I started working on this podcast about overwhelm much earlier in the semester, at a time when I always notice faculty are starting to get overwhelmed. And perhaps unsurprisingly, and definitely ironically, I got overwhelmed. I was feeling a lot of drama around finishing this episode, I got stuck in all of the usual stuff that comes up in the semester, and the feeling of urgency and all of the kinds of barriers that come up for us during the semester. So I wanted to start out by sharing that I too, get caught up in the overwhelm of the semester! It is a normal part of the semester. It's how we respond to overwhelm that can shape our experience of the semester. This is an invitation to practice self-compassion for your overwhelmed self, and to invest a little bit of time and energy in creating more ease in your everyday life.
Today, we're going to talk about four ways to address overwhelm. And I'll summarize them for you. We'll begin with self-compassion, and specifically opting out of self-blame. We’ll consider how to expand your capacity. We'll explore the idea of reducing your obligations. And then we'll talk about how to assess what went well and what didn't go so well when your time of overwhelm is over.
When I realized that I was in the ridiculous position of feeling overwhelmed about my podcast episode about overwhelm, I went back and I listened to my draft of the podcast. And I followed these steps of inviting more self-compassion, of really considering my capacity and boosting my capacity, and reducing my obligations. And then when this time of overwhelm was over, assessing that time. (That is something that I'll share in my newsletter this month.) And I can attest to how helpful it actually was to follow the path that I've set out here. I was able to reclaim my enthusiasm and my belief that really, it was possible in a time of overwhelm to complete this work, to connect with what matters to me, and to share this episode with you all.
I want to start by acknowledging the many different thoughts and emotions and embodied awarenesses that come up during times of overwhelm. You may be feeling a whole range of things. You may be feeling exhaustion, sadness, anger, disappointment. You might feel isolated. You might also feel excited or energized about what you're working on and the opportunities you have. You might feel connected or overstimulated. Fear can come up. You may feel tension in your shoulders or your stomach. Or you may feel like you need to move all the time, or the opposite: you might feel frozen, or something totally different. However you're feeling, take a moment to just connect with what's going on in your mind and your body. I know this is hard, and I'm going to encourage you to do it anyway. I'll give you a moment and I'll be right back.
Were you able to connect with how you're feeling? The absolute hardest thing to do when you're overwhelmed, I think, is to step back and pause and notice. It feels often like we just need to keep going that we can't stop. We can't stop to pause. And of course that means that we can't really notice either. It takes pausing, it takes a moment of contemplation to really notice.
What I've observed is that when we're overwhelmed, often we're caught up in feelings of self-blame. And one way I see this showing up for faculty is this phrase, “If only I could…[fill in the blank].”
If only I could write more…
If only I could work faster…
If only I could fit more students into this advising period…
If only I could work late at night…
Or whatever it is for you. I see so many versions of this. This is not your fault. There is no “if only I could…” You are overwhelmed because of structural inequalities. You're overwhelmed because of the intersection of patriarchy and racism and ableism, and because of the unreasonable expectations that have come out of the corporatization of higher education.
One image that I find really useful in thinking about our relationship to our institutions is from my time in advertising. This was when I was right out of college in the late 90s. That is a story for another day! But one of the things that I got from that experience was this fabulous book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. Gordon MacKenzie was a creative at Hallmark. He wrote this book about how do you reconcile being a creative person in a corporate setting. And what I love about it is that it's actually super relevant to academic life. As academics, we have a level of autonomy and creativity in our work that's really important to us. And yet, we are part of an institution that is fairly corporatized at this point.
Mackenzie pictures the institution as a hairball, okay? There are different options of how we might relate to the hairball in Mackenzie's conception, one is getting sucked in and stuck in the hairball. Another is flying off into space, and freezing in isolation. Or ideally, using the gravity of the institution, the hairball, to keep us in orbit, to support what matters to us. Interrupting the rut of self-blame has to do, I think, with visualizing ourselves in orbit, not flying out into space, not getting stuck. Maintaining that orbit is possible. If Gordon MacKenzie, a creative and an artist, can do that at corporate central, Hallmark, I think there might be hope for us!
One way to get back into orbit is to really embrace the idea and the feeling that working beyond your capacity is not helping your students. It's not helping your peers or your colleagues, and it's certainly not helping you. I want to acknowledge that you may be getting very different messages from some of these folks, maybe your chair, someone on a committee is telling you very differently. You are the expert in your own life. What is your body telling you? What does your inner life tell you?
Imagine talking about your experience of overwhelm to a caring friend. This is an exercise from Kristin Neff, who is a self-compassion researcher. And she uses this really simple and useful way of thinking to help us with self-compassion. How would you respond to a dear friend? When you explain how you're feeling, when you explain your situation, create a little bit of distance and think of yourself as a good friend. This might feel kind of uncomfortable and weird, but with more practice, it actually can become more comfortable and can feel kind of good actually. So if you were responding to yourself, as you would a treasured friend, you might say, the blame is not on you. There's no blame in this scenario that falls on your moral fortitude or your self-discipline. You might say, put your own breathing mask on first. You might say, working beyond your capacity does not support your students, your peers, your colleagues, your family, or yourself. You might have another compassionate response that I'm not capturing here. The point is that usually we want to respond to a loved one with compassion, with gentleness and care. This is a habit worth practicing, speaking to yourself, especially in a moment of overwhelm, as you would to a deeply cared for friend. When we're a little more gentle with ourselves, we can be a little more open to the things that may make a difference in our daily lives when we're overwhelmed.
So right now, how much do you believe that you can expand your capacity? Probably not much. I see folks—and I do this myself—very often saying I'm doing so much, I'm not doing anything well, there's no way I could do anything else. Now, don't misunderstand me here. I am not in any way talking about “Just Do It,” or do more, or push through, do it anyway. No, this is not at all what I mean. When I say expanding our capacity, what I'm talking about is resting, getting enough sleep, eating well, finding ease and flexibility. These are the things that make a difference to our feelings of overwhelm. And they're really what constitute expanding our capacity.
Okay, right now, you're probably thinking, there's absolutely no way. Those things are so far from my reality. And I know! I absolutely acknowledge that it can feel so far away. And yet, taking time to attend to our basic needs is exactly what expands our capacity, expands our ability to do what matters. So this might mean rest or sleep, it might mean managing pain. So for me, when I get overwhelmed, my neck pain starts to act up. And then not only am I super busy and feeling overwhelmed, but you know, a good portion of my brain is going to trying to ignore the pain that I'm experiencing. Until of course, my body rebels and says no way and, you know, then it's just a negative experience all around! If I can take time to care for my neck to do my PT exercises, even while I'm overwhelmed, that expands my capacity. My brain power is freed up to do what I want, my brain power is freed up to focus on what matters to me. And my experience of everyday life gets better.
Attending to your basic needs may look like asking for support. It might require reconnecting with why you're doing all of this in the first place and reconsidering what matters. It might mean planning for fun or connection. It could be about your expectations about getting it right. Now, am I saying that you should let go of perfectionism and just half-ass it? Well, I mean, that's an option, certainly. But so is letting yourself think about what “good enough” would look like in this circumstance. It's not either perfect or half assed right, there is a spectrum.
So I'm going to share a little anecdote about my chiropractor. She's in a very intense season of business, she is down to just herself as a chiropractor. There used to be two other folks in the office. The last time I was there for an appointment, taking care of my neck. (I’ll pat myself on the back there!) I actually asked her about this. I asked her, how are you managing this? What are you doing to make this possible? And what she said is, I am focusing on my wellbeing. She's making sure she's well-rested, On the weekends, she's not doing anything other than resting. She got her partner and her kids on board with this and she holds that boundary. She got a new protective hairstyle to make life a little bit easier. These are some concrete ways that she's kind of clearing the decks a little bit, and making it so that she can sustain a pace of work that is really challenging.
What are the basic needs that you have been neglecting? What are you craving more of in your daily life? What is it that you've said, oh, when the semester is over…? Or what are you putting off? Making things these things happen now is not necessarily easy. But it's also not a luxury. These are the things that we need as humans, and meeting these needs helps us expand our capacity and lessen the really negative effects of overwhelm.
Partnered with expanding our capacity as exploring how we might be able to reduce our obligations. You can treat this kind of like a scavenger hunt: where can we find the flexibility? Here are some questions that you can ask yourself about your schedule, about your to do list. For example:
What assumptions am I making about my to do list that are maybe not fully informed? Maybe I need more information in order to make a good decision about this?
Which deadlines could be shifted?
What ideas do I have about HOW something should be done?
I'll give you an example here. When I was a new chair, I learned that my standards for producing administrative reports will was way too high. And I learned this because a very kind administrator said to me, wow, your reports are so beautiful and yours is the first one to be turned in. So I learned from that: I think my standards for this are a little bit higher than they need to be!
Another question you can ask: who can do this task other than me? Where have I resisted delegating? A colleague I was talking with recently was saying that they thought they couldn't ask the department assistant for help on a particular task. But it turned out that that was wrong. And yes, it did take time to set up and to delegate. But then everything was automated from that point forward.
Now, sometimes there's just nothing we can do to shift our academic obligations or campus obligations. In that case, we can always consider acknowledging difficult feelings about some aspect of our work that we may have. So y, maybe feeling disappointed in colleagues. If we can acknowledge that feeling like, I'm just really feeling disappointed about this email exchange, maybe that can help us think differently about whether we need to follow up on that email thread. Because maybe we can see where the urge comes from, to participate in that thread.
You also don't need to focus on reducing academic obligations, you can ask these same questions about your domestic tasks. What assumptions am I making about my to do list? What deadlines can I shift? Do I have standards for how things should be done that maybe I'm not fully needing to meet right now? Who can I ask for help, whether that is someone in the home or a friend or maybe outsourcing something? These are questions that you can ask about all aspects of your life and your obligations.
And if you absolutely cannot reduce any of your obligations, that's a reality sometimes, and that's okay. What's really important in that circumstance, then, is to double down on expanding your capacity, and on opting out of self-blame. Because those two pieces, showing yourself compassion, and really attending to your basic needs, can change your experience of overwhelm.
What we know from the rhythms of academic life is that things ebb and the flow. Any period of overwhelm will come to an end. And when it does, take 15 minutes to ask yourself, what worked? What was challenging? What are you celebrating? What would you do differently next time? How would you set yourself up for a less overwhelming time? Ut's really important to take the time to just jot down a few notes or draw something, create a mind map or a collage or some gestures or movements to document that experience. Putting a little bit of time and thought into what you tried, and what you'd like to try next time can really come back to you. You might also take a look at your calendar and anticipate when these times of overwhelm tend to happen. You can think ahead and put into place some habits of self-compassion, some ways of attending to your needs, some practices that help you get real about your obligations.
I'm thinking of you and I'm wishing you good enough vibes as you make it through your own experience of overwhelm this semester.
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