Guest Post: Work-Life Balance in Academia

Emily Lynn is a 1+3 AHRC funded postgrad student at Lancaster University. Her research interests are faith-based organisations, the welfare state and public faith. Emily is also the founder of the  academic blog, Let’s Talk Academia. In today’s post, she talks about the problematic lack of a ‘work-life balance’ mindset in academia and urges more people to take a break. Follow Emily on Twitter at @EmilyJLynn, and have a look at Let’s Talk Academia’s website and  Facebook page here (links at the bottom). 

There seems to be this hushed common fact that the word ‘work-life balance’ doesn’t fit comfortably in the academia realm. PhD degrees don’t have set hours after all, so where is the stop line? For many postgrad students, there simply isn’t one and a five day week swiftly turns into a seven day week, full to the brim with what seems like endless work. And it’s true, the work does seem endless.

Whilst the word ‘work-life balance’ seems to be slipping through the net in academia, the word ‘burnout’ seems to be ever growing. It’s a term that almost seems to come hand in hand with doing a PhD or a research MA (leading onto a PhD). People work, work, work, ignoring this whole ‘work-life balance’ thing (because who has time for an actual work-life balance in this game?) and then comes increasing stories about people struggling with burnout time and time again. The topic of mental health issues in academia also continues to increase, but is it with any surprise when PhD/postgrad students feel like they have to be constantly working on their project – a project that is expected to fill a gap in knowledge, or at least contribute substantially to their chosen field? There’s a huge amount of pressure and responsibility attached to that, a pressure that leads to people sacrificing their personal life most of the time because they often feel like they “have to”.

Admittedly, although I’m making a huge effort to take more breaks away from my academic work, I feel ridiculously guilty for doing so. I feel guilty if I take a full weekend off because for some reason I feel like Saturday and Sunday are extra work days for postgrad students. If I’ve had an unproductive couple of days in the week, the weekend is almost a safety net for my studies where I can play “catch up” and get on top of the work I failed to do in the days prior.

However, this mindset is obviously wrong and it wasn’t until I went through burnout myself that I realised my whole work schedule was completely messed up. I’m now a huge believer in having a work-life balance and really do believe it is essential if you want to do well in academia. After all, academic work isn’t the kind of work where you can afford to not be the best version of you. How will it be possible to produce innovative work if you’re so tired that even reading doesn’t make sense to you anymore? To be successful in this line of work, it is so crucial to ensure that you place your wellbeing first, and that means making sure – no matter how busy you are – that you don’t let your personal life slide off the radar. Try and achieve this before you even get to the burnout stage, because once that stage is reached you end up being way more unproductive and everything just seems so much harder.

More importantly, listen to yourself and your body. Are you feeling really tired but still pushing yourself to read a book that needs to be finished? Are you struggling to string sentences together in a piece of important writing because your headache just doesn’t seem to be shifting? Did you forget to eat your lunch because there was “no time”? The questions can go on and on, but you get my drift. If you answered yes to any of those questions, or just know from your own body and mentality that you should probably take a break, then please do! Do yourself some good and take a long break away from your studies to do something for you, guilt-free. Catch up with your friends and family, spend some quality time with your partner, or maybe just take a break away from work on your own and do something you know will be good to take your mind off work. I promise you will feel so much better for it – and your work will be better for it too. 

Thanks so much to Emily Lynn for writing this piece, visit her blog at http://letstalkacademia.blogspot.co.uk/ and her facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/letstalkacademia/.