Peer reviews are really important to me (See this previous post for some reasons why). In many academic niches they really make the (academic) world go round and so it is important that we do them, do them well (enough), and do them in a timely manner. (It's also important we do them without being an asshole, but I'm going to tell myself all of my blog readers already know how to do that, because you are nice, kind, and supportive people).
This doesn't mean that I necessarily enjoy doing peer reviews or that I don't find them to be a pain in the ass. Mostly for reasons related to me consistently forgetting to put time in my calendar to do them (but also sometimes because I get sick of reading the same terrible manuscript that I've rejected over and over again).
Recently I sat down at a cafe to review a manuscript that had made its way to me a second time because of the first R&R decision from the editor. The first thing I decided to do was read through the other reviews and the response letter from the authors to gauge how well they had responded to my comments and the comments of the other three reviewers.
There was my review, about a page long. There were the reviews of Reviewer 2, same length. Reviewer 3 wrote about 2 pages of comments, which I thought was a bit long but they seemed reasonable and justified.
Then I got to Reviewer 4.
Reviewer 4's entire review was three bullet points long.
(and no, it wasn't "this paper is so amazing you should accept it")
This epitomizes for me how I'm feeling about work these days. I'm the one-page professor, who feels guilty for not doing a "better job." I'm surrounded with three-bullet point professors who probably don't feel guilty at all (in my mind). And in my crankiness I see nothing but benefits from being the three bullet point professor: More time for research and grant writing. Less stress. Not taking home work to do late at night.
Note: All of those benefits might not even be true, I know this.
I'm so tired out these days. Work is requiring a lot of effort. So Be The Three Bullet Point Professor (at least a bit) is, for now, my new motto for productivity.
Showing posts with label burnout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label burnout. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
wtf is this "burnout" thing i keep referring to?
I've been talking a lot about burnout lately, on the blog, on twitter, and in my personal relationships offline. It has occurred to me lately that "burnout" is one of those words that has been adopted by a lot of people, which may or may not be used correctly. "Stress" and "depression" (and maybe "anxiety") are similar words that get adopted outside of the worlds they are originally defined by and used somewhat easily to describe lots of various states. Just like sadness isn't clinical depression, or feeling anxious isn't panic, stress isn't necessarily burnout.
I have been working on a post about burnout and starting to attempt to "dig out of my burnout hole" when it occurred to me I am probably contributing to this problem by not really taking the time to talk about what burnout is. Given that I'm a psychologist with both a personal and professional interest in burnout, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a time out from talking about me, and talk about what this frame of mind looks like. In clinical psychology, the phrases burnout, vicarious traumatization, and compassion fatigue can be (mistakenly) used interchangeably. Francoise Mathieu, who is a well known in the area of compassion fatigue for practitioners, has a great recent article here that defines all of them. (This will download a PDF)
(Disclaimer: Because I'm a blogger, and because I'm lazy and refuse to allow the blog to become too much like work, I don't have cited resources here. If anyone wants some, I'm happy to pass them along if you email me or tweet me).
Burnout is not stress, but a state of being that can come from prolonged stress. While some of the consequences of stress and burnout can look the same (e.g., insomnia, increased use of drugs and alcohol, relationship problems, low productivity, irritability, fatigue, concentration problems - incidentally many of these are also symptoms of depression, to further complicate the picture), there are some features of burnout that really set it apart from stress. The big ones that personally come to mind are these:
1. Depersonalization - people who are burnt out can experience a sense of depersonalization and detachment. You might feel disconnected from your life, or as if you're watching your life happen without you, or that you aren't very present within your own life. For me this often manifests as a feeling of not really having been home for days or weeks on end, despite the fact that I have been. Or I sometimes will have a sense of missing seasons, or losing track of what time of the year it is (A few weeks ago I briefly couldn't remember if it was the Fall or Spring semester). I'm not sure that diagnostically the experiences I put in this category would hold up, but for me they highlight a general sense of not being present.
2. Cynicism - individuals who are burnt out are also deeply cynical. These are the colleagues who seem angry at everything, who are very bitter, and who might display a sense of humor that seems questionable. Burnout and resulting cynicism is pretty common in academia - especially in situations where we feel powerless against a job structure or system that seems dysfunctional or we have little control over our work or work environment. Because my personality errs on the side of cynicism (although that's not the way I'd describe it internally, I know it can look this way externally), I don't have a good personal radar for when I'm becoming overly cynical. The only checks I have are these: First, when I'm angry all of the time about the same things and/or the same things are getting too much "air time" in my conversations with ECB, for example. Second, when I realize people are trying to problem solve something that for me just felt like an observation. That is, the situation seems completely unsolvable to me, but not to others. Of all the things that happen to me when I'm burnt out, this is the one I hate the most -because it can potentially damage my interpersonal relationships or it can give a really, really negative (and incorrect) impression on people who don't know me very well.
3. Lack of Empathy or Ability to Connect with Others - for practitioners in the health or mental health care fields, this is particularly of concern. When people are burnt out they lose their empathy for other people. Clearly if you're responsible for the care of others, this isn't a great setup. For some people I know this is an early warning sign of impending burnout. For me, it's a late sign. Because I tend to pick up on people's moods and emotions easily - and feel other people's emotions easily - this is a very, very, very bad sign for me. When someone is crying in my office and I'm irritated, or when someone wants to tell me a story and I want to punch them in the face because I have "better things to do," it's a sign things are pretty bad. In the past six months I've made some new interpersonal connections that make me feel happy - and I'm holding on to that reaction tightly, because it makes me feel like I can bounce back if I give my mental health some more attention.
4. Feeling Emotionally Numb - feeling emotionally numb means not having much reaction to anything, positive or negative. It's feeling monochromatic in your emotions, rather than having a healthy range of them. And it feels different than an appropriate level of acceptance. For example, sometimes if a bad thing happens (some type of stressor) we might not get upset and that's healthy. However, sometimes we might not get upset because it's burnout. Feeling emotionally numb isn't something I recognize very easily, but rather something my friends will reflect back to me - for example, ECB will often tell me I don't seem appropriately angry over something that has happened. Or I might describe something with a bizarre amount of positive affect, as if I'm merely amused, when in fact I should be really upset.
I chose my burnout, and I chose to own the consequences, when I chose to prioritize getting tenure over the rest of my life. At this moment, I'm glad I made that choice - attempting to be amazing at too many things (a tenure track professor, a homeowner, a daughter, a friend, a potential date, a human being outside of psychology) was causing me a paralyzing amount of anxiety. However, it hasn't been a good choice (for me) for a number of reasons:
1. I'm not sure how I can turn it back - I have been promising myself I will slow down since the start of May. In case you're not looking at the calendar, that was almost 2 months ago now. Every time I try to slow down and stop working, I feel anxiety. Allow me to state the obvious: This isn't good. I'm at the point where I am seriously considering imposing a vacation upon myself so I can get out of this mindset. That's kind of fucked up. At the larger level, I worry that being burnt out for so long has fundamentally changed parts of my personality, my work as a psychologist, and my relationship with work. I feel a bit of fear that I won't be able to "return" to the person I was before.
2. Burnt out people make questionable ethical choices - this is a particular problem when you're providing care for other people. For example in a study of clinical psychologists, Pope and colleagues found that almost 60% of psychologists reported working with clients when they were likely too distressed to be helpful. As a professor, I am responsible for other people and I do have to make ethical choices. But burnout clouds our judgment and can make decisions that would otherwise look incredibly problematic to us seem not that wrong. Particularly when we need to take careful time to make decisions but we feel pressured to make them quickly and get back to our own things, when we are burnt out and have a severe sense of time urgency.
3. Burnout impairs relationships - I don't even have the energy to explain this. I hope it seems self-explanatory why being depersonalized, cynical, numb, and having no empathy isn't really the best way to connect with others. Maybe it's really for the best I haven't been dating on purpose.
4. Burnout makes me look nothing like what I am "really" like - a few weeks ago I tweeted part of a conversation with a friend where I said that now that I've achieved my tenure requirements I was looking forward to becoming a person I actually like again. This wasn't necessarily a joke. I have become (in part) a person I don't really like that much. I can't see past my own stress, I can't filter that stress with others. I am exhausted all of the time. I can't concentrate - and the worst thing is I am fucking up all over the place because I can't remember things. I used to be an organized person who never forgot anything. Do you know how unsettling it is to have no recollection whatsoever of an experience you had or something you said to someone or a task you said you'd do? I can't shake how awful that feels. I'm an emotionally sensitive person who is usually there to support my friends - it's like it's been turned off. I hope anyone I've met in the past 2 years can take this as some sort of disclaimer - I'm so much more awesome than I seemed, I promise. If you can hang in there, it will pay off. (Unless you like cynical bitch Psyc Girl and then we probably won't be friends long term because I'd like to retire her).
5. I've learned that I can hit rock bottom... and then keep going - I've learned a really dysfunctional lesson in the past 2 years, in particular. I'm like a car that runs out of gas... and then keeps going. I have accomplished major lines on my CV in a state of burnout and exhaustion that I never would have thought possible. In fact, the past 2 years I've been exhausted (and physically ill for most of them), but they have probably been my most productive 2 years yet. This is not a good lesson to learn. I have no radar for when I need to slow down, no ability to touch base with my body to know when I'm past my limit - apparently I don't have a limit when it comes to work. Instead the limit is personal and interpersonal. I'm grateful for the things I've learned and accomplished, but in a lot of ways I would prefer to know where my professional limit lies. Now I need to learn it from scratch.
I have been working on a post about burnout and starting to attempt to "dig out of my burnout hole" when it occurred to me I am probably contributing to this problem by not really taking the time to talk about what burnout is. Given that I'm a psychologist with both a personal and professional interest in burnout, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a time out from talking about me, and talk about what this frame of mind looks like. In clinical psychology, the phrases burnout, vicarious traumatization, and compassion fatigue can be (mistakenly) used interchangeably. Francoise Mathieu, who is a well known in the area of compassion fatigue for practitioners, has a great recent article here that defines all of them. (This will download a PDF)
(Disclaimer: Because I'm a blogger, and because I'm lazy and refuse to allow the blog to become too much like work, I don't have cited resources here. If anyone wants some, I'm happy to pass them along if you email me or tweet me).
Burnout is not stress, but a state of being that can come from prolonged stress. While some of the consequences of stress and burnout can look the same (e.g., insomnia, increased use of drugs and alcohol, relationship problems, low productivity, irritability, fatigue, concentration problems - incidentally many of these are also symptoms of depression, to further complicate the picture), there are some features of burnout that really set it apart from stress. The big ones that personally come to mind are these:
1. Depersonalization - people who are burnt out can experience a sense of depersonalization and detachment. You might feel disconnected from your life, or as if you're watching your life happen without you, or that you aren't very present within your own life. For me this often manifests as a feeling of not really having been home for days or weeks on end, despite the fact that I have been. Or I sometimes will have a sense of missing seasons, or losing track of what time of the year it is (A few weeks ago I briefly couldn't remember if it was the Fall or Spring semester). I'm not sure that diagnostically the experiences I put in this category would hold up, but for me they highlight a general sense of not being present.
2. Cynicism - individuals who are burnt out are also deeply cynical. These are the colleagues who seem angry at everything, who are very bitter, and who might display a sense of humor that seems questionable. Burnout and resulting cynicism is pretty common in academia - especially in situations where we feel powerless against a job structure or system that seems dysfunctional or we have little control over our work or work environment. Because my personality errs on the side of cynicism (although that's not the way I'd describe it internally, I know it can look this way externally), I don't have a good personal radar for when I'm becoming overly cynical. The only checks I have are these: First, when I'm angry all of the time about the same things and/or the same things are getting too much "air time" in my conversations with ECB, for example. Second, when I realize people are trying to problem solve something that for me just felt like an observation. That is, the situation seems completely unsolvable to me, but not to others. Of all the things that happen to me when I'm burnt out, this is the one I hate the most -because it can potentially damage my interpersonal relationships or it can give a really, really negative (and incorrect) impression on people who don't know me very well.
3. Lack of Empathy or Ability to Connect with Others - for practitioners in the health or mental health care fields, this is particularly of concern. When people are burnt out they lose their empathy for other people. Clearly if you're responsible for the care of others, this isn't a great setup. For some people I know this is an early warning sign of impending burnout. For me, it's a late sign. Because I tend to pick up on people's moods and emotions easily - and feel other people's emotions easily - this is a very, very, very bad sign for me. When someone is crying in my office and I'm irritated, or when someone wants to tell me a story and I want to punch them in the face because I have "better things to do," it's a sign things are pretty bad. In the past six months I've made some new interpersonal connections that make me feel happy - and I'm holding on to that reaction tightly, because it makes me feel like I can bounce back if I give my mental health some more attention.
4. Feeling Emotionally Numb - feeling emotionally numb means not having much reaction to anything, positive or negative. It's feeling monochromatic in your emotions, rather than having a healthy range of them. And it feels different than an appropriate level of acceptance. For example, sometimes if a bad thing happens (some type of stressor) we might not get upset and that's healthy. However, sometimes we might not get upset because it's burnout. Feeling emotionally numb isn't something I recognize very easily, but rather something my friends will reflect back to me - for example, ECB will often tell me I don't seem appropriately angry over something that has happened. Or I might describe something with a bizarre amount of positive affect, as if I'm merely amused, when in fact I should be really upset.
I chose my burnout, and I chose to own the consequences, when I chose to prioritize getting tenure over the rest of my life. At this moment, I'm glad I made that choice - attempting to be amazing at too many things (a tenure track professor, a homeowner, a daughter, a friend, a potential date, a human being outside of psychology) was causing me a paralyzing amount of anxiety. However, it hasn't been a good choice (for me) for a number of reasons:
1. I'm not sure how I can turn it back - I have been promising myself I will slow down since the start of May. In case you're not looking at the calendar, that was almost 2 months ago now. Every time I try to slow down and stop working, I feel anxiety. Allow me to state the obvious: This isn't good. I'm at the point where I am seriously considering imposing a vacation upon myself so I can get out of this mindset. That's kind of fucked up. At the larger level, I worry that being burnt out for so long has fundamentally changed parts of my personality, my work as a psychologist, and my relationship with work. I feel a bit of fear that I won't be able to "return" to the person I was before.
2. Burnt out people make questionable ethical choices - this is a particular problem when you're providing care for other people. For example in a study of clinical psychologists, Pope and colleagues found that almost 60% of psychologists reported working with clients when they were likely too distressed to be helpful. As a professor, I am responsible for other people and I do have to make ethical choices. But burnout clouds our judgment and can make decisions that would otherwise look incredibly problematic to us seem not that wrong. Particularly when we need to take careful time to make decisions but we feel pressured to make them quickly and get back to our own things, when we are burnt out and have a severe sense of time urgency.
3. Burnout impairs relationships - I don't even have the energy to explain this. I hope it seems self-explanatory why being depersonalized, cynical, numb, and having no empathy isn't really the best way to connect with others. Maybe it's really for the best I haven't been dating on purpose.
4. Burnout makes me look nothing like what I am "really" like - a few weeks ago I tweeted part of a conversation with a friend where I said that now that I've achieved my tenure requirements I was looking forward to becoming a person I actually like again. This wasn't necessarily a joke. I have become (in part) a person I don't really like that much. I can't see past my own stress, I can't filter that stress with others. I am exhausted all of the time. I can't concentrate - and the worst thing is I am fucking up all over the place because I can't remember things. I used to be an organized person who never forgot anything. Do you know how unsettling it is to have no recollection whatsoever of an experience you had or something you said to someone or a task you said you'd do? I can't shake how awful that feels. I'm an emotionally sensitive person who is usually there to support my friends - it's like it's been turned off. I hope anyone I've met in the past 2 years can take this as some sort of disclaimer - I'm so much more awesome than I seemed, I promise. If you can hang in there, it will pay off. (Unless you like cynical bitch Psyc Girl and then we probably won't be friends long term because I'd like to retire her).
5. I've learned that I can hit rock bottom... and then keep going - I've learned a really dysfunctional lesson in the past 2 years, in particular. I'm like a car that runs out of gas... and then keeps going. I have accomplished major lines on my CV in a state of burnout and exhaustion that I never would have thought possible. In fact, the past 2 years I've been exhausted (and physically ill for most of them), but they have probably been my most productive 2 years yet. This is not a good lesson to learn. I have no radar for when I need to slow down, no ability to touch base with my body to know when I'm past my limit - apparently I don't have a limit when it comes to work. Instead the limit is personal and interpersonal. I'm grateful for the things I've learned and accomplished, but in a lot of ways I would prefer to know where my professional limit lies. Now I need to learn it from scratch.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
apparently I'm so burnt out even my burnout is burnt out
A few weeks ago one of my friends called me after something bad happened. I'm not going to name the friend, even with the pseudonym I usually use or tell you what happened. But what happened was seen as both of us as a possible symptom of long-standing burnout.
I don't remember our whole conversation (it was early in the morning and I was already in my office, lame) but I do remember distinctly saying to my friend that we are not to be trusted to regulate ourselves and work. We can't trust ourselves to accurately gauge how much work we can really handle, nor can we trust ourselves to tell when we're burnt out. We vastly overestimate the former and sadly never see the latter until it's far too late. Both of us have a tendency, I think, to be cruising along actually thinking we're not that stressed until something almost downright hilarious in its awfulness happens. It is my working hypothesis that grad school interacted with our pre-existing vulnerabilities to completely burn out our ability to notice and manage stress.
This week I went to an award ceremony. Every time someone was called up to receive their award, the sponsor (for example a colleague) spoke for a few minutes about the accomplishments of that person. It was actually an inspiring, albeit intimidating, experience. There were so many people being recognized for doing so many amazing things. This definitely resulted in some imposter syndrome on my part, but that's not what this post is about.
Everyone was described as not only a fantastic researcher, colleague, team-member, and overall person, but as a dedicated and passionate instructor. And hearing everyone's tales of instructor amazing-ness gave me a bit of an out of body experience.
I realized, listening to them, that I used to be that instructor. I was passionate about teaching. I spent time on my courses consistently. I went above and beyond with my students. I was interested in the pedagogy of teaching and I was up to date on much of it. I used principles of learning in my courses (okay I still do that one).
I'm not that instructor anymore. I doubt I'm even that mentor anymore. Is that all my fault? No. I've been dealt some shitty hands here at PCU. And I know I can't be perfect across the board and I have actively tried to prioritize research over teaching, knowing that it is research that will get me tenure. Not teaching. Even worse however, is the fact that I hardly remember being that instructor. It's almost like thinking of a completely different individual. (And in a lot of ways, I was a different individual, that many years ago).
I could write about all the things that have led to this, but I'm frankly too exhausted. This odd experience, of listening to the descriptions of the instructor I'd like to be but can't, allowed me to connect with how incredibly burnt out I am. I am burnt out in my bones, in my soul. My brain doesn't work very clearly. I'm tired all of the time. I'm cynical, I'm bitter, I am angry. Some of it is accurate and some of it is not. I'd like a vacation but I can barely get myself to stop working 7 days a week out of stress and fear of losing my job.
So not only am I burnt out (if you look it up, you'll see a lot of those things describe it perfectly), I am... apathetic about my burnout. I didn't care. It was a weird disconnected "Huh. Look how burnt out I am. Interesting" experience - with no emotion whatsoever. I am so burnt out that I'm even burnt out of my burnout.
Am I completely flat? No. I'm finding lots of reward and happiness in some places. But I'm clearly not who I used to be when I left graduate school. And one of my biggest concerns has been related to the theme of whether or not the sacrifices I've made for my career have permanently made me a different person or if they are temporary - this is something I talk about constantly, and worry about constantly. I don't want to be a burnt out professor.
You might wonder - do my colleagues recognize this kind of burnout in Assistant Professors? Yes. It's openly known this happens. Do my senior colleagues have recommendations for this kind of burnout? Yes - one's first sabbatical. In Year 7. That's right... you're fully expected to hang in there for seven years of this and then expected to somehow recover on your sabbatical (while also accomplishing enough to justify your sabbatical and get ready for your next level of promotion). 7 years of this, then 1 year to recover. Take a step back and think about that, if you can - that's just a little bit fucked up.
I don't remember our whole conversation (it was early in the morning and I was already in my office, lame) but I do remember distinctly saying to my friend that we are not to be trusted to regulate ourselves and work. We can't trust ourselves to accurately gauge how much work we can really handle, nor can we trust ourselves to tell when we're burnt out. We vastly overestimate the former and sadly never see the latter until it's far too late. Both of us have a tendency, I think, to be cruising along actually thinking we're not that stressed until something almost downright hilarious in its awfulness happens. It is my working hypothesis that grad school interacted with our pre-existing vulnerabilities to completely burn out our ability to notice and manage stress.
This week I went to an award ceremony. Every time someone was called up to receive their award, the sponsor (for example a colleague) spoke for a few minutes about the accomplishments of that person. It was actually an inspiring, albeit intimidating, experience. There were so many people being recognized for doing so many amazing things. This definitely resulted in some imposter syndrome on my part, but that's not what this post is about.
Everyone was described as not only a fantastic researcher, colleague, team-member, and overall person, but as a dedicated and passionate instructor. And hearing everyone's tales of instructor amazing-ness gave me a bit of an out of body experience.
I realized, listening to them, that I used to be that instructor. I was passionate about teaching. I spent time on my courses consistently. I went above and beyond with my students. I was interested in the pedagogy of teaching and I was up to date on much of it. I used principles of learning in my courses (okay I still do that one).
I'm not that instructor anymore. I doubt I'm even that mentor anymore. Is that all my fault? No. I've been dealt some shitty hands here at PCU. And I know I can't be perfect across the board and I have actively tried to prioritize research over teaching, knowing that it is research that will get me tenure. Not teaching. Even worse however, is the fact that I hardly remember being that instructor. It's almost like thinking of a completely different individual. (And in a lot of ways, I was a different individual, that many years ago).
I could write about all the things that have led to this, but I'm frankly too exhausted. This odd experience, of listening to the descriptions of the instructor I'd like to be but can't, allowed me to connect with how incredibly burnt out I am. I am burnt out in my bones, in my soul. My brain doesn't work very clearly. I'm tired all of the time. I'm cynical, I'm bitter, I am angry. Some of it is accurate and some of it is not. I'd like a vacation but I can barely get myself to stop working 7 days a week out of stress and fear of losing my job.
So not only am I burnt out (if you look it up, you'll see a lot of those things describe it perfectly), I am... apathetic about my burnout. I didn't care. It was a weird disconnected "Huh. Look how burnt out I am. Interesting" experience - with no emotion whatsoever. I am so burnt out that I'm even burnt out of my burnout.
Am I completely flat? No. I'm finding lots of reward and happiness in some places. But I'm clearly not who I used to be when I left graduate school. And one of my biggest concerns has been related to the theme of whether or not the sacrifices I've made for my career have permanently made me a different person or if they are temporary - this is something I talk about constantly, and worry about constantly. I don't want to be a burnt out professor.
You might wonder - do my colleagues recognize this kind of burnout in Assistant Professors? Yes. It's openly known this happens. Do my senior colleagues have recommendations for this kind of burnout? Yes - one's first sabbatical. In Year 7. That's right... you're fully expected to hang in there for seven years of this and then expected to somehow recover on your sabbatical (while also accomplishing enough to justify your sabbatical and get ready for your next level of promotion). 7 years of this, then 1 year to recover. Take a step back and think about that, if you can - that's just a little bit fucked up.
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