Burnout Culture
How the quest for a PhD led me to crash and burn.
In January 2019, when I returned to my graduate research lab after Christmas break, I spent the first three weeks completely paralyzed. In theory, I knew I should be taking advantage of the little dedicated research time I had, before the frantic spring semester started back up. Instead, I spent the time in a depressive lull, overcome with the inescapable fear that any results I produced would continue to be disappointing. Rather than returning to work feeling rested and recharged from my two-week holiday, I felt terrified, despondent, and exhausted. My ever-lengthening list of poorly executed assays and frustratingly unhelpful results weighed on my every thought. These weren’t just failed experiments, but personal failings. Every facet of my environment was assuring me that, if I had only worked harder, been even more meticulous, pursued the research with a relentless single-minded intensity, then I would have gotten promising data by now. But no matter how hard I was working, how exhausted I felt, it was never enough.
When I returned to the lab in January, I felt completely helpless, unable to give my supervisor what he demanded, and unprepared for the looming specter of my candidacy exam in May. Instead of feeling motivated and spurred into action by this challenge, I was crippled into inaction by the grim expectation of failure. My graduate career all came to a head in February, when I was forced to confront that I was on the precipice of a complete mental breakdown.
Coincidently, around this time, I was introduced to the concept of burnout in an article for Buzzfeed news by Anne Helen Petersen. In this article, Petersen described the condition of “millennial burnout” and how it has become a pervasive and malignant condition in modern society. In the last year, burnout, described as “the millennial condition” by Petersen, has gone viral. In addition to the influx of articles written about burnout, several YouTube personalities have spoken out about it in the past year. After years of silent suffering and unaddressed social failings, the endemic reality of burnout has finally taken center stage.
But what is “burnout” and why should it be any more prevalent today? The common misconception is that burnout is a condition relegated to individuals whose careers are high stress and extremely difficult and that it can be cured effectively with a tropical vacation, a day at the spa, or some “me-time.” In reality, burnout is a far more complex and insidious affliction rooted in the psyche and in the very structure of our modern society.
Burnout cannot simply be described as exhaustion from overwork. Normal exhaustion from hard work is meant to be satisfying. Consider the bone deep fatigue you feel after a particularly hard work out. You are tired, but in that pleasant, gratifying way that is permeated with a sense of accomplishment. In an article for 1843, Josh Cohen writes that burnout “combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained.” Burnout happens when “you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”
This nervous exhaustion can manifest itself as severe anxiety, depression, panic attacks, crippling indecision, irritability, weakened immunity, and insomnia. These symptoms can make it nearly impossible for the burnout sufferer to make real productive progress on their endless task list, which only serves to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and exhaustion that triggered the burnout. Petersen notes that this oppressive feeling can often present itself as “errand paralysis,” a phenomenon in which the individual fails to complete mundane tasks, because they see them as unproductive, unrewarding, or requiring decisive action. This is the crux of the burnout epidemic, which makes it so crippling. In one stroke, burnout paralyzes its victim entirely, making even routine actions seem insurmountable, and simultaneously eats away at their ego with the pernicious and tormenting belief that they are never doing enough.
Just as I was emerging from my January depressive lull, I quickly found myself catapulting into a chasm of anxiety and panic. Classes were starting, which meant a good deal of my time became occupied with instructing chemistry labs, helping students with their coursework, and grading endless papers. For the first time though, I didn’t have any classes myself. Rather than being a welcome reprieve, however, this made my panic worse. Without the additional work and stress of class assignments, I was out of excuses. My failure to produce results in my research was now, in my reckoning, exclusively my fault.
At the same time, our labs were coming under construction, meaning equipment and chemicals had to be consolidated and moved. In the midst of my panic, I was wholly unprepared. Where others in my lab had spent the time in advance preparing chemicals and planning to adjust their experiments for the construction, I was caught floundering in the midst of my own personal panic attack. I was coming in evenings and weekends in the tiring hope of producing something worthwhile before the construction began. I remember coming in on a Saturday only to realize that the one reagent I needed was out of stock. It sent me into a tailspin of panic. The hallways, echoing and quiet, became increasingly claustrophobic as I walked circles around them looking in every corner for the chemicals I needed. I sketched hasty backup plans in my head, quick bursts of hope, only to discount them immediately. I was stuck in a mental and physical loop. I was too burned out to rationalize a solution and too panicked by the idea of not having useful results to surrender fully.
When I read Petersen’s article, I felt overwhelmed with a strange mix of relief and terror. Here, put in plain words, was named the affliction that had induced in me both blind panic and hopeless despair. Burnout wasn’t just some endpoint I was careening towards; it was all around me. It was a fog saturating every aspect of my daily existence, and it was suffocating me.
When I decided to step back from graduate school and attempt to finish with a Master’s degree instead, it was a decision I made out of panic. It is only looking back with the benefit of hindsight that I can appreciate that it was a necessary choice. During that time, I was willfully ignorant of the ways in which burnout was eating away at my mind and my body. I was sleeping less than ever, fasting for hours and then binging unhealthily, drinking massive amounts of caffeine in the morning to keep me going, and drinking alcohol in the evenings for the purpose of calming my anxiety. I was actively sacrificing my health for the work, a very risky move for someone suffering from a chronic illness that had landed me in the hospital multiple times. It was unsustainable and dangerous, but seemed somehow justified.
At the same time, I had lost all clarity of purpose, if I even had any initally. My friends with Bachelor’s degrees were making money, real money. They had upward mobility in their careers and the chance for their hard work to translate into raises and promotions. They had the resources to begin saving for retirement. They worked hard at their jobs, but they had time for relationships, hobbies, and vacations. Meanwhile, I felt increasingly trapped in a world where I was destined to make the same pathetic salary for years, working weekends and evenings for no extra compensation until I could graduate, a feat that can take a decade for some. And, any time I tried to carve out a tiny sliver of time for myself, a weekend off or a week back home, it felt like indulgence. If I were truly dedicated, I would not need time off.
It became increasingly apparent that, within graduate school, your value is proportional to how much of yourself you are willing to sacrifice for the work. Running experiments and assays in the evenings and weekends isn’t just encouraged, it is required. It was made clear to me, very early on, that I was expected to be dedicated to the work at the exclusion of all else. If college is supposed to be a balanced, well-rounded experience, then graduate school is meant to be the opposite. Graduate school, which for many is sold as the key to higher paying careers and job security, was built on an academic tradition of the relentless pursuit of subjects that are pedantic and specific.
With a toxic climate such as this, it is unsurprising that just over 50% of students in doctoral programs actually complete their degree. In an article for The Atlantic, Te-Erika Patterson discusses the role of burnout and mental health in these staggering levels of graduate student attrition. “The majority of students who enter doctoral programs possess the academic ability to complete their studies,” she writes, “but systemic issues at schools may lead to high attrition and mental distress among graduate students.” The issue of graduate student burnout is not a case of students who simply are not cut out for rigorous academia, but rather it is symptomatic of a failure ingrained into the very structure of academic institutions that can only be resolved by wholesale institutional reform.
When I returned to my hometown after finishing my Master’s degree, I was surprised by how much recovering I still needed to do. I had assumed that, once I removed the source of the burnout, the symptoms would dissipate on their own. However, as much as burnout is a systematic and institutional issue, it becomes an intimately personal one too. As Petersen writes, we become burned out, because we “internalize the idea that [we] should be working all the time.” Once internalized, the instinct to stay consistently productive at the expense of all else becomes like an addiction.
These days, I find that self-care has become like an atrophied muscle that I need to rebuild, carefully and tenderly. The simplest things, like eating well, sleeping properly, and staying active, have become counterintuitive to me because they are unproductive. I still catch myself trying to find ways to make eating more efficient so that I can get more done. My mind, desperate for the tormenting relief of productivity, ransacks every moment for its next fix. Now, I am relearning how to take pleasure in the work, how to carefully wring out that grateful exhaustion from every blessed moment. I am trying to pay more attention to what I can give to the world that is reciprocal, rather than what I can sacrifice. I am attempting to recognize and appreciate the places where I am valued, rather than exploited. Great work takes time and patience. Inspiration is not an abundant and persistent resource; it requires space to breathe and bloom. In the 21st century, it is easy to forget that we are not yet fully transfigured into machines. In our relentless drive towards progress, we must not sacrifice our precious humanity on the merciless altar of productivity.
