From Burnout To Balance

How to get from burnout to balance? Three weeks into the new year the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, 42, announced that she will vacate the office.  She held that post for the past five-and-a-half years.

From Burnout to Balance – The Begining

 

Ardern made history when in 2017 she became the youngest female to lead a government anywhere in the world at 37 years old. The years she led the country proved that in spite of her relatively young age, she has what it takes to become a world class leader.

Ardern navigated New Zealand through the uncharted territory of the Covid 19 pandemic. The subsequent recession, mosque shootings in Christchurch, and a volcanic eruption in White Island.

The BBC says that she is admired around the world as a model of what democratic leaders should aspire to be. Canada’s Justin Trudeau said that her contribution to the world was “immeasurable.” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese referred to her as a woman of strength, intellect and empathy (Turnbull 2023).

In short, she made the job of Prime Minister in crisis times seem like a cake walk. Ardern’s sudden quitting announcement at the beginning of 2023, on the grounds that she no longer has “enough in the tank” to keep going therefore shocked the world.

It does not seem possible that someone who has proven so capable at managing some of the most demanding responsibilities could not have also regulated herself well enough to stay at a job she was clearly excellent at doing.

How could anyone be good at governing others but be so bad at self-maintenance that they mentally and physically wear themselves to a frazzled end?

Stress

It is a build-up of chronic stress that leads to the phenomenon known as ‘burnout.’ While no one is immune from burnout, according to California-based psychotherapist, Barrie Sueskind (2023). “Women are conditioned to accommodate other people” and therefore tend to have higher incidents of burnout.

It is however, not an intractable problem. In daily life, it can be avoided by pre-planning time better, being selective about saying yes, and self-care. Outside of general overwhelm, one of the most common times that burnout is set off is in the attempt to balance the pursuit of a masters or doctorate degree with a work or professional life.

In the academic whelm, I teach the skills to move from burnout to balance as a strategy with three components: a buddy system, boundaries and better behaviors.

How To Recover from Burnout

While burnout is not a medical condition, prolonged or repeated feelings of mental and physical exhaustion have fueled the concept, “that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity” (www.mayoclinic.org).

It’s a haunting sense of having no more to put into the job, studying, family life and personal care. Work, as much as academic deadlines or domestic pressures can trigger the feeling. Often pressure in one area generates a domino effect causing a person to feel like when it rains, it pours.

After even one solid downpour, flooding and water damage ensue, and are accompanied by loss, confusion, displacement and despair. While life’s downpours are out of our control, they can be anticipated and prepared for, and mitigated.

People who are constantly trying to balance both a job/professional life with student requirements seem especially at risk. As the balancing act between these two primary areas of everyday life is a long journey.

Another way of viewing burnout is as an imbalance of emphasis in daily life. It happens when a person has “high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and low levels of personal accomplishment” (Fox 2022).

Emotional exhaustion is rooted in fear that the ability to perform is or has diminished or is unsustainable against a past track record. It is an internal stress that sucks creative energy to think differently or to problem solve around the situation that is hindering accomplishment.

Depersonalization is an attempt at a coping strategy. It is however, ineffective as it involves dehumanizing interactions and experiences. It is not only presently unstainable, it is detrimental to both long-term physical and mental health.

Burnout Signs

A person encounters diminished levels of personal accomplishment when incompetence is self-determined to be present. That is to say, when a person doubts their skills and abilities to achieve success, an internal, chronic level of fear dominates their thinking and subsequently, their ability to take action.

According to Fox (2022), when these three factors (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced sense of personal accomplishment) are present, an individual is burnt out. It is likely that regardless of the trigger situation, be it prompted by work or academic deadlines, it is only a matter of time before other areas of performance will also be negatively affected.

Planning to circumvent burnout with a strategy of balance therefore begins with enlisting support or as I call it, creating a buddy system. In daily life this could be friends and family who help with responsibilities.

These are people who will lend a hand, an ear and a shoulder when demands begin to feel overwhelming. In an academic arena, this is someone who is a writing or an accountability partner. My own writing partner for example, has helped me keep focused and inspired over several years of writing projects.

She lives more than 3,000 miles away from me in Denver, Colorado and her research interests are totally dissimilar to mine. We have gone years without seeing each other yet still, the necessity of our relationship keeps us connected.

We account to each other on a near daily basis, for our academic outputs. Having to state our goals and report on it, including failure to meet an objective, helps each of us to achieve our long-term individual writing goal—while remaining sane, grounded and generally, in balance with the rest of each of our lives.

Three Factors That Can Prevent Burnout

The buddy system allows us to vent our academic frustrations to someone who understands because they too are in academia. The specificity of this buddy system also facilitates each one of us to offer wonderful, meaningful solutions.

The differences in our daily conditions is accidental but one of those accidentals that is pure serendipity. We are often able to see the other’s problems and events from perspectives that bring a fresh take on seemingly intractable challenges.

The second aspect of counteracting academic burnout with balance is by creating boundaries. From experience, these are simple in theory but hard to enact in reality. Drawing personal boundaries among activities that are absolutely critical, important and optional often takes time to figure out.

The key to effective operationalization of this tactic is a heightened sense of awareness about what activities of your life belong in which category. This act of self-auditing will allow an infusion of clarity about where time is going and therefore an opportunity to decide what activities to say yes and no to.

In short order this leads to a re-prioritization of what is meaningful and a falling-away of the less important that drains energy and sucks time.

The final factor in my three prong burnout assault plan is better behaviors. Over the years of constantly observing and assessing what I do, when and how, I have come to understand that I am most academically productive in the very early hours of the morning, before my household stirs, before I speak to anyone, and before my mind begins to become preoccupied with the tasks of the day.

Burnout vs Balance

Honoring this behavior is incredibly difficult. It entails shutting down the night before in a time that will facilitate sleep at an hour that will provide sufficient mental and physical rest. When considering all other duties on a daily basis, a reasonable shut down time is a Herculean ask.

There are more days that I short change my sleep than I make good on it for my writing. In spite of the imperfection of habit however, I still wake up the following morning and do a little bit rather than do nothing on days of poor sleep.

Engaging in better behaviors is a never-ending work in progress. It is a task that is refreshed on a 24 hour loop. I start from zero each new day by remembering the larger goal as an academic is to produce well-researched content. If you are a post-graduate student, it is to produce a dissertation or thesis and the goal has to be at the forefront of mind every time the loop begins again.

These three tactics in my burnout to balance strategy comes from more than a decade of research, practice and experiment. Each tactic has a wide variety of perspectives, angles from which they can be approached with many avenues of individualization.

Balance

The brilliance of retooling time using these tactics is that once they are employed in the service of academic productivity, they are always available to the user henceforth.

The tactics become customizable for warding off burnout while in pursuit of professional goals, fitness goals, business and entrepreneurship desires, domestic and family oriented aims—in short, the balance of any aspects of life in which there is a high risk of giving it all up for the sake of personal survival.

Jacinda Ardern still has yet to teach the world many more lessons in democratic governance as well as self-regulation—I remain an avid fan and await her next balancing act.

*****

References

Fox, Daniel J. 2022. “Do You Have a Burnout-Prone Personality?” Accessed 23 January 2023.             https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-you-have-burnout-prone-personality-wealthnessonlinkedin?trk=pulse-article_more-articles_related-content-card.

Mayo Clinic. n.d. “Job Burn Out: How to Spot it and Take Action.” Accessed 23 January 2023.             https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642

Sueskind, Barrie. 18 January 2023.”How to Recover from Burnout (Without Pausing Your Whole  Life).” Accessed 23 January 2023. https://www.theskimm.com/wellness/how-to-recover-from-burnout

Turnbull, Tiffanie. 2023. “Jacinda Ardern: New Zealand PM Quits Citing Burnout.” Accessed 23    January 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64327224.

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