Tag: Burnout
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Grief in the Academic Process
Welcome back. In the first of a new series for 2023 I am going to explore grief, and how it might affect the academic journey. I realise this topic may sound out of synch with popular New Year culture, when everything around us is about goal setting and fresh starts (and on that subject, for…
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Understanding Procrastination…and finding compassion
Procrastination is something that we all struggle with, but in the creative life it can feel and become profoundly disabling. For academics, the discourse around procrastination is typically quite unhealthy – you are ‘lazy’, or ‘not doing well enough’, or just ‘not cut out for academia’. These kinds of comments have the unfortunate effect of…
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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…
Beatha Coaching 