Tips for Tired Academics: General
Longass post, first in a series. My two cents on how to not completely crash and shatter when you're juggling university, work, social life, and household tasks. This started as a community comment for @mycatsnameiscleo but then grew like yeast. Hi Yul, thank you for your patience! While putting this together though I realized I have a lot of details to add, so I decided to make it a series in the upcoming days instead.
Mind you, this isn't How to Avoid/ Prevent Burnout. I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that. I burn. I am fire and storm, or else I am nothing. But I did have to learn the hard way how to balance my forces, and this is what I've come away with after more than a decade of ongoing dysfunction.
Hydration and sleep are essential, but individual. It might take a bit of time to figure out what works for you. Start by noticing how you're doing on your days off (or just less hectic days). Much depends on your age, metabolism, conditional sleep/wake cycles (hello fellow shift workers), eating habits, baseline blood pressure, medication (including being unmedicated!) and so on and so forth. Your body knows better than your search engine. Listen to it and try to get closer to that Optimal Feeling. You'll know it when you encounter it, and then it gets easier to approximate every subsequent time. These needs are also apt to change over the years, and that's okay. You're a mammal, not a machine. The point here is to trust the animal of you and take a mental load off. Stressing about prescribed standards of wellness just makes you more unwell.
Nutrition is highly flexible. For me, food is fuel for function and that's the extent of that. I don't have anywhere near the time nor energy to make every meal from scratch, nor to think up what to cook every damn day. On top of that, I have severe restrictions to navigate. Therefore the only effort I invest is to stop myself from going fully feral for my favorite junkfoods, because I do know I can't be functional if I am fuelled by sludge. I rotate a few insultingly easy dishes that I know I'll actually consume to avoid food waste. I make big batches of one-pot meals on downtime days and freeze most of the amount, portioned, to avoid cooking later when the week/month gets busy. I eat a lot of sandwiches. I bulk-buy and freeze veg and fruit. A smoothie is a meal. Meat is expensive and sits heavy in my stomach so I get most of my protein elsewhere. I'll do a separate post on groceries shopping & prep; meanwhile, Tal's Guide to Spoonie Cooking is an absolute lifesaver. Honestly, kitchen content aimed at disabled and chronically ill people has been the most helpful to me in letting go of the shame of being unable to feed myself the way my grandma did when I was a kid. Simple food is good food, and cheap & quick does not by default mean unhealthy.
Making time for your people is possibly the suckiest part of this. The simple fact of the matter is that you don't have enough resources to give each individual as much of your time & energy as they would like to have, or that you'd like to give. The silver lining is here is that nobody else has them, either. We're adults now. Everybody's busy, stressed, more or less always tired, and getting busier with each passing year. That's why you gotta literally schedule friend time. Arrange for hangouts in advance. It's ok to just have a loose idea and then sync closer to the day of. From what I see online, a lot of the Bad Feelings about reduced social time come from people viewing their friendship dynamics from younger years as a sort of standard to reach, rather than simply a past state of affairs. You are not a bad buddy because you're rarely available to hang out. Your friends do understand; they're in the same boat. Nobody can make a lot of space in their schedule but if each of you scoots over just a bit, just once a month, your friendships will continue to thrive I promise.
Making time for yourself is likewise tricky, but your body helps you here. Sometimes you'll be so tired that you will physically not be able to keep studying or working. You will naturally lean into rest and nap, chill with roommates, cuddle with partners or pets, go for relaxing walks, etc. Sometimes your brain will simply refuse to keep grinding and it'll put you into recharge mode whether you want it or not. This is good. Don't beat yourself up for it. This is your system saying "Hey admin, we're overheating here, Power Saving Mode will be automatically on for a while". The only real problem here is that such switches are out of your control, and that's hella inconvenient. That's why you need to minimize crashouts by feeding your system little recharge jolts in advance. My best tip: have a shit ton of hobbies. Literally tens of them. Do a speck of each whenever the fancy bites you. That way you catch essential breaks in your productivity routines + you provide your brain and senses with variety. More to come on this but "time for yourself" doesn't need to be 3 hours with a novel, nor an extended pampering bath, nor a wholeass weekend getaway. If you can and want to do those, go for it! But if you can't even concieve of that much downtime, you're not alone. 10 mins of a mobile game while pooping does actually count. A slightly longer shower at whatever is your Indulgent Temperature (personally I love my scalding hellwater) absolutely counts. Exiting the bus 1 stop early and walking that distance also counts. Putting on your earbuds and fav playlist while doing laundry or dishes counts. Which brings me to my next topic:
Staying on top of housework. Now this might be my most hateful item on this list. The vacuum is a Beast and when the hell do all the dishes spawn in the sink? I am the only steward of my homestead so you can imagine what a load that is. So far there are only 4 things that reliably work for me: cleaning along desire paths, doing a X minutes run, having a fixed Cleaning Day, and eliminating my Sensory Enemies. Again, I'll expand on this, but the common denominator here is to reduce the amount of thinking necessary. Let your housework flow along rather than trying to dam and direct it. As academics we are mental workers, and unnecessary cognitive burdens only drain us. Taking care of your enclosure ought to be a way to shut the brain off for a while, move your body, and get a nice clean space as a result - not this enormous Project of Many Tasks that only eats away at your precious hours off.
Staying on top of your studies is obviously going to be your priority. Now, this is massively individual - we all have our own learning styles, preferred methods, material formats, etc. The two key things I had to embrace after I broke down the first few times (yes I was that cruel to myself) are: one, if it's less than one hour it actually does count. 15 minutes of listening to your own recorded voice reading out your notes while you commute from A to B is still studying. So what if you're narrating your own audiotextbook? So what if you only hear one chapter today? You still studied. And two, genuinely fuck what it looks like. I don't mean the Quirky messy aesthetic that nonetheless is still pictureworthy. I mean primordial terrifying chaos. The "if you see me through the window you'll think my house is haunted" look. The "if anybody finds my notes they'll either call the feds or the exorcist" type of research. An ex of mine made bootleg dynamite to get a grasp on the chemistry & physics behind violently dynamic oxygen consumption. I know so much about the biochemistry of herbs native to my region I quite literally am capable of killing someone with a cup of tea. My friend freaking hacked our state-wide electricity distributor business. For science. Another completely disregards washing their (admittedly super long) hair during exam season; it's dry shampoo all the way for upwards of a month. I'm not saying go full Mad Scientist, certainly not, we do live in a society, but truly there are very few Rights and Wrongs to the learning process.
Not breaking down at work is my personal biggest challenge out of all of these. I work in an overwhelming place sensory-wise, surrounded by (mostly) people I consider idiots, where the culture is toxic as all get out, and which is rapidly going downhill. Sorry to tell you that most of my copes are rooted in arrogance and spite. I am aware of my skillset, reputation in-company, and the surface-level impression I give (sweet little thing, clever little creature, I can exploit this... oh shit it has Teeth. WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT DOES NOT UNBITE YOU). In consequence, half the people there have taken me under their wings, the other half walk on eggshells, and 4 or 5 are playing mindgames for the long haul but hey, that's my home field, bitches. Now, your own workplace, internship, whatever you have, is its own story and you are your own kind of person, and maybe I can't help you much from my own experience. But I can give you the resources that helped me, and you can see about applying them in your context, in whichever way suits your needs best. So when the post on this topic comes around it will include books, websites, and other sources that empowered me to recognize the patterns that made me break down in the workplace before and develop some counters to them. Hopefully they'll help you too.
Finally, mind your underlying bodily health. Keep up with your medical analyses. There are quite a number of physical issues that manifest as, or can provoke/ trigger/ aggravate, mental unhealth and other trouble and send you spiraling into a crash. Examples: I used to berate myself for having 0 stamina and endured gruelling workout regimes to fix that - only in my late 20s did I discover, via an unrelated bloodwork check-in, that I have a hereditary liver dysfunction that impacts my upper fitness limit. I struggle with debilitating anxiety, paralyzing depression, focus issues, time blindness, emotional dysregulation etc. etc. - only now, in my 30s, did I learn that I have a thyroid condition where the symptoms massively overlap with several mental health problems, a condition that often actually triggers those same problems. 30 years of self-flaggelation for a bit of info that was 1 conversation and 1 lab appointment away. Talk to your doctor. Request to have your hormones, vitamin & mineral levels, and your overall blood status checked. Check your heart. Check your eyesight and hearing. Check your sense of balance. Before you kill the monster you gotta know its name.
