Dealing With Burnout

The poet T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month.” He wasn’t a professor, so he couldn’t have known how very accurate those words are for those of us who work in higher education, but he certainly hit that particular nail on the head: every year, April is when I start questioning whether or not I need to make a career change. And those questions are a sign that I’m in the throes of burnout.

Most of us feel burned out at one time or another, so you probably know the symptoms:

• Feeling tired in a way that a good night’s sleep doesn’t address (if your stress level allows you to sleep at all).
• Feeling a pervasive sense of negativity about everything in your life, not just your job. (If you’re feeling burned out on life in general, and if those feelings have lasted more than two weeks, please take a look at this post on Understanding Depression.)
• Feeling like you have no control over the things that stress you out.
• Feeling like you can’t focus or can’t remember basic things, like the PIN for your voice mail system.
• Feeling like you’re working more and getting less done–in other words, a decrease in your productivity.

The worst part of burnout, for me, is the feeling that I’m wasting my time at my job: my students aren’t engaged, I’ve lost all energy to get them engaged, and there’s just no point in anything any of us are doing. And yet the semester has two more weeks, so we keep coming back to class every day.

While feelings of burnout are most common in the workplace, and that’s the context in which we usually discuss them, it’s also possible to feel burned out on marriage, motherhood, and other roles we play outside of work. Taking care of a seriously ill or elderly loved one–another situation beyond our control–very often leads to similar feelings.

This might be the most important reason for figuring out how to deal with burnout: sometimes, those feelings (and our responses to them) can impact the people around us, those we care about the most. Burnout is rarely as simple as how any one of us is feeling in a particular moment.

So how do you fight the burnout fire?

Shrink the problem. Start by making a list of all the things that are stressing you out. Which of those things are under your control? Which of those items is easily addressed? Deal with those items first, then prioritize the others in terms of how much stress they’re causing you. As for those things that are beyond your control–bouncing back from a stressful situation requires time and effort. For now, the important thing is to see yourself scratching things off that list.

Conserve your energy. Burnout is often a response to feeling overextended, so think about what you can eliminate from your schedule or delegate to others. If you can’t delegate work responsibilities, maybe this means reducing the number of after-work commitments on your calendar.  Perhaps it means asking for help from your spouse, partner, friends, neighbors, even your kids. If you’re anything like me, you hate asking for help–but doing everything yourself is virtually a guaranteed path to burnout.

Learn something new. Sometimes, burnout is a symptom of boredom; it’s just another way of feeling like you’re stuck in a rut. If you’re pretty certain your feelings are related to workplace stress, then learning a new skill–one that might better position you for a promotion or a career change–might be the best approach to addressing them. If your burnout isn’t work-related, then taking up a new hobby (or delving back into one you haven’t made time for lately) might be the answer. It’s good for your brain and replaces negative stress with eustress.

Disengage. If you normally take work home with you, stop. If you spend your evenings pretending to watch TV but actually thinking about your jam-packed calendar for tomorrow, find another way to occupy your mind–preferably a way that makes it impossible to think about whatever is causing you stress. Take a walk, plug in your headphones, and sing along. Pick out a complicated recipe and bake something for the first time. Whatever you do, be sure it requires your full attention. Even if you can’t get rid of your stressors, at the very least you need a break from them.

I’m fortunate that my worst periods of burnout are usually followed by a summer break from teaching–so, even though I’m writing and reading and preparing for the fall semester all summer long, I’m not trapped in the loop of futility that the last few weeks of the academic year appear to be. Summer is like an enforced period of disengagement (and a welcome one, to be sure.) But if the day comes that I feel similarly dispirited when September rolls around, I’ll know it’s time to do some serious thinking about new possibilities.