How to Not Burn Out as an Academic – Guest Expert Interview with Dr Danielle De La Mare

I talked to Dr Danielle De La Mare, career wellness coach for academics, about burnout in academia, the all-to-common phenomenon of work addiction among researchers, the importance of feeling connected to yourself and other people and the necessary steps to tackle stress and overwhelm in the long term. 

Hey Danielle, who are you and what do you help academics with?

I’m Danielle De La Mare and I have a company called Self Compassionate Professor where I help academics with career wellness. My goal for my clients is to feel like they’re actually in control of their work rather than their work controlling them. A big part of that is helping them make a decision about whether or not to leave academia. Many of the people I work with have hit a wall and they’re suffering so much that they’re seriously considering leaving.

It is possible. It’s really hard, but it’s possible. Some people are at the point where they say, ‘I am over it. I am done. I’m not doing this academic thing. It clearly doesn’t work for me and I’ve tried for a really long time.’ But if you really are committed to the work, and you care about the work, and some of your core values are connected to your research, for example, then it’s worth giving it a shot, and seeing what you can do to find some wellness in your career. 

Academics often have teaching, research, and service work, and they’re being asked to do all of those things in this way where they don’t have a nice way of transitioning from one task to the next. You say, ‘Okay, this is my Monday writing day, I’m going to write.’ And when you’re done with writing, you take all of your writing energy to the next task. Then you can’t get your writing off your mind while you’re trying to do the service work and you’re longing to do your writing, but instead, you’re doing your service work, and you’re not doing your service work efficiently, and you don’t really care about it, and it just feels like it’s getting in the way. 

It’s about orienting, because I think that so often, we’re swimming in this sea of chaos and just trying to keep our head above water, rather than saying, ‘No, these are my priorities. This is what I need to get done.

And this is how I need to self-manage to get myself through it in the most enjoyable way possible.’ Because you don’t want to hate your job. A lot of my work is making it feel better. Bringing forth a feeling state that you can rest into, where you can actually really feel supported and soothed in your work.

I like what you said about creating a specific environment for each task, so your brain knows what’s going on and you don’t have things lingering in your head. I guess that’s where stress comes from – from thinking about all things you have to do and being anxious about how they’re going to work out, when you’re going to do them, or not forgetting X, Y, Z. 

You’re never present. And when you’re not present, you have no energy. You’re trying to hold things that are impossible to hold, and you can’t hold the future.

So, if you can reorient yourself on a regular basis, and I usually recommend three times a day at least; morning, afternoon, evening – reorient, come back to yourself. Figure out what you need to do, what your priorities are, and then work on those and try to stay present with the task at hand.

Three times a day! Wow! If you don’t mind sharing, how do you do that?

Often you can just ask yourself some simple questions in the morning. Like, ‘What do I feel like doing today?’ or ‘What needs to be done today?’. And that’s the first conversation you have with yourself. Now I know what needs to be done. Because if you just wake up and start going, and you’re jumping from task to task, and you have no real clear direction about how you’re going to do anything, then there’s no path, right? 

Their emergency is not my emergency.

Use simple questions that you ask yourself, because sometimes you need to do something, but you don’t want to do it at all. And that’s okay. Listen to your body. If your body says, ‘This does not feel good right now,’ it’s okay to put that task off for the next day or for the next week if it’s possible. If you really have a hard deadline, it may not be. But often in academia, we call them deadlines, but they’re actually often just guidelines.

True. I guess that’s where people struggle and what is sometimes challenging is to not have deadlines. Then urgent things popping up in your inbox, these fires that need extinguishing, it’s easy for them to take over.

Isn’t it?! There are things that many of us do, like shutting off our emails, not having your email on your phone, that kind of thing can help. Just telling yourself, ‘Their emergency is not my emergency.’ It’s constantly coming back to yourself and asking, ‘What do I need?’, ‘What’s best for me?’ and ‘What’s the path I need to walk?’ 

I just talked to somebody who said, ‘I love my students, I care so much about them, I want to be there for them.’ Okay, then that’s a really important thing to know and you should carve out space for your students so that you can support them. I’m not saying to make it about yourself all the time, but if that’s a really strong value of yours, like supporting your students, or being there for people in one way or another, then that’s coming from you. Saying ‘These are my values.’ is great and you should make that space for them because you care about them. 

I like what you said about how we should be aware of what you want and need as the first step. It’s a bit of a cliche, ‘fill your own cup first before you can pour from it.’ But it is true, isn’t it? I find I’m a bit of a people pleaser, so when someone knocks at my door, or sends me this email with a top priority mark and it’s their emergency, I’m getting stressed, I have anxiety, and I want to do anything to help them. Usually this emergency involves me, or they make me feel like I made a mistake and now I have to respond to the emergency. So, I’ll have this as my mantra from now on: Their emergency is not my emergency. 

100%. There’s a lot of recognising what your mind’s telling you and if you have this really clear inner critic that’s saying, ‘You’re going to fail, or lose your job, or everybody’s going to think you’re a loser because you’re not doing this one thing right now.’ You just need to stop and ask yourself, ‘Is that true? Is that really true?’ 

(In a sing-song happy birthday tune) ‘I’m incompetent today, I’m incompetent today!’ If you sing your thoughts, you can detach from it a bit and you don’t have to believe it. That’s one of the things you can do so that you can reorient.

Hmm. I really like that! I’ve not heard about this approach, so I’m going to try that.

It’s great! You laugh at yourself.

Right! Because then it becomes ridiculous. It’s probably similar to writing things down. What I started doing is having a journal and writing things down that go through my head, in terms of what my worries are and what I’m grateful for. Another thing that works for me is writing down in the morning what I think is going to be difficult during that day and coming up with a solution for it. I found this in the book “The Kindness Method” by Sharoo Izad. It’s a really nice book about forming habits in a self-compassionate, kind way. 

I’m a trained Mindful Self-Compassion teacher, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s showing compassion to yourself. When you feel like you’re being mean to yourself or suffering in some way, it’s best to feel those feelings and give yourself some sort of physical gesture to show yourself compassion, telling yourself something compassionate – that’s what it’s making me think of. To wake up in the morning and say, ‘Okay, what’s the thing that’s going to be difficult today? And how can I find a solution?’ That seems to be a dialogue that can fluidly emerge from that self-kindness! 

It really helps because it takes the anxiety, those spinning thoughts – and it stops them. And you sit back and reflect, and then you find a solution. Once you have the solution, the thing isn’t so difficult anymore. Honestly, it’s that easy because you can always come up with a way of dealing with things that are difficult. You just have to stop and think. I guess this is similar to the the re-centering you were talking about earlier.

Yeah, it’s checking in with your body! It’s one of the questions you might ask in your orienting session.

Could you talk a bit about your own journey and how you came to where you are now? You help academics with feeling good in their careers, or maybe evaluating whether or not they want a career change. Why are you doing this?

This isn’t true for everyone, but for many of us, we teach what we ourselves need to learn. So, I have turned my trauma into a purpose. When I was an academic, I hit a wall and I felt terrible. I was working really hard and had really long hours, I had a baby the second year into my tenure track job, and the only moment I felt like I got any rest was when I would go to a coffee shop at 6am on Sunday morning. I’d have from 6 to 7am where I could just exhale. Outside of that I never stopped working. Even my husband said to me, you are carrying low-grade anxiety with you wherever you go. One day he said to me, ‘I never interact with you when you are not anxious. Ever.’ We had a baby, and I’m trying to do this demanding job and I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s right. I am.’ 

You can have mindfulness, meditation, and calm moments, but you also need other people to love you and support you.

I tried different things, like yoga. Yoga felt really good and that led me to meditation. I learned how to meditate and then I learned how to teach people meditation and I started bringing meditation into my classes. At the beginning of every single class, I would make my students meditate. I said it was for them, and it was, but it was very much for me even more than them. That was helpful, but every time I finished the meditation, I was back in it again. It was these breaks, but it wasn’t a long-term change from the meditation, so that led me to doing more digging, and I found Mindful Self-Compassion. 

I realised that self-compassion is the missing piece for me, because other than in meditation, I was never creating any space for myself. I would sit in a meeting and try to act like the good academic and have my pen and take notes and make good suggestions and do the ‘right thing’. I was always performing and there was never any space for me to just relax in the meeting. It’s okay to relax in the meeting! This is what I needed to hear back then. 

Eventually, I got sick. I got a cancer diagnosis and I just got hit so hard. I was trying so hard to make this work and I couldn’t figure it out. With yoga, meditation, it worked to some extent, and then I got sick. People might argue with me on this, but I knew, intuitively, that that cancer diagnosis came from me never resting, never relaxing, never figuring out a way to get out of anxiety. At this time, it was before I knew what I needed to do in terms of my treatment. Would I get surgery? What stage of cancer did I have? It was before I knew any of that. I just knew that I needed to start connecting to people more. 

So, the first thing I did after getting the cancer diagnosis is I went to Starbucks, and I paid it forward. I bought coffee for me and the person behind me. And then I just had this intense need to connect to everybody. I wanted to call friends. I wanted to be with family because I had been starved of relationships for so long. That’s when I realised that relationships were a key piece. Being in supportive relationships was a key piece to my sense of burnout and my sense of anxiety. You can have mindfulness, meditation, and calm moments, but you also need other people to love you and support you. I know so many academics, including me, say, ‘I don’t need people because I don’t have time. I don’t have time to talk to my friend- I talked to her three months ago. I’m good.’ No, you need the support and the love of other people, and you need to make space for yourself. That’s my journey in a nutshell.

I am so sorry to hear about your illness! And I’m glad you are doing better now. When did you decide to quit academia and transition to having your own business?

It was going to be a 10-year plan. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to leave, but I can’t do it right away.’ And then my husband got a job across the country, so we moved back to Denver, which is where we were before, from Michigan. And I thought, ‘Okay, I guess this is my chance. I’ll go ahead and start my business.’ Before I started though, I took a job as a visiting assistant teaching professor. I was in that job for a few months, and I got sick again. Not cancer, but it was a serious autoimmune disease. My body kept telling me to stop it, so I was only there for a few months, and I had to say, ‘I know I signed a year contract, but I’m done. I can’t do this.’ I had been trying to do my business and I was coaching people on the side, so after I finally left that job, I could just take full flight. 

This actually makes me think of the fact that many researchers also often move to other countries! For example, for their Postdoc, or if they take a job in a totally new city. The US, for example, is huge. Or in Europe, where I am, people often move between countries where the language is different, the culture is different and you don’t know anyone. This is really, really hard, and then you add suddenly having long distance relationships with your friends to the mix. I think this is a good reminder for all of us to take this seriously, to build relationships and to maintain relationships for our own health and happiness. 

I know that you also talk a lot about burnout, and you help academics with preventing burning out. What are the signs that you are heading towards that point of burn out?

I use Polyvagal theory to think about it. This is Stephen Porges’s work where he talks about these three levels. On the first level, you feel very connected to other people, you feel very connected to yourself, you’re calm, you can hang out, for example, in a meeting, and feel like your needs are still being taken care of. You can sit and position your body in a certain way, because that feels right to you.. Then when your nervous system becomes overwhelmed, you fall into fight or flight. And when the fight or flight happens, you’re pushing really hard, you’re doing everything you can to make it work or you’re running away from things so that you can create space over separately. The problem is that academics stay in that mode for too long, because ideally, you’re supposed to only go into fight or flight for temporary things. You should move through this one thing that’s overwhelming you and then you move back up to that connection place. But academics will stay here for years, and when they stay here too long, they fall into freeze, and freeze is how I see burnout. 

Freeze is when you cannot lift your head up long enough to write an email. It is a place where you can’t function. I had Dr Özgün Ünver on my podcast, the Self-Compassionate Professor, and she talks about burnout and her own story. She said she was literally on her sofa, unable to move. She couldn’t do anything. And the only reason she was able to even get medical care is because she had a friend come over to visit her and said, ‘We need to do something about this.’ and this friend took her to a doctor and that’s when she finally started to get on the path toward better health. The main sign is that you are incredibly unmotivated. You really don’t know how to make anything work and you feel frozen. Everybody has different symptoms, but I think the primary one is that you just don’t know how to function anymore.

I was getting stomach aches. Your body is often telling you, ‘You need to chill out.’ And you think, ‘Oh, no, but I can’t.’ Your brain has this conversation with your body, where your brain says, ‘No, you need to step up and do the work and keep going.’ Listen to your body. That’s where your wisdom is — in your body. 

Your body will stop you eventually. And that’s what happened to me. And I really believe that’s what my cancer diagnosis was. If you find yourself getting sick, that’s a sign. Another symptom that I see often, and I saw in myself, was forgetting things. I used to be this teacher who knew my students’ names and I could very easily call on them at any time. Suddenly, I just stopped remembering their names. I was in a class, and I couldn’t call on them by name anymore. 

How can you get out of this state before it’s too late? 

We have the culture of academia telling us, ‘Don’t slow down’ and mix that with your own work addiction that maybe not everyone but most of us have, which also tells you not to slow down. You have to be in a really strong place and connected to yourself and clear about what your values are and what you actually need in your life. You need to be able to talk back to the culture and to your inner critic that’s telling you to keep pushing. You need to say, ‘No, I can’t do this anymore. And I’m going to figure out a way to stop all the crazy.’ Because it is crazy.

There are two things that you said that I found interesting – the first one is work addiction. You said almost all of us have it. And I always thought that I didn’t have it, then recently I’ve come to the conclusion, especially during the pandemic, that I am a little bit addicted to work, just because I find it very rewarding. That’s a luxurious place to be in, because I’m my own boss, I get to do things that I find fun. I genuinely love my work. But I also find it addictive and sometimes I find it hard to stop. So, if people were trying to self-diagnose, what are signs that you’re addicted to work?

The number one sign is what we were talking about earlier in terms of not being able to let the ‘energy’ of work go, even when you’re doing other things. You’re with your kids, or you’re trying to clean the house, and you can’t do it because you’re just thinking about work. Every minute you get, you find a way to maybe open your email, or look at this one thing, one last time. If you can’t let it go, that’s a pretty good sign you’ve got some addiction going on.

I know it’s scary, but if you say what you need now, and you’re bold enough to do that, that opens the door for other people to feel like they can say what they need.

The next thing I would like to talk about is the academic culture — especially the structure and the system. This is because I don’t want to make academics feel like that it’s their own fault for not feeling good because they are doing everything wrong. Oftentimes, when we find ourselves in situations that we find hard to deal with, there is of course a personal component, things we could have done better, if we knew better etc. But there’s also a whole structure that makes it really easy for us to get to that place. In academia, the way it’s set up is often contributing massively to why people are not feeling good- with their work or getting sick.

Can you speak a bit about that? Are there any structural changes that you would like to see? What exactly do you see as contributing to the bad work environment in academia?

Academia doesn’t have a culture of career wellness, for sure. It’s not like you can go to your PhD advisor, and you say, ‘You know, I’m just really having a hard time with this chapter. My brain is not working.’ Generally, a PhD advisor will say, ‘Well, push a little bit harder, get it done!’ We don’t have a culture that allows us to say ‘Well, why don’t you take a break and come back to it?’ or ‘Why don’t you check in with me in a couple days, and tell me how you’re feeling?’, or ask ‘How are you feeling?’, ‘Are you feeling burned out?’ Those kinds of conversations need to happen, we need to have a culture that supports that kind of thing. 

They can go to faculty development centres and learn how to teach better and learn how to be a more productive researcher, but they need something deeper. They need to be able to connect on a deeper level about what it is they actually are experiencing, emotionally and psychologically. A lot of them go to therapy to get that support, but a lot of them also tell me that they would like to have that kind of support in their institutions, and they don’t have it. So the question is, what can we do to institutionally give faculty support?

If you could dream of the ideal university as a workplace that centres around career wellness, what would that look like?.

I don’t know what exactly it would look like, but it would facilitate transparency about how people are feeling. People would be able to very openly say, ‘Look, I’m burned out, look, I’m overwhelmed. I need a break’, without feeling like people are going to judge them or disrespect them for that. They would be able to feel safe and supported and be able to say what they need.

I know it’s scary, but if you say what you need now, and you’re bold enough to do that, that opens the door for other people to feel like they can say what they need. So doing that now, even before we have these institutional structures to support that, is a really good idea and you can support institutional change just by making those kinds of choices.

That’s something really important to always remember. If you feel this way, then in 99% of cases, it’s not just you who feels that way. If you feel that way in this situation, then most likely someone else in your situation would feel exactly the same way, so it’s not you, it’s the circumstance that is creating this response in you. Whatever struggle you are currently feeling in academia, I can confidently say, ‘You are not alone.’ There are many people who feel the exact same thing. 

Is there anything else that I haven’t asked that you would like to add or say? 

I do want to say one more thing about listening to our bodies. As academics, we like to be in our heads a lot. It’s a thing we’re good at! But I would ask you to notice what your body feels like when you’re doing particular tasks. Take what you’re perceiving and what you are doing in your head, and just bring it down to your heart and to your chest, and as you’re doing particular tasks, notice how you feel during those moments. 

I do this in my coaching, where I ask my clients to look at all the tasks involved in their teaching work, research work and service work, and break it down and rate it – give it a number. ‘I feel minus 10 when I’m doing this task.’ and ‘I’m feeling positive 3 when I’m doing this task.’ Really notice what it feels like in your body so you have a clear idea about what needs to be changed and what you can do more of. Please listen to your body, because it’s so important and we don’t do it enough!

I like that! I love the idea of putting feelings into data points! 

Of course you do! (laughter) You have a PhD; this is what we do!

I love rationalising things, so I’ve got to start doing that! My work isn’t focused on career wellness, I’m helping researchers get published. And writing and the pressure to get published can create a lot of stress for academics!

So, one thing I recommend to researchers who feel like they don’t have enough time to write is a time study: to write down throughout the day what you’re working on and see where the time sucks are and how much context switching you’re doing throughout your day, so you can pinpoint where you’re losing time. I think this strategy combined with your emotion scoring technique could be a really powerful strategy to find the source of your stress in a data-driven way! If you’re finding that an unimportant task took you an hour and made you feel a minus 10, then maybe that’s the reason why you are feeling stressed all day. 

Totally!

If someone who is listening or reading this interview wants to find out more about you, or maybe work with you, where can they go? 

You can find me at selfcompassionateprofessor.com. You can check out my podcast, which is called the Self-Compassionate Professor on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and there is a decision guide on my website that helps to ask questions on whether you should leave academia or not. And if you want to schedule a consultation with me on my website, there’s a place you can do that. I work with people who are trying to feel better in their academic job or those trying to decide whether or not they want to stay in academia. 

Thank you. Definitely check out Danielle’s work and podcast! I actually was on her podcast recently, too! If you are interested, you can listen to that episode here, where I talk about my own journey and career wellness.

Thank you so much for this conversation, Danielle! I’ve really taken a lot from it.

Note: The interview was transcribed and copy-edited for clarity and concision.