Hi my Fair Playing friends,

Last week I had a massive head cold. It was really crappy, and seemed to hold onto my body for dddaaaaayyyyss…

I’m well aware that having a bad head cold is not the end of the world. Especially in the face of so much upheaval out there (hello!).

But as I sat on the couch bored out of my tree for the fourth day in a row, I reflected on a specific moment in my life.

It was probably 2018 or 2019, when I was doing my postdoc. I remember waking up one Friday morning feeling a bit off.

I gave myself a shake, did some yoga, and figured I just needed to brush off the cobwebs and get on with my day.

But as the day progressed, I continued to feel unfocused, tired, groggy. I tried deep breathing, I tried stretches, I caffeinated-up. Nothing seemed to snap me out of this fog, and I did the best I could to plug away at whatever I was working on.

Over the weekend I had some rest and hung out with my kids. And by Monday (when I was feeling more myself) I realized that on Friday I had had a bad cold, but I didn’t even realize it.

I didn’t even realize it, people.

I was so disconnected from my own body and so focused on productivity as a way to try to save myself from employment precarity and imminent financial instability, that I ignored my own symptoms and had no idea what was going on in myself.

Looking back, it’s interesting that I used embodied work - the deep breathing, the stretches - to try to help me push through.

These things didn’t help me, of course, because I wasn’t engaging in them to actually help myself. Had I genuinely engaged in deep breathing, I would have really felt myself, and become attuned to what was happening in my body. I would have known that I needed to rest.

And yes, eventually I did burn out, which I’m sure surprises no one.

We live in a world that glorifies over-work, has created such rickety, precarious systems that dangle people over a ledge with the promise of stability if they just work harder and prove themselves a little bit more. (This is a cross-industry problem, of course).

We live in a world where people have to work while sick, or, like my story above, train themselves to become disconnected from their own bodies, from themselves, out of fear and stress that their world will fall apart if they don’t continue.

And to be clear, sometimes it WILL fall apart.

Is it possible that we can collectively create a world where we have the leigh way to pay attention to ourselves as individuals and what we need to thrive, instead of pushing ourselves to the point of collapse?

I wrote more about this in my blog post “Burnout is not an individual problem: it’s cultural”.

As another adjacently-related note, this post just came out on Jon Malesic’s Substack Burnout Culture. He writes about AI and higher education. Might be worth a gander if you are living and working in that world.

Have you got any burnout stories, my friends?

Julia

Julia Gray, PhD

​Website | Instagram | LinkedIn​

• award-winning writer, researcher, teacher
• mentored hundreds of students & clients
• playwright, theatre creator
• chocolate devotee, Mum of 2, ex-bun-head

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