Author: Rebecca Pope-Ruark
I spend a lot of my time teaching faculty and academic leaders about burnout, which the World Health Organization (2019) defines as “a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” It has three characteristics: exhaustion, depersonalization or cynicism toward those you work with, and real or perceived reduction in professional efficacy. My interest is academic in some ways, and deeply personal in others. I experienced a period of significant burnout as a tenure track faculty, which I’ve written about here, and it has become my purpose to help others in higher education understand burnout as a culture problem not a personal problem, one that we must address together even as we heal individually. In this post, I’d like to talk about a significant lever for managing burnout: rest and recovery time.
In my previous post, I introduced the five values associated with Scrum, an Agile project management approach. The five values—commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect—guide the work of Scrum teams in industry as they collaborate to build better products. These five values may also align with many faculty’s values: faculty are committed to their disciplines and focused on their research and teaching, use their courage to take risks in the lab and classroom, are open to new ideas and processes, and respect the goals, values, and missions of their institutions.
Many who embody these values and join the ranks of faculty do so from a sense of passion – passion for their discipline, for creating knowledge, for working with students and training the next generation of leaders. But as burnout researcher Kandi Wiens (2024) reports, “When you love your work and consider it a calling, or if you’re exceptionally purpose-driven and committed, your job will demand a lot of you…Without sufficient periods to rest and recharge, the risk is high for exhaustion, depersonalization, and down the line, lack of efficacy, as you become overwhelmed and depleted” (153). And long-term burnout scholars Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter (2022) suggest that “a heavy workload is more exhausting when someone does not have the capacity or opportunity to recover and bounce back” (15).
So, what does rest and recovery look like? Basic but often ignored elements of self-care matter: getting enough sleep, eating well, engaging in physical activity that you enjoy. Physical activity, especially, is important and one of the best ways to end a stress cycle and clear out stress hormones. And think about things like turning off your computer or phone well before bedtime to help you to get more sleep and sleep better.
Alex Soonjung-Kim Pang (2016) in the book Rest draws on the work of German sociologist Sabine Sonnentag who found four factors to successful recovery time: relaxation, control to decide how you spend your time, mastery experiences that are engrossing and challenging, and mental detachment from work (166-167). Engaging in hobbies or fun pastimes is one way to meet these factors, especially activities that use your brain or body in different ways from your job. Team sports like soccer and tennis come to mind as well as individual activities like knitting, pottery throwing, horseback riding, or building remote controlled cars, boats, or airplanes, for example. Volunteering for causes you care about can also be recovery time; spending time at an animal shelter, canvasing for voting rights, or volunteering at your local food bank all help you focus on something different than your work and build up an identity not solely defined by work, another important aspect of mitigating burnout.
Join us for a deep dive into active rest and recovery as a way to mitigate burnout in my next NCFDD workshop in November.