Remembering academic self-care

The Scream - E. Munch (Google Art Project)

The hashtag #academicselfcare reminds you that it is your responsibility to take care of yourself,
because academia will rarely do it for you. Multiple people, including the wonderful @IHStreet, have spoken bravely of the struggles with psychiatric illness we encounter as academics. It's not clear whether the constant stress eats away at our well-being or whether scientists are just more neurotic because of their constantly inquisitive nature. Many if not all of us, at some point will deal with unbearable stress, lack of self-worth, depression and anxiety.

As far as depression goes, I think I have the best kind. It comes linked to major life events or hormonal changes and once identified, it is rapidly improved by standard medication. After multiple years of therapy, I'm pretty good at figuring out what is going on. Basically the drill is "Why am I so hopeless?" "For how long have I felt hopeless?" "Oh, maybe serotonin has gotten a bit wonky and needs a boost. I need to talk to someone about this." Exercise has also been very good at dealing with this when I feel things are not quite right. As I said, the best kind.

Still as lucky as I think I have been, depression is not an easy thing to go through and you cannot just "pick yourself up and snap out of it". It has impacted multiple years of my life and nowadays I monitor its comings very closely. For some reason the winter messes with me (cough, SAD, cough) and the summer NIH deadline has had me staring right down the abyss the past few years. I have very strong feelings about my future depending on how well I can convince a random group of invisible people. This winter was particularly bad for personal and professional reasons and I started wondering whether I'm burning out. A recent Harvard Business Review article on incipient burnout quoted
- "emotional exhaustion: feeling used up emotionally, physically and cognitively"  CHECK
- "easily upset and angered, have difficulty sleeping" CHECK
- "depersonalization, feelings of alienation and cynicism toward your job"  CHECK
- "capacity to perform is diminished as is your belief in yourself" CHECK

This sounds dangerously like some aspects of depression and for me one leads readily to the other. Since there are some actual problems that need to be solved in my job and life, what matters most is that I am healthy enough to do it. So, it's #academicselfcare time! I have not had an actual vacation (when I'm not writing a grant or doing a substantial amount of work on the side) in something like 18 months and I do not remember the last time I had a two-day weekend. The summer I started my postdoc I pledged I would take both Saturday and Sunday off each week for two months. The first weekend I just sat at home and watched 12 hours of TV each day because I had no idea how to plan weekend activities any more. Things are not as bad now as in grad school because I have learned to introduce downtime whenever I need it, but I feel like I need to get back to a regimented rest schedule. Once you become a professor, it is very easy to move things that need writing and thinking to the weekend because your day is so fragmented and interrupted by random things, you cannot find 2-3 hours of peace. So if you want to have downtime in the evening, you move certain chores to the weekend. The thing is, I just need to lock people out and protect my time during the week.

Here I pledge that I will have full weekends (and maybe 3-day weekends) in July and August, that I will plan a couple of kick-ass trips and that I will carve out some time every week to write and read (OMG, read!?) and do science-work that will actually push my research program forward. Oh, yes and get back to exercising regularly.