Tag: stress
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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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Workplace trauma and the ‘second violence’
In this post I am going to explore workplace trauma, and the effect that not having our stories heard can have. Trauma is a common word these days, in part due to the efforts of online psychoeducators to destigmatise normal mental health challenges from public and private shame. But the overuse of trauma as a…
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Understanding Imposter Syndrome
We all know it, we’ve all felt it. Academics talk flippantly of imposter syndrome, and it seems to be a generally accepted aspect of working in the sector. This phenomenon is also true of the cultural and creative sectors, with whom academics have more in common than they might generally accept. Any time we put…
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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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The Problem with Perfectionism
Kicking off a new series, I am going to explore some of the key challenges that clients often bring to coaching: topics like procrastination, imposter syndrome, dealing with rejection, and experiencing anger at work. I’m starting with perfectionism, and in particular its impacts on our ability to produce creative work, because this is something I…
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How to Grieve
In my last few blog posts I have explored the ways in which grief is often present but unacknowledged in our working life. I’ve mentioned the unexamined costs of pursuing an academic career, as well as a too common lack of compassion for other life losses such as bereavement, and I have also discussed the…
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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…
Beatha Coaching 