Strategies in Tackling Burnout

Maintaining Personal Well-Being: The Legendary “Work-Life Balance”

“Work-life balance” is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. It can be so easy to hear “work-life balance” and brush it off—it may even feel like a myth. Work-life balance may be incredibly challenging sometimes, especially due to external pressures, and we recognize that the accessibility of a “work-life balance” is connected to privilege. However, we hope that work-life balance does not always need to feel like an urban legend, and that the strategies below may help in making it feel a little more attainable through notions like “culture of compassion” and some other helpful incremental changes.

Disentangling Work and Worth

In many work environments, especially academia, it may feel like your value is somehow tied to the work you are able to do. So many people feel this way, even when that mindset often leads to feelings of frustration and disappointment. It is important to many and a core value of academia to have a sense of purpose or value from your work; research and teaching as passions for many. However, maintaining a healthy relationship with your work requires letting go of letting your work define your own value as an individual.

Despite what our world of graphs, charts, and predictions would lead us to believe, our lives are not exactly linear, and neither are our professional journeys. It’s important to recognize your career is a journey, and like all journeys, has its ups, downs, and middle ground; your vitality in your career can go well beyond the times where you experience burnout, failure, or exhaustion (Pope-Ruark 2022, 18). Productivity is not everything; there are so many other facets of ourselves that we sometimes need a low to learn to appreciate, like our creativity, resilience, and compassion. In GWSS classes, students learn about how economic data collection omits the non-monetary value of products and services; we learn how you need to see not only the measurable value of something to truly understand its impact and significance. This same basic concept applies to how we tend to measure our own success. So much of who we are is immeasurable, and yet these immeasurable things are incredibly significant and impactful. Your measurable productivity as a professor is not analogous to meaningful learning for your students, and even less so is it analogous to your worth and value.

Cultures of Compassion

Preventing burnout and supporting those experiencing it requires change beyond the individual level. Since burnout is closely related to culture in higher education (Pedersen & Minnote 2016, Pope-Ruark 2022, 26), there is work to be done in undoing harmful cultural expectations. An essential part of this process is creating a culture of compassion, where you can extend compassion to both colleagues and, importantly, yourself.

One important piece of creating compassionate culture is to recognize privilege, particularly that which is granted to tenured or tenure-track faculty. The exhaustion that comes with burnout is sometimes treated as something to be proud of, like proof of your dedication to the job and ability to persevere. Exhaustion is often experienced differently for faculty not in a position of privilege (Pope-Ruark 2022, 110); this makes it all the more important to extend compassion to colleagues rather than viewing experiences of burnout as a question of who can tough it out and who can’t.

Supportive Circles for Faculty

Burnout is not just the result of personal challenges; burnout can be connected to a larger breakdown in the relationship between instructor and institution (Clagett, 1980, 1). One way to combat this that has been explored both within academia and within other professional fields to creating purposeful peer groups as a form of support for faculty. This is a strategy where department chairs and leaders can have a tremendous effect (Pedersen & Minnote 2016); encouraging open communication between faculty and open discussions of needs and expectations can combat the stressors that lead to burnout and help lift faculty up through mutual support when experiencing burnout symptoms.

Simply acknowledging and supporting employee groups, department leaders can help faculty to feel heard and supported rather than experiencing feelings of neglect (de Villiers Sheeper et al, 2023). Through facilitating and supporting peer networks and groups, departments can take important steps to reforming cultural aspects of academia that can lead to feelings of burnout. Being a leader in creating supportive networks also does important work of reducing feelings of isolation that many faculty experience. This type of organizing and leadership is just one way that tenured faculty or department leadership can utilize their positions to create better environments for all staff, and by extension, experiences of students.

Setting Boundaries

As Brené Brown reminds us, “Boundaries are hard when you want to be liked” (2017, 115). Faculty, particularly women and faculty of color, are often vulnerable to this pressure (Pope-Ruark 2022, 175). Faculty are supposed to say yes to everything and supposed to want to do everything. Resisting this pressure is incredibly hard; always giving in to it is unsustainable. However, you deserve to be able to say no to things that others ask of you.

With so much pressure to perform, it can be incredibly difficult to check in with ourselves. However, practicing self-care is an important piece to doing your best work and just generally feeling good. Furthermore, setting boundaries doesn’t necessarily mean that you are short changing your students, or that they’ll become upset and leave you a bad review. As students, what is important to us is that there is clear communication regarding the boundaries that are set. The table below includes gentle reminders of some ways you could set boundaries in your professional life, including questions and suggestions for implementation as well as how to communicate those boundaries to students.