MORIAH PETTWAY: So the term burnout, I feel like it’s used a lot, but what does that actually mean?
NICK JENKINS: Burnout oftentimes is when we experience a prolonged period of stress that has worn ourselves down so that we have Less energy, to complete the task that we’re looking to do and meet our goals.
PETTWAY: So what would you say is the best way to have sort of a sustainable academic career where you can still engage with the things that you want to engage with without sort of burning out
JENKINS: I think that the biggest thing, I’m going to use this, analogy, Going to college is a marathon, not a sprint. And I think that especially in the quarter system, we kind of run these very like prolonged sprints where we kind of go, go, go, go, go, and then we crash.
When you think about, and you talk about marathon runners, and when we think about the most successful people, they’re able to set a pace that feels sustainable for a long period of time. And when we think about that here, and I know that all of us are here to study and to grow, and those are very important pieces from an academic perspective, and then a career perspective, but it’s recognizing that there’s also all these other areas of our life that are important. So one of the best things that helps with burnout is actually work-life, work-life balance and being able to have the things that not only, cause I mean, there’s things that drain us and there’s things that rejuvenate us.Thinking about what those other activities are that rejuvenate us to allow ourselves to succeed.
PETTWAY: How can we sort of discover those things?
JENKINS:I think that one of the big pieces I see, let’s say here at Northwestern, Is that even for some of the activities like the clubs and organizations, there’s high expectations or like perfectionism comes in of like I have to be the best, or I have to like, I have these clubs that I have to go, you know, go through a recruitment process for, or I can be accepted and or not, and that’s like the piece of even like learning. Learning within its own right does not have to be a draining activity. Work within its own, own right doesn’t have to be a draining activity. It’s the stress of the of it that makes it impactful.So sometimes it’s like, are there activities that we can do that we don’t feel that pressure. I think that those are the times that we had the most impact and we’re just doing things for the, the joy of doing it.
PETTWAY: So you mentioned, you know, a job doesn’t even have to be draining or like school doesn’t have to be draining. So a lot of students are, you know, getting internships for the summer or like me as a senior and now going to like a full-time job, what would you recommended for not burning out?
JENKINS: I’m gonna go tell like a little bit personal of my own life. I think that. I actually really appreciated when I went from undergrad, before I went to grad school, I actually had just a full-time job. And first I was really worried about like what is it gonna be like to work 8 hours a day, but the thing is that, that I was able to take a mental shift because here’s the thing, when you’re a student, you’re always a student. When you’re taking classes, you’re a student. Sometimes the good thing about having a job is, I’m just working from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Once 5:00 p.m. hits, I can shut it down, and I give myself permission to go live my life, and then I can be like, now it’s time with my friends or my family, or I can rest and relax and nap, and I don’t have to worry about that. Setting boundaries. It’s such an important task. So if the job doesn’t have clear boundaries, it’s how do I set those boundaries for myself, and that’s, I think that how we find ourselves to succeed. I also encourage when I’m working with clients, or students here to think about how they can set boundaries for themselves and give themselves that permission of when am I in student mode of myself and when do I just get to be me mode that is completely separate and I don’t have to be thinking about school.
PETTWAY: Yeah, that was exactly my last question is sort of that guilt of saying no, like how do you overcome that and how do you like actually set boundaries?
JENKINS: Saying no, even though like technically it is a very simple thing to do. The act of it is very challenging, and I think that you almost have to say that like, seeing, saying no as a superpower, and that is something that we build, of what is it like to, and, and even just like, I’m gonna, this is gonna sound very hulky, but I’ll even say, sometimes practice in the mirror, figure out a way that you can say no in a way that feels good for you, It’s about how to find your own way of setting those boundaries, so the no doesn’t always have to be a hard no. It can be a deflection as a way to say like, I’ll get to you later, or like, hey, let me go finish this task, and then let me go, you know, get to that. you can only do so much. Like for instance with courses or work, it’s harder to reduce than to add. It’s better to start under your threshold and build up than go beyond your threshold and then try to back out. So, typically we’ve noticed that we always know when we usually we’ve gone beyond the baseline, because those are the times then, and this goes into burnout, because it’s times when the quarter is just that hard to, to finish at the end of it, we feel like we’re dragging, we’re trying to read the same, you know. Article or the same book chapter and our brain is just not functioning. We’ve all been in those situations. It’s knowing how do we pull back and even I think that this goes into it. Burnout does not mean that it has to be that sustainable all the time. Even us taking little breaks can have a pretty big impact in terms of rejuvenating us. Thinking about that, but I think to your point of it’s OK to experiment and see.
PETTWAY: Thank you, Nick.
Nick is a staff therapist and associate director for community-based interventions at Northwestern. For WNUR News, I’m Moriah Pettway
