How skilled are you at relaxing?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, friends! Remember me? Sorry about the cancellation 2 weeks ago, and thanks for your understanding. Thanks, too, to those of you who sent nice messages. All is well, but this time 2 weeks ago I was struggling with how much I was trying to get done, and something had to give, which ended up being the podcast episode. The usual culprits - overwhelm and burnout - were to blame. I know that these are things that many of you struggle with. So, I thought that I could squeeze some good out of the situation by talking about it here, and in doing so perhaps give voice to some of the struggles that other people are facing.
Let me give you the background. There’s something writing-related I’ve been working on all summer - longer than that, in fact - and I was frustrated by how long it was taking me to do it. You know the scenario: what seems like it’s going to be a couple of weeks’ work, max, ends up dragging on and on and on for months, so that you end up not only stressed that it’s taking so long but also frustrated with yourself for letting it take so long (because things like this have to be someone’s - i.e. your - fault, right?). And this was all happening against a background of me doing next to nothing to entertain my children while they were off school, with the result that there was a lot of screen time and a lot of boredom and a lot of me feeling like a crappy parent because it seemed like all their friends were off on holidays to exciting locations. So, in my mind, I was falling short in both work and parenting, which itself is a recipe for stress. What ended up making it worse is that my mental sharpness was on the decline, which was no doubt a result of taking no time off all summer - except for a 3 day camping trip. The thing I was working on needed more work, and each day I seemed less capable of doing it. Eventually, it got to the point where I realised that I just had to send it to the person who was waiting for it, because I just couldn’t bear the thought of dragging it out into another week. It was a no-win situation, at least that’s how it seemed to me. Send it off, and worry about it not being quite up to scratch. Or carry on working on it, which meant continuing to stress about it and also being too mentally exhausted to make the changes that needed to be made. So, that’s where I was when I cancelled the last episode: I just had to get the thing done and out of my head.
Now, in the little announcement I released in place of an actual episode, I said that I was working hard to get something finished off, and then I was going to take a proper and overdue rest. Let’s talk about that, shall we? Because too often, we don’t. When we talk about burnout, the focus of the discussion is often ‘Yeah but seriously you need to take a break’, and the issue of what it’s actually like when you decide to take a break, along with the problems that arise there, are overlooked. This is how it went for me. I finished and sent off that big piece of work on the Friday, I took off Saturday and Sunday (which I always do anyway - they’re filled up with family stuff), and then despite promising myself that I’d take it easy for all of the next week - the plan was to keep things ticking over but no more - I lasted a day and a half. The truth was, I found I didn’t know how to relax. If you’d asked me beforehand how I’d have liked to spend my down time, I’d have told you that I’d start each day early, by relaxing in the garden with some coffee before everyone else was awake, go to the gym or for a run, come home for a shower and a nap, then maybe wander to a coffee shop with my knitting and treat myself to a cake, yoga followed by Netflix in the evening, an early night, etc etc. Nothing fancy, but these are the sorts of things that, when I have work to do, I wish I could be doing instead. But without that backdrop of ‘I should be writing’ and the associated guilt that accompanies doing anything other than writing, my time off ended up feeling loose and baggy and I didn’t really have the motivation to do any of the things I thought I wanted to do. I’d be telling myself, ‘I’ll do something nice a bit’, and then before I knew it, the kids were home from school and asking me what was for dinner. I ended up drifting back into work mode, after all - but not because I felt guilty about not working. It was more that I didn’t know how to do not-work. At least, I didn’t know how to do it while I was still at home and surrounded by all the usual structures and routines - it might have been different if I’d been able to go away somewhere. It occurred to me that relaxing, unwinding, being-instead-of-doing, taking down-time is a skill. It’s a use-it-or-lose-it thing. It’s one thing to know, or to come to accept, that we ought to relax more. It’s another thing to know how, and to be able to switch immediately and effortlessly into relaxation mode after pushing and pushing for a long period of time.
Thinking about this reminded me of a pair of articles on burnout by the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s in The Economist back in 2016. There was so much in what he wrote that struck a chord, both with my own experiences and those that people describe to me in coaching sessions. Cohen describes a burnt out client who takes a week off work in order to relax, but who ends up ‘packing his schedule’ with activities that were demanding in their own way and not at all the sort of down time he’d envisaged. That reminded me of the role that exercise plays in my attempts to relax - I enjoy it, and I’d go a bit deranged if I didn’t do it, but I also have expectations of myself - not only physically, but also in terms of telling myself that while I’m doing it I may as well listen to something educational and mentally enriching.
Cohen also talks about the indecision that arises from burnout, resulting from coming to experience life as a bombardment of unwelcome and overwhelming demands. Let me read you his wonderful paragraph about this:
‘You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.’
This made me think of a common response in coaching sessions when I explore the possibility of relaxation with clients. Often, they’ll say, ‘But I need to do x, y, and z …’ and then sort of trail off, giving the impression that the actual demands on them take up less space than their sense of being subject to relentless demands. I felt this too, when I was rushing to get that writing-related task finished. There was no pressure from the person I was sending it to - they had explicitly told me that I didn’t need to hurry. The pressure was all from myself, and when I tried to see what was behind it, what actual real-world factor was making this so urgent, I didn’t find very much.
Which is not to say that we’re imagining things when we feel overwhelmed by demands; it’s more that we’re beaten down by demands, whether external ones - from our employer, family, other people - or ones that arise from the expectations we put on ourselves. We end up in this constant state of alert. It’s a bit like if someone were to walk up to you and kick you in the shins at random intervals. If that were to happen often enough, you’d feel stressed and under attack even at those moments when you’re not actually being attacked.
And then part of the problem, as Cohen identifies, is the nasty habit that lots of us have, of evaluating our worth by how much we achieve. When you do this, you might be exhausted by productivity, but the alternative - switching off the production line and just being for a while - might end up causing a different sort of stress. You might end up telling yourself that you’re lazy, worthless, weak, a waste of space. I’ve talked before on this podcast about this, plenty of times. It’s the warped mindset that leads us to view rest as something that we need to earn, rather than a basic physiological need. But it goes further than that, too. When we think in these terms, we sometimes come to view our needs simply as inconveniences - negotiable, optional demands that we can ignore, minimise, and dismiss in favour of doing things we regard as worthwhile. It’s that ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ mentality - and the less dramatic versions of the same sentiment, like ‘I’ll eat when I’ve finished this chapter I need to read’ and ‘I’ll see my friends after I meet this deadline’.
One problem with ignoring our basic needs in that way is, obviously, that our basic needs don’t get met. A quieter problem, one that’s easy to overlook, is that we end up forgetting that we have these needs, and when we notice them, we mistake them for unreasonable demands, things that we should be able to do without. We mistake necessities for luxuries, and what makes us think we’re entitled to luxuries?
This reminds me of CJ Hauser’s wonderful essay ‘The Crane Wife’, published in 2019 in The Paris Review. In it, Hauser reflects on a field trip taken shortly after breaking off their engagement to a man who they came to realise fell far short of meeting their needs, needs that they themself had come to despise. Describing how they (without success) would beg their fiance to tell them that he loved them or that they looked nice, Hauser writes,
‘I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com. … That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.’
We can all join Hauser in feeling relieved that they escaped a future with this ghastly man - but the sad truth is that many of us do to ourselves what Hauser’s former fiance did to them. That man was unpleasant, but he’s no worse than your inner critic. He wouldn’t tell Hauser that they looked nice; your inner critic won’t tell you that you’ve done a good job or that it’s ok to take a rest even though you haven’t finished doing that important thing or that missing that deadline doesn’t make you a bad person.
Cohen notes that a big part of dealing with burnout is making practical changes that may or may not be feasible: working less, relaxing more. I think it’s reasonable to add to that things like secure employment, fair pay, removal of systematic bias and discrimination, and a ton of other things that are beyond the power of individuals to address. He also remarks that (quote), ‘Merely listening and attending to the needs of the inner self as opposed to the demands of the outside world can have a transformative effect.’ Unsurprisingly, Cohen advocates psychoanalysis as a helpful tool here. I agree with him - but I think there are also things we can do right now and without the help of a therapist to connect with our needs. One is that old favourite: Would you say that to a friend? It’s easy for us to dismiss our own needs and berate ourselves for having them, but unless you used to be engaged to CJ Hauser, we tend to take a more compassionate approach when thinking of the needs of others. If you draw a blank when you try to think about what your own nee ds are, ask yourself instead what your best friend’s needs would be if they were in your situation. And don’t simply do this now, just the once, and then forget about it. Practise doing it often, and especially whenever your inner critic shows any sign of telling you that you’re not entitled to something or other. Whatever your best friend is reasonable to demand or expect in your situation is what you’re entitled to right now. Perhaps your needs are inconvenient. That’s fine. But they were here first - not your job, not your spouse, not that committee you’re on - and their being inconvenient doesn’t make them negotiable. Perhaps you can’t meet all of your needs all of the time. That’s life. Your needs are important, but they’re not the only thing going on in the world. But keep in mind that while you can survive the odd night without enough sleep or the odd day without eating lunch or the odd colleague who’s disrespectful or inconsiderate, these things are the exception, not the rule. Another quotation from CJ Hauser: ‘There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs.’
So, where does this leave you, next time you allow yourself some time off and find that you don’t know what the hell to do with yourself, with the result that you kind of flounder through the day not doing anything particularly restorative and end up feeling annoyed and deflated rather than relaxed? Here, I think it’s useful to go back to what I said near the start, about relaxation being a skill. It’s a muscle that you need to exercise if you want to be able to use it well, and if you neglect it, then prepare to find that it’s creaky and weak and malcoordinated when you try to fire it up. If you deny your own needs for long enough and then try to relax and find that you can’t relax, you’re putting yourself in the position of someone who spends months on end sitting on the sofa in front of Netflix and then tries to run a marathon. Imagine someone like that complaining that they thought running would make them fit, but instead it’s just making them hurt, and anyway they give up, there’s clearly no point. That outcome doesn’t make them rubbish; it’s just that they’re expecting too much too soon. They can’t just go from zero to 100 and expect things to go well. They need regular training, all of which is a way of saying that they need to recognise and respond to their body’s needs. We all know and accept this when it comes to something like physical endurance. And perhaps the same is true of relaxation. If you’re not in touch with your own needs and you’re constantly driving yourself to produce more and more, then not knowing what to do with yourself when you have a day off is a predictable result. You need to train, by tuning in to your own needs and working out how to meet them. What sorts of things restore you? If you don’t know, experiment and find out. And when you do have a day off and find that it’s not the wall to wall relaxation festival you hoped it would be, resist the temptation to tell yourself that you’ve failed. View it instead as an exercise in tuning in to your own needs. Without blaming yourself, think about how the next day off could go better. What’s one change you could make? And also, what are your expectations here? Are you expecting a full reset in the space of one day, where the stress dial gets turned back down to zero? Is that reasonable? What if, instead, a good outcome is simply the pleasure of spending 20 minutes reading a novel, even if you don’t know what to do with yourself the rest of the time? You get the idea. But you don’t need to wait until your next day off to think about your needs. Is there some need you have that you’re neglecting right now? Just being able to answer that question is progress. And it gives you a little head start on your next day off.
Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at https://www.patreon.com/AcademicImperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - https://www.academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!