Category: Burnout
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And then, life happens…
When I was in academia, March was the hardest month. Judging from the conversations I have been having with clients recently, that is still true. There is something about the uphill slog to Easter, through the bulk of the Spring teaching, with increasingly stressed dissertation students, committees starting to plan for the next year (and…
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Finding a definition of workplace trauma
This is an extended version of a short piece I recently posted on Substack. If you would like to connect with my writing more frequently Substack is the place to do it. You can subscribe free and receive my shorter pieces into your inbox every weekday. I had an interesting conversation with a fellow coach recently. She…
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Burnout prevention is an act of resistance
Recently I had the pleasure of working with a small group of academics, all at different stages in their career journey, through the Summer Coaching Programme. Over three months we explored how burnout happens, what recovery and repair look like, and in our final session last week, how we can resource ourselves against burning out…
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The Stress Effect & Creative Burnout
In this post I am going to address one of the commonest issues that present in my coaching of academics, creative burnout. I have explored physiological burnout and how it differentiates from stress in this post, so if you are not familiar with burnout it might be worth revisiting that content. However, creative burnout is…
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Five boring ways to protect your body from burnout
In my previous post, here, I introduced polyvagal theory and the role that our autonomic nervous system plays in stress and burnout. Burnout and stress have profound physical, emotional, and mental effects because our nervous system is constantly sending information up to the brain to affect the signals being sent to the rest of the…
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Breathe and relax
Our breath is one of the most powerful tools we have to manage our stress response and calm our nervous system. In times of high stress we are less likely to prioritise the activities that really help us maintain our wellbeing, such as being outside and eating healthily, so I wanted to film a short…
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This is your brain on burnout
In my last two posts I introduced burnout as a collection of common symptoms rooted in nervous system exhaustion, a result of enduring high stress levels for too long. The conditions of chronic unrelieved stress and mild to moderate burnout are endemic in academia because of fundamental systemic problems. But there is also a lack…
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Stress, chronic stress, or burnout?
In my first post I introduced burnout as a collection of symptoms related to sustained nervous system arousal, and highlighted reasons why burnout may be particularly common in academia. In this post, I am going to introduce the stress-burnout spectrum, with some indicators for positioning yourself on that scale, and suggest appropriate interventions for each…
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Am I tired, or is it burnout?
By far the most common topic I have been asked about has been burnout: what is it? how do we mitigate against it? how can we recover? So over the next few posts I am going to do a series on burnout, including a deeper dive into what is happening in our bodies when we…
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