on fumes for too many, for too long and then the body shuts down, which starts like a domino effect on the mind and the mood. It’s because you, and it actually helped me reframe it. When I first saw my doctor, so my doctor she, she told me in one sentence, something that really helped me, it was like Myriam, you have reached your limits. And boy, those limits were really really far. You know, like…
Jo VanEvery
Yeah, “you are not a weak person. But you have got to the edge.”
Myriam
Yeah, exactly. So that that really happened, I was forget… and see, I still have some after effects. I’m, have just forgot what I wanted to say, which happens like more often now.
Myriam
So the sheer physical dimension, not being able to do anything. At that time, I was, you know, going to the gym three times a week. And I stopped, because I couldn’t physically.
Myriam
And my doctor also told me like, if you want to keep like some kind of physical activity, it’s good. But you can walk for 10 minutes, not more, because you will not be able to come back to your house physically. And I was like, Yeah, really?
Myriam
And she looked at me and say, Wait, we have I have people who have patients who run marathons. I’m like, Okay, this is not my case. Yes, and if there are other, the level of burnout where you are now, and they want to keep a physical activity, I tell them to take a walk around the block, but not every day. And I’m like, Okay, this is what we’re speaking about.
Myriam
And the truth, you know, you walk for 10 minutes, I mean, not hiking, not anything like around the houses.
Jo VanEvery
Amble down the road. Yeah.
Myriam
Okay, but I am not sure I will be able to walk home, because my muscles are just not there anymore. So there’s this and to to add to the physical dimension.
Myriam
I was also warned that I may encounter, one or two years from now, like two or three years after the burnout, eyesight issues that are physical, because it’s a classic for people who have been through burnout, that the muscles that actually hold your eyes are gone too.
Myriam
So you know, all these like, really, as they call physiological processes of burnout was something I was totally unaware of.
Myriam
The way your body is not able to manage cortisol, the stress hormone, sometimes because you’ve been working, you’ve been functioning on a high dose of cortisol for like years, and then suddenly, it doesn’t produce cortisol anymore, or you overreact to cortisol because you had like, it has secreted like one drop of that. Because a tiny, tiny, tiny little event happens, such as, “oh my god, I’m five minutes late”. And you go into full panic because your body is like, “oh my god, cortisol”.
Myriam
How you have like, changes in the structure of your brain for burnout. I was like, Okay, I thought…
Jo VanEvery
Wow. Wow.
Myriam
Even a year after, I’m still quite weak physically. I still crash down. To give you another very concrete example, when I started teaching again, it was two hours of teaching. Er, a course I love, students I love, so no, you know…
Jo VanEvery
Like the book you’ve read before, a bit? Yes.
Myriam
It was a two hour session. After that I went to my bed and lied on my bed alternated with a couch for 36 hours because physically I couldn’t. Just imagine, you know, when you had a real, the flu like the real flu, and just after the flu, when you feel you’re totally empty, that you’re staring at the wall. You don’t have the fever anymore, you’re not like in acute flu. But the day after, when you have no muscles, no nothing, and you’re not a braincell working? That’s it.
Jo VanEvery
Wow. So three months, you’re basically lying on the sofa?
Myriam
Yeah.
Jo VanEvery
And you maybe work yourself up to 10 minutes walk a day. And
Myriam
Not every day, please.
Jo VanEvery
Not every day. I’m wondering if if where you live is a bit like where I live that there is no flat walking, like all the walking involves a hill?
Myriam
No, because the city is flat, flat, flat.
Jo VanEvery
Oh, the city’s flat. Okay.
Myriam 46:14
but the city is totally flat.
Jo VanEvery
Okay, Oh so that’s good. At least where I live, I can’t walk for 10 minutes without a hill. I can’t walk for three minutes without some kind of a hill. My town is a little, you know, steep. Like my hills aren’t as high as yours.
Myriam
Mine are a little…
Jo VanEvery
That’s okay. But so you are. So you’re like, within your three months, you’re mostly just lying, staring at the ceiling and by the end of three months, you’re at the point where you can do 10 minutes walk every couple of days. You can, books you’ve read before, but no surprises in your books, whatever.
But you have to, but you have to go back to work at that point. But you go back, well, no, then you’ve got the summer.
Myriam
Then I’ve got the summer.
Jo VanEvery
Okay, then you effectively had six months. Five?
Myriam
So I went back end of August. Yeah, well, actually, I went a little bit, I went back to my office in June, the way I could, you know, and I had no problems doing that.
Myriam
I had never, I have never lost the joy of writing. I have never lost the joy of caring for students. I never hated my students. I hated my colleagues.
Myriam
And I consciously chose during those three months to keep on caring for my graduate students. I could have done it differently. Most of them are co-supervised by really good people, who said, I’m you know, I’m on deck. And I’m like, no. This bring and this is something I wrote to all the students, like I chose to still be there for you. I may be, it may take longer for me to react, etc, but I’m still there, because working for you brings meaning and joy. Always.
The next phase of recovery: returning to work 00:49:41
Jo VanEvery
So you kind of were officially back at work in that summer. But you were able to choose because it was summer no undergrad teaching you are able to choose what activities you did and to limit that, but you also went officially, you were officially part time coming back weren’t you?
Myriam
No, so I started the, okay because that is also something I did, I used a lot of our still really good welfare system that you can start the halftime only at the beginning of the academic year.
Myriam
You can have a gap of full time between … and it’s not really even … it was even suggested to me though by the university human resources office saying yeah, this is June, just go back to work full time but be careful. Don’t, don’t, you don’t have, we don’t have teaching over the summer. So just do what you want to do and rest and apply for the half time just for the first of September when the academic year starts again.
Myriam
Because we are entitled to one year of half time for health reason with full salary. It was good I spent those three months over the summer.
Jo VanEvery
Yes, no, absolutely. Sounds good. So the summer was really the time of year when you had the most control over your pace and what you were doing and all that kind of thing. It was all more in your control. And you chose that summer, you went back to work, but you basically prioritize the things that were meaningful and brought you joy, which was the writing and the post grad supervision.
Myriam
To be very honest, I kept that during the three months of sick leave.
Jo VanEvery
Did you?
Myriam
I did. [pause] I did not have to. I felt free not to. But I decided to. And I went back to writing at the beginning of June before I was off the sick leave, because it was the time of the the annual writing retreat.
Myriam
That my good friend and partner partner in crime Professor Renaud Le Goix and I are organizing for our graduate students in Haute Savoie. So that’s how I went back to writing, in this sort of superb environment, by the views, by the atmosphere, by the people who were there. Only half time, I would work in a two hours, then rest for two hours, Then work two hours, you know, with a lot of people caring for me, and watching, like don’t overdo it et cetera.
Myriam
And in this, like, really collegial atmosphere. And I went back to writing rather easily. In the sense that when I left, there was a text I was supposed to write, I had the structure, I have the notes, it was it just wasn’t drafted. So I did not have to, you know, think really about what I wanted to say, that was already on paper. And I just took that paper and drafted the text, two hours by two hours at the beginning of June. And that worked.
Jo VanEvery
Right. So by June, you had enough. You had recovered enough cognitive capacity to do that. But that kind of was all you could do. So you were there. You did two hours work. You slept for two hours kind of thing. And yeah.
Myriam
No, I wrote lying down. Because it took me more than six months to be able to sit for more than two hours.
Jo VanEvery
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. No that that that makes lots of sense. Yeah,
Myriam
I bought a couch for my office for September in September. I’m like, I can’t sit in front of my computer for a half day. This is too long. So part of my work I did it lying down, including in my office.
Jo VanEvery
Right. Right. So that was part of the care, right? Like, you’re sort of like not going from like, so the time off was “no, that’s it lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, the ceiling, stares back”. Very, a lot of physical, actual physical fatigue that you need to recover from. And you have a supportive family who made sure you ate and all that kind of thing. And you have supportive colleagues.
Jo VanEvery
But also because you are aware of this, you weren’t the amount you were prioritizing, using your energy for things like writing, even compared to things like sitting up properly, right, like writing lying on the sofa with the computer on your knees, kind of completely supportive sort of thing. So that’s, yeah, that’s a huge, you know, so that okay.
Jo VanEvery
And then September you go halftime, so you’ve been halftime now, since September, which affects how much teaching you’re doing. But of course, you can’t do the teaching lying down. So that first class when you do 2 hours, and then you need to sleep for 36 hours afterwards, I think is a very interesting illustration of the amount of energy required by teaching compared to by writing and part of that is that you’re standing or sitting at the front of the room.
Jo VanEvery
Part of it is that you can’t take regular breaks, that you have to kind of do it for the full two hours. And also there is a lot of cognitive and emotional work that goes into engaging with students, which is real work. I think this is a thing that I remind people of a lot.
Jo VanEvery
It feels like what we do compared to what construction workers do, is not really physically demanding work. You know, like, because we’re not lifting heavy things all day. But the cognitive and emotional work we’re doing is real work and burns calories. It’s you know, it is physically demanding in a in a in a slightly different way. And that two hours really… So how long did it take for you to build up your stamina for teaching?
Myriam
It’s not, well, my physical endurance is not back yet. I don’t think it will be back before a year or two from now. So like three years after burnout, and because I was, I started exercising again, like five minutes, then 10 minutes, then with weights, you know, really, really progressively. And in December and January, I’ve found out that I was on the plateau on the physical side, and even maybe sliding a bit down.
Myriam
So I spoke to my doctor again, who is really watching me very closely. And she suggested I would do physio for building up resistance again. And which is which is really interesting and telling is that when I first went to the physiotherapist, he tested my strength, and my strength is still there, you know, with this dynamometer, or whatever they call it, the strength is still there on the, I haven’t lost strength on the first impulse, the first impulse is fine. The second, oh my god. [Laughter] There’s nothing left.
Myriam
So it’s interesting to to know that, for teaching it it didn’t take me long to recover for teaching. But I was really careful about, on my teaching days, not doing anything else, not especially not doing something before.
Myriam
Typically I was teaching the master students are every Tuesday afternoon, and I was supposed to go to a seminar just before I never did. I’m like, No, I can’t have a seminar, and then half an hour break, and then teaching for two hours, this is just not going to happen.
Myriam
And I also organized my days so that after teaching, I would do nothing, I would start by recovering going back to my office lying down drinking, eating like a nut or something and a date, you know, like, and take time to physically digest what the two hours of teaching.
Jo VanEvery
Right.
Myriam
So I really organized around that. And during the semester, also, because the students are amazing. I build up the stamina, and how should I put it? The joy of teaching built my stamina back. Right, right. I mean,
Jo VanEvery
this whole theme that the joy and meaningfulness of the activity makes a big difference. But you still need to pace yourself in what is quite, you know, quite a serious way, the pacing.
Myriam
Yes, indeed. It still happens.
Jo VanEvery
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so. So you’re still seeing, so there’s the physical. So that’s the thing that this is not just a kind of mental.
Jo VanEvery
This is cognitive exhaustion. It’s physical exhaustion. It’s, there’s a whole set of things about the way that your body processes hormones, especially cortisol.
Jo VanEvery
And that the recovery takes a very long time. And you have had a very supportive. It sounds like your GP has been very supportive. Like your doctor is quite knowledgeable. And also, yeah.
Myriam
Yes. And I mean, my GP has been wonderful. I, she also gave me medication from the beginning, anti-depressant and Xanax. I’m still on antidepressant a year after and Xanax on demand. She’s sent me to therapists specialized in burnout, and I’ve got physio. So I’ve got, you know, quite a team, helping me recover.
Jo VanEvery
Which all of that is covered by your national health care?
Jo VanEvery
So one of the issues for listeners is, you know, if you’re in a country that has this kind of, you know, social health care system, that and you’ve got an understanding doctor and there are people they can refer to and the lists aren’t too long, right? There’s availability because that is an issue, even if it’s going to be free when you get to see them. Sometimes you have to wait a long time to be able to see the therapist or whoever. But you’re able to get all that.
Jo VanEvery
But some other people are looking at, “oh my goodness, like the amount that would cost me to be able to even get the medical and mental health support that I need is…”. So there’s like structural issues on structural issues, but you’ve been, but it’s good, I guess, to have been, you know, to be able to talk to you about this because you had access to that stuff, which means that now, people at least have an idea of oh, if we’ve got access to this, you know, this is what appropriate mental and physical health care support for burnout looks like.
Jo VanEvery
It looks like physiotherapy at a certain point to rebuild the resistance, it looks like mental health medication, and then therapy. It looks like, you know, regular checkups with your family doctor, your primary care physician and, and them having having a sense over time, because you mentioned earlier, she’d made a comment about tendonitis. So was that one of the things like in terms of the physical effects that you were just getting this every year, kind of at the end of the academic year, you were getting physical symptoms.
Jo VanEvery
So that would be another thing for people to look out for, wouldn’t it? Like, do you have a pattern of getting tendonitis or headaches or something at particular points in the year?
Myriam
Exactly. That is really something to watch out. And it was, it was super clear. I mean, she’s, we laugh a lot together, because she’s really good. And she was like, “hmm this is so strange.” Oh, this is me. “So you’re coming to visit me again? The knee or the shoulder? This year it’s June, ooh it’s good.”
Jo VanEvery
It lasted a whole extra month, right?
Myriam
Oh, the year before I had zoned-out? You know, she was like, Oh, this was a bad year, right?
Jo VanEvery
Oh, my. Yes.
Myriam
So yep.
What recovery teaches about signs & prevention 01:03:38
Jo VanEvery
So basically, now you’re just presumably very kind of observant of what your body is doing so that you prevent yourself, you know, so that you can do things but that you’re recovering as you go along.
Jo VanEvery
So one of the things you mentioned, you said, like when you’re even reading fiction, that you get this very physical anxiety response sometimes and that that’s a sign. What other kinds of signs could people look out for that would be, you know, maybe even pre having a full burnout? Like, what are some of the things that people might want to try not to dismiss and use as a trigger to maybe rest more or something?
Myriam
Um, I have, I recognize now that anxiety in the body is really something. Every single time I overdo it, physically, I get anxiety and have a bad night. It’s like clockwork. You know, I’ve had a full day, and then I can get a full day off. But I’ll have a full day because whatever, there was a seminar or conference or something.
Myriam
So it’s a bit too much for me. And at the end of the day, my shoulders tense up, and my heart races a little bit. I don’t even have, you know, intrusive thoughts or going round and round. I don’t even have that it’s really now located in my body. And I know I’m going to have a sleepless night. So this is when I take half a Xanax. I’m like, Okay, this was it. And it helps. So there is this there, then.
Jo VanEvery
Well at least then, so presumably, the half a Xanax means you don’t have the sleepless night because presumably the sleepless night, like that’s the thing about anxiety, right? It then causes you to have a sleepless night which the sleeplessness then makes it worse and you get into a cycle so you’ve got the medication in order to but now you spot it early. You take the medication and it…
Myriam
And you break the cycle by a good night’s sleep. There is this there is the fatigability. I can’t multitask anymore. That is out of question.
Myriam
So that is me also, a symptom that people might want to watch for. Like you used to be able to multitask and then suddenly you can’t. That’s obviously cognitive fatigue. Right. So that is really, really important.
Myriam
Something else that I just realized yesterday afternoon, we had a department board meeting, this is the last committee I’m sitting on. And we had a presentation from someone from another department, speaking to us about institutional restructuring and strategies, using a lot of three letter acronyms, and managerial speak, and there was a lot of innovative collaborative kind of thing.
Myriam
And again, I sense my body reacting super strongly to that. And it was like, fight or flight. Either I, what I wanted to scream at him, I mean, he’s a good guy, I have nothing against him. But I really wanted to like, this is bullshit, you’re all making us suffering, on purpose. This is, you know, mistreatment, etc, etc. I found that I wanted to do that. And I wanted to also flee the room and go elsewhere. I was like, Ooh, I’m still there.
Myriam
And so I consciously decided to freeze, or, you know, have the third option of the fight or flight thing. I mean, I am disconnecting my brain and not listening to you, guy. I went on Twitter, and social networks to have something else to think about and be absorbed mentally by. So there is, you know, this strong reactions in your body that a year after, and listening to that, you know, really.
Jo VanEvery
Yeah, yeah. Well, and that’s, you know, I think dissociation serves a purpose, right? Like, sometimes it’s, that’s what you need to do to make yourself safe. My nephew is autistic. And I remember my sister saying years ago, you know, that he would, you know, he’d really get really upset if they were like, in the grocery store. And she at one point just said to him, you know, when he was like a teenager, she’s like, “You know how to zone out, just zone out.” You don’t have to, like, pay attention, this stuff is distressing you put your headphones in, zone out, you don’t have to engage with all this around you that’s distressing, you, we need to be in here because we need to buy food, kind of thing. Right?
Jo VanEvery
So I think that was what what you said, it’s like, oh, wait a second, this is, you know, I know how to zone out, I’m going to zone out. Right. And, and I think, you know, that can be really seen as, like, treated as a very negative habit.
Jo VanEvery
But I think any of those kinds of habits. It’s not necessarily that they are in and of themselves a bad thing to do. It’s you need to know when you’re doing them and why. And sometimes, they’re a protective thing to do, as you just described, and some time, right? Because that is that is absolutely way less disruptive to that meeting, than you either screaming at some person or running out of the room, right? Like
Myriam
I do regret not screaming right now. Because that’s…
Jo VanEvery
Yeah, maybe you wanted to disrupt the meeting, but you chose, okay, I am feeling this I need to do something to protect myself. Right. And this, you know, zoning out is is a is a way to do that that’s not disruptive to everybody else, and then I can recover later, but I’m not going to make it any worse, right?
Jo VanEvery
Because it’s one thing to be reading a novel, you know, for, for relaxation and feel yourself having a panic attack and go okay, I should stop reading this novel. This isn’t working for me. And it’s another thing to be you know, in a meeting or you know, some sort of a public place where you also don’t want to attract a lot of you know, that could be more work right? Like if you if you ran out of the room somebody would then be worried about you and and then you’d have to explain yourself and like it’s just easier to go on social media, occupy your brain otherwise or you know, play you know, play a little you know, Candy Crush or Tetris or something on your phone that just, right, like just occupies your mind and lets you, you know, sort of appear to be there but not be there.
Jo VanEvery
But again, it’s part of that, you know, that also links back to what you said before about sometimes you’re in a committee and you realize that there is nothing, right, you don’t have to stay engaged with this guy, there is no, right, there is no purpose to that. Other than, you know, politesse. So, you know, you don’t you don’t have to,
Myriam
We can, you know, get rid of politesse at some point.
Jo VanEvery
That doesn’t, yeah, exactly. It’s like, you know, this is, you know, respectful behavior, but is it actually serving? Like, is it worth hurting myself to appear polite? No.
Jo VanEvery
And and you can do that in a way that isn’t, you know, disruptive to the meeting. So that’s what you did. That’s, that’s really interesting.
The limits of individual efforts to prevent burnout 01:11:49
Jo VanEvery
So I think I think this has been, oh, my gosh, I have learned so much from talking to you today. I sort of feel like you, one of the things is that, you know, that is interesting is that you had been aware of this for 15 years before it actually happened, because you had had some kind of a collapse 15 years previously, that you had already started doing a lot of the things that anyone can do, personally, to try to, you know, be able to function and do the parts of the work that you enjoy and find meaningful in a context that is incredibly trying and becoming increasingly so.
Jo VanEvery
You were making sure you got lots of sleep. You were making sure that you ate well. You’re going to the gym regularly, and you know, remaining physically fit. You were you were meditating. You were doing, you know, all of that kind of thing, right?
Jo VanEvery
And those things, I think, you know, they are important, they are good things to do. They will not necessarily solve the problem.
Jo VanEvery
And it’s absolutely right to be angry, if that is what your employer thinks is the solution to the problem, because the employer has other options that are actually structural. But on a personal “How do I kind of survive this?” I think those things, and you were doing those things.
Jo VanEvery
You were consciously, in addition to that, avoiding the cognitive dissonance of doing work that felt trivial, futile or just very counter to your own values in this system, which is I think, something we don’t talk as much about but we should.
Jo VanEvery
I mean, I talk about it a lot. But I don’t see it out there as much about the meaningfulness, you know, and don’t, you don’t have to let people weaponize the meaningfulness against you to work harder, you just need to be like, “no, the work I’m going to do is going to focus on that”.
Jo VanEvery
And yet, you were still, “this is what happened”. And knowing those physical signs, and knowing what is involved in recovering, I think, you know, that it is, it is a big thing, it’s not a thing to be taken lightly. It’s a real thing. It involves all the systems of your body.
Jo VanEvery
And I think what I’ve also heard from you is that you do, you know, partly because of the privilege you have, as a full professor in a system where you have employment security, and where there is a good welfare system that enables you to go back half time for full pay for a year after you’ve had a long term sickness, where you can take three months of sick leave without a serious financial penalty, where you do have a health care, you know, a national health care system that is still you know, it’s not working as well as it used to, but it still works a bit. Right? Still working better than some people’s!
Jo VanEvery
Privileges, right, means that you have been able to look after yourself when it did come, and you have been able to ease back into the work and you have been able to still do the parts of this job that you do find incredibly meaningful and, and that even bring you joy: the relationships with your students, the writing work that you do, and and you’ve been able to continue to do that.
Jo VanEvery
And part of that is also about the solidarity you have with some of your colleagues: the colleague you run the writing workshop with, a writing retreat for your students with and some of your other colleagues. And that’s an incredible privilege too. I mean, it’s what we hope for everyone but not everyone has that.
Jo VanEvery
But it’s worth I think, building that, right? Like, the relationships are important, they’re not a fancy add on, right? Like having built those relationships over the last 15 or so years in your position means that they’re there when you need them in the same way you’ve been there for other people. Right?
Myriam
Yes. No, absolutely. And this is why I’m, it’s also because I’m at the center of so many privileges. That from the beginning, I went public with my burnout. I don’t risk anything by making it public. By making the reasons for it public, I mean, what can people do to me? I’m tenured? Okay. That’s it.
Jo VanEvery
Yeah, you have the support, you have a supportive partner, you have supportive colleagues. Yeah. And I’m so glad that you know, because I think people.
Jo VanEvery
So that’s, that’s the thing, we’re not saying, we’re not saying that everybody is going to be able to do what Myriam did in these circumstances.
Jo VanEvery
What we’re saying is that by hearing Myriam’s experience, you can identify what the risks are, you can identify what some of the things are. And if you have to be more cagey about the decisions you’re making, if you have to work a little bit harder to find the support that you need, then it’s absolutely worth doing that.
Jo VanEvery
And that, but that if you are also in this kind of privileged position, and you’re not, you know, that part of what the decision you made to protect your colleagues, the decision you took in solidarity with one of your other, similarly privileged colleagues to protect your junior colleagues and your students from some of the worst effects of the institutional and structural problems.
Jo VanEvery
That that’s also, you know, I think that’s the thing where that activity is partly about making sure that you’re giving a little bit of space to the people who don’t have the same privileges to be able to look after themselves, and to not take on the extra stuff and burnout, to be able to say to a colleague, you know, I’ve noticed these things, and you might want to rest, is there a way I can help? Right?
Jo VanEvery
There may not always be but being able to do that and trying in some small way to make it right. And when you are in a position of privilege to say this particular committee that that chair can stay empty, don’t give that to somebody else to waste their time with. We’re all overworked. Why are you doing this?
Jo VanEvery
Like, I think we all I think all the privileges to you know, the people with tenure need to do those things more, instead of just being like, Oh, well, you know, we don’t have a choice. Like, sometimes we do, some of us do have choices, and we have to acknowledge the choices we have and really use them wisely.
The most important question to ask yourself 01:19:21
Myriam
That is absolutely true. I totally agree with that. And one of the questions that really rose for me, during the pandemic, and then I keep asking, is the so what?
Myriam
And it’s a it’s a genuine question. If I, I used to do that. I mean, it’s about grading, we used to grade like this. Why do we do that? What if I do that? So what?
Myriam
And are there… the first question is, will there be consequences? Because I find that for us, tenured faculty, a lot of time, we have internalized that there will be consequences, while there will be no consequences, in fact.
Myriam
So really asking oneself generally, will there be consequences? Will there be positive consequences? And will there be negative consequences or not?
Myriam
So what? It’s super, it’s really precious at a personal level and at a value level. So what?
Myriam
I mean, I’m making my burnout public. So what? So what?
Jo VanEvery
I think, yeah, that but the potential consequences of making your burnout public is, you know, some other person notices, oh, wait a second. I should take X, Y and Z more seriously than I have been. And maybe they don’t get to the full collapsing.
Jo VanEvery
I mean, you know, you’re talking about 15 years ago, you were you were in a master’s defense. So what were you you were sitting in a chair and you collapsed, right, your body just gave up? And, you know, like, nobody, we shouldn’t come to the point where we’re collapsing in public that, you know, everybody would like to avoid that, if possible. It’s not fun.
Jo VanEvery
So I think, I think that’s an it’s hard, and it involves taking some really difficult decisions. But I think that question about what are the consequences? And always thinking, you know, like, what are the positive consequences?
Jo VanEvery
And it’s of both actions, right? If I do this, like, why am I doing this? Like, what does it achieve? What are the consequences of not doing it? But also, like, if I don’t do it? Is there some other positive benefit?
Jo VanEvery
And, you know, if students are important as they are to you, um, you know, I think you really need to ask, you know, does this actually help students? And, you know, if that’s a value that’s important to you, you know, does it actually help them? Or is this you know, just a thing that we, you know, we have kind of taken for granted helps them.
Jo VanEvery
I’m reminded, I have it written on a blackboard in my office. But I heard Tricia Matthew, who was an editor of a book about Black women’s experience of the tenure process in the US, The Hidden Truths of Tenure. And when that book came out, she was interviewed by Tressie McMillan-Cottom and Roxanne Gay about that book. And I remember listening to the podcast interview. And one of the things she says she asks a lot, which I think is the same thing is, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Jo VanEvery
Similar kind of thing. It’s like, “by sitting on this committee, what do you think you’re doing?” And part of that was, you know, because, you know, as much as you have talked about, you know, we have this institutional requirement about gender parity, right? There are a lot of situations where Black women feel a double thing about we need, you know, there’s, so we need representation. And then they end up being on all these, you know, doing all these service things and really struggling to, you know, do their own work, right, teaching, research, whatever.
Jo VanEvery
And that all of that, and I think that’s the context in which she raised that question. But I think it’s very similar to yours. Right? And that’s the kind of thing like, what do you think you’re doing? If you’re sitting on this committee? What is it achieving? Like, what do you think it’s achieving? And then what is it really achieving? Right?
Jo VanEvery
And I think that’s a really good question. And it’s not a question meant to say, just say no to all of it. It’s a question meant to be taken seriously. Right? What do you think you’re doing? Is that true, right?
Jo VanEvery
And then what are the consequences? What are the consequences of doing this? Right? What are the consequences for other things I could be doing right, balancing that? What are the consequences of not doing it, right, for me, for others, whatever.
Jo VanEvery
And for you, you’ve sometimes made decisions that, you know, this is more important than this other thing and so I’m going to say no to this, not because it’s not worthwhile, but because the consequence is that I can’t, I wouldn’t have time to do this other thing. And I’m going to do this other thing, because it’s more important to me. So I think, yeah, I’d love to be in a system where we didn’t have to know this much about burnout.
Myriam
No, absolutely. And just the fact that we have to say no, or think about saying no, is the absolute proof of institutional malfunction. We shouldn’t be in that position.
Circling back to the original incident 01:24:46
Myriam
But yeah, and I’ll just add a small story about my collapse, 15 years ago. A couple of days after the collapse, I went to see my parents. My dad was obviously still alive and my dad was a medical doctor. He in public hospitals, so yes, it does run in the family. And he saw me getting out of the car. And apparently, I was like, grey, you know, of exhaustion. And it was already like three days after the collapse.
Myriam
And he looked at me and said to me, “My daughter, what happens? What is happening to you?” So yeah, “I’m really tired. I collapsed three days ago during a master’s defence.” And he looked at me and he said, “You, two weeks ago have started to take vitamins.” I’m like, Oh, shit. Yes. And he said “yes, this is called doping, my beloved daughter. Two weeks ago, you you felt that your body was at its limit. And you took chemical stuff to make it go further. You were in the red. It took you into the black zone. That’s doping.” Like, okay, yes, daddy.
Myriam
And I never took vitamins again, because I eat healthy. So I don’t need, I don’t have any other health issues. So I don’t need extra stuff. I’m like, the moment you think about taking vitamins or magnesium or something, why? It’s because you’re already really tired. And what you’re doing is doping. So that is something also that might be useful to other people.
Jo VanEvery
Yeah. Well, and even if you continue to do that, if you do it with awareness, and you also do the other things, right, like, you’re like, Okay, right now, I need the supplements, right? But I also need, right, and so it’s like, if you’re doing that instead of rather than also, that’s a difference, too, right.
Myriam
That’s true. And it’s very personal, I know that my mind body generally warns me beforehand, but warns me when the, the level of burnout or exhaustion is really quite high. So I don’t have a lot of margin. It’s not like, Okay, I don’t have a wide, you know, Danger Zone margin. I’m like, Oh, I go up, up and then collapse.
Jo VanEvery
Well, and I think, you know, we live in a society that really, it makes it, you know, we get, we get kind of trained not to listen to our bodies, right, we get trained very young. We look at, you know, schools have all these attendance requirements, you know, people are busy, you know, your parents, you know, it’s just like, you have to, you know, can you keep going because it’s, you know, the consequence of not being…? Right? It’s hard to take that rest, it is really hard. And so we get used to ignoring those signs. And so sometimes, you know, maybe our bodies tell us stuff before that, and we’ve been ignoring, you know, we, we don’t hear that anymore. It’s like, we’re kind of deaf to that now. And it’s the
Myriam
There is the other option, which I encountered just before the burnout, when your body tells you something, and you’re like, shut up, body, I know.
Jo VanEvery
Exactly, I can’t do anything about it right now. Right.
Jo VanEvery
But I think I think just being able to, you know, just even if people are not feeling like they’re in any kind of extreme state right now, though, I don’t know anybody right now that isn’t feeling something, right? But just, you know, allowing yourself to even if you can’t do anything about it, just make sure you’re still listening, and you know, what’s going on.
Small steps & being prepared 01:28:48
Jo VanEvery
And thinking like, what are the small steps? Right, like, maybe we can’t fix the whole thing, but, you know, can we reduce some of the activity? Can we, you know, is the is this? Is this thing we’re doing, you know, helping us? Or is it? Is it making things worse?
Jo VanEvery
Do we know that certain things help? And we aren’t doing those? And could we start and what do we need to get rid of, in order to make time for that?
Jo VanEvery
You know, I suggest things like when in the materials with the planning classes in the studio, I suggest things like, you know, instead of thinking, oh, I need to find an hour to go to the gym every day, you know, if you have to walk across campus to go to teach, like, actually make that an activity, right, allow yourself time so that you’re not rushing, maybe start building in, oh, I can go a kind of longer way round. So at least I’m getting, you know, some fresh air and a walk, right for 10 minutes to get to this class and to get back instead of just, you know, resenting the fact that you have to displace your body to go and do this activity. You know, and then, you know, so you’re resenting that and then you’re like, but I don’t have time to go to the gym. It’s like well, let’s just add in like, you know, maybe it’s not enough but it’s something right?
Jo VanEvery
So start with what you can do and then and then see what happens. But yeah, listening and then being like okay, because yes, I imagine at by the point you’re going to the doctor and say yeah, it’s okay, you can sign me off for three months, things have got really bad.
Myriam
Yeah, but I also have a list of things I can get rid of in case of an emergency listed.
Jo VanEvery
Oh, nice.
Myriam
Because I know that when I need to make time for rest, all that stuff is happening or I’ve been abducted by aliens, as you say. I will not have the cognitive capacity or time or energy to think about what I can cast away.
Jo VanEvery
Yeah.
Myriam
So I have a list.
- First, get rid of this
- If this is not enough, the next thing to get rid of is this one.
- It’s this one.
So it’s already triaged.
Jo VanEvery
Nice. Yeah. Yeah. So when you’re feeling cognitively able you use some of that energy to decide, when things get bad, what could I not be doing?
Myriam
Yeah. I had that before the burnout.
Jo VanEvery
Yeah, and you’ve still got it. And you might need this for the rest of your career, because like you say, the recovery time is years, rather than you know, that three months is just the initial acute phase and getting you to a point where you can, and now you’re in this sort of secondary phase of being part time, but you are always now going to have to be more careful, because you are not probably fully back to 100%.
Myriam
I don’t know if I will ever be. I’m fine with that. I mean, I mean, my that I know, I have applied for a sabbatical for next year, because I know that in September, I will be in no physical shape to teach full time.
Myriam
If I don’t get the term sabbatical. I have no idea what will happen. And I have no idea if I will be able to stay in academia for the now 10 years that I have before retirement. It used to be eight years, but our government…
Jo VanEvery
Right.
Jo VanEvery
Neoliberalism don’t we love it?
Myriam
Yes, but I don’t know. And I’m just, you know, I’m also taking it one day at a time with my priorities, you know, first priorities first. And I’m also fine with that. And I know, I will not be able to take new responsibilities before several years. Because I’m physically unable because I can’t handle stress, or unplanned stuff, which is what you have to deal with, when you’re responsible of something. I just can’t.
Myriam
And it’s like, really, really very physical. Not that if it were cognitive or mental, it would be different. But like, I’m like, No, you know, I can’t I can’t do it.
Jo VanEvery
I’m going to collapse.
Myriam
Yes, I’m going to collapse.
Myriam
yeah. And I’m also unwilling. Other responsibilities, and I don’t. And I’m both unwilling and unable, in no particular order, right.
Jo VanEvery
Yeah. Yeah. But I think you know, at your stage of career, you know, you have already done a lot, right, like, you are, right? And so you are very clear about your priorities. And those priorities are not completely counter to what the institution needs from you, right, like many of your priorities are things that they need and want you to do. Right. So you’re just saying, I’m not taking on this leadership stuff? Because I can’t, you know, I don’t want to and I can’t right?
Myriam
I did it. I’ve done my share. more, probably a bit more than that.
Jo VanEvery
Yes, exactly. Other people would always like to define your share as bigger than what you think your share is. But you know, that’s, that’s the situation.
Jo VanEvery
Okay, I think we should probably wrap this up. It’s been fantastic to talk to you, I hope there are, I will have to figure out how to, you know make this legible, because it’s quite long, but I think it will be very helpful for a lot of people to just really understand what it looks like, and what it feels like, and what recovering is going to entail.
Jo VanEvery
And I hope that also helps people just really, you know, do what they can to affect the structural stuff, you know, because the structural situation for everybody right now, in the specifics, it looks quite different sometimes. But, you know, in the generalities that we are all under very similar pressures. And it’s
Myriam
I totally agree, and we’re even pitted against one another. And, you know, are the structural reform, neoliberal reform that we have been subjected to, where like, “We need to make it more like the US/UK system. Because they’re better”. You’re better.
Jo VanEvery
But the US, I mean, the UK is in the process of completely destroying the system.
Myriam
Of course, the reforms import the worst part of other systems not the best one, like you know, university with some financial resources. That is also part of the USA and UK model for a lot of university and bizarrely this hasn’t been imported. Wow.
Jo VanEvery
Let’s see if we can do these things with no money, Oh, okay.
Myriam
And really, this is a situation where we need a lot of international talk, I think, because it’s a very internationalist talk, because the facing the same beast in every place, but that takes on different shapes in those places. The answer to that in the workers movement has been internationalism. And I do think we need a lot of that in global academia today. Oh, my God what a conclusion. [Laughter]
Jo VanEvery
Here’s where we come out. Yes. Indeed, okay. I’m gonna let you go. It was lovely to talk to you will thank you so much.
Myriam
You’re very welcome. And yeah, and I’m really happy to do that. Truly.
[end.]
If you recognise the symptoms in this post in your own experience, please don’t ignore them. Help is available. You are not alone.
Burnout – Emily & Amelia Nagoski – available in various formats including a workbook & video!
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This interview was conducted on 20 March 2024, over Zoom. The transcript has been edited for easier reading and the audio edited to reflect the text edits more smoothly. This content was sent to newsletter subscribers on 12 July 2024 before republishing here. Added to the Spotlight On: Burnout in August 2024.
