At 31, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this pressure to be so busy at all moments. I spent many years away from academia, working in the tourism industry for nearly a decade after finishing my undergraduate degree at Notre Dame. Although my hours were long, the tasks to complete for each day were relatively straightforward. We delivered a product to our guests onboard our whale watch tours, we cleaned the boat at the end of the day, and we went home. Done. There was no residual anxiety left in my mind that there was a task left undone, something I should be doing. My return to grad school last year changed all of that.
I’d long prided myself on my ability to prioritize my leisure time and not let work take over my life. In grad school, it actually feels like there isn’t enough time in the day to complete my tasks, let alone maintain a semblance of balance with my personal life. There is this sinking, somewhat uncontrollable feeling that I should always be doing something, that each free moment is a time in which I could be achieving. It’s a combination of capitalism, the world of academia, and my own anxious tendencies, but for a woman who was raised in a society that taught her to please others before herself, the idea of not being able to get everything done is at best, nerve-wracking, and at worst, anxiety-spiral-inducing. How can I manage my own well-being while still plugging away at my goals?
When I look around, I see students embodying our society's culture of toxic productivity. Going into work on the weekend. Running their experiments late into the evening. Complaining about how much they have to do but not taking action to alleviate their load. It’s exhausting to watch, but I don’t blame a single one of them. This is constantly being asked of us — by our advisors, by the academic culture, by our own minds. But even if I know that this isn’t the way I want to live my grad school life, I struggle to escape the anxious uncertainty and guilt that I should always be doing more. We are fueled by the desire to achieve, produce, create. More, more, more. For many of us, this inner motivation is what brought us to grad school in the first place.
But what if we let ourselves off the hook? What if we take the entire weekend off, or plan a vacation in the middle of the quarter because we feel ourselves burning out. What’s going to happen? We fall behind? But from what are we falling behind? A life full of stress and no free time?
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