I’m a member of an online support group for the autoimmune condition I have and one of the recently diagnosed people wrote a post about how hard it is to cope with the pain and fatigue alongside their job, parenting, and housework and sometimes they have to “give in” and rest. They made giving in sound so negative and you could tell that they were filled with shame about it. Like giving in was giving UP and that was unacceptable. My response was to suggest to them that they might consider reframing rest as an active treatment for their condition… namely because it is. I know that I can’t go full-on with anything the way I used to. I need more sleep, I need more rest, even mental exertion sometimes becomes too much. Along with the many meds I take, I see rest as an essential treatment that I need every day, and some days more than others. Given the unpredictable nature of this disease and its flares, I just don’t take on as much as I used to professionally. And when I look at what my Spring and Summer have looked like, as I developed a totally new condition out of nowhere that is still not fully understood or definitively diagnosed (after seeing eight different medical professionals – though at least I’m now under the care of two good specialists), I feel very prescient for having decided not to pursue several opportunities that I wanted to do, but I would absolutely have had to drop.
For those of you with disabilities, spoon theory is probably quite familiar. We only have so many spoons each day – so much capacity for deep thought, stress, physical exertion, and even social interaction before we crash. And crashing often leads to further disability – for example, overexerting myself one day could (and has) lead to a flare of pain, fatigue, and a host of other symptoms that lasts weeks or even a month. So we try to plan our lives around leaving a few spoons in reserve each day, because stuff comes up, right? Our kid tells us as we’re going to bed that they need help with a project that’s due tomorrow. Our colleague is unable to do their part for a presentation we’re supposed to give together tomorrow and we need to figure out how to deliver their part as well. Our spouse gets sick and we have to take care of everything at home on our own. You can’t plan for everything and it’s inevitable that there will be times when you’re going to use up all your spoons and then some, but learning to plan around your capacity and leave some in reserve is a critical skill for those of us with disabilities. And learning how many spoons we have for different types of activities is a process and one that feels like building a sandcastle next to the water at low-tide. It’s an ever-changing endless process.
Even if you don’t live with disabling conditions, I can promise you that you only have so many spoons for each day. If you have a bad tension headache at the end of a workday, if your mind is racing when you try to go to sleep, if your shoulders are knotted and tight, if you’re snapping at the people you love because you’re all out of patience when you get home, if you’re so mentally exhausted that you can’t even make a simple decision like what to eat… those (and others) are signs that you have pushed yourself too hard. Even if you’re not disabled, pushing yourself beyond your capacity disables you, at least temporarily. It makes you less capable of reflection, attention, patience, and solid decision-making. As I’ve mentioned in the past, having too much on our plates (called “time poverty” in the literature) has been shown to increase our risk of anxiety and depression. And repeatedly pushing yourself too hard puts you at much greater risk of burnout. Whether you are disabled or not, there are consequences for working beyond your capacity.
And yet, so many of us overwork. For some of us, that’s more the norm than the rare exception, to the point where we see doing our contracted amount of work as underperforming, as lazy, as letting people down. Instead of looking at our to-do lists and seeing that we’re being asked to do way more than is reasonable, we assume that we just need to find new ways to become more productive. Because the failure must be ours, not the system of work that keeps intensifying, and asking us to do more and become expert in more and more things.
And being productive is a seductive thing, especially for people who have self-esteem issues. If you feel you’re not enough, meeting deadlines and getting things done can make you feel good about yourself temporarily. But it can easily become more about chasing the dopamine hit that comes from completing a task than about doing something meaningful. I think a lot of productivity is that way — feeling busy and getting things done can make us feel useful. If we’re busy, we must be worthwhile, right? It’s sort of a hedge against our existential worries. I must be a good person if I’m getting all these things done on time!
I’ve come to recognize that I feel a strong need to show people that I’m a person who lives up to their commitments and respects other people’s schedules and needs. Basically, I want to be liked, probably (definitely) to an unhealthy extent, and I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m inconveniencing or pissing off others. A library is very much an interdependent ecosystem where one person’s failure to complete a task can impact the timelines and workloads of others. For example, I’ve seen the negative impact that waiting until the end of the fiscal year to do the bulk of one’s book ordering has on our Technical Services staff. I don’t want to be the sort of person who causes stress for another colleague. That said, I think I’m a bit compulsive about my reliability to the point where I put completing tasks on time (even relatively unimportant ones) over my own wellbeing.
I think how we treat productivity comes from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I grew up hearing that I was a uniquely terrible kid and thinking I was inherently unlovable, and while I’ve become much more confident in myself, that assumption still hangs over me and colors my interpretation of everything. I think it’s very hard to feel deserving of rest when you are worried about what your colleagues will think if you have to rely on them because you can’t get x or y done. If you think you’re an inherently good person who is just as deserving of kindness and grace as anyone else at work, I imagine it would be a lot easier to do what you need to stay well.
I was extremely sick and was barely sleeping from March through July and I only took one day of sick leave because I felt like I needed to get all the tasks done before the end of the academic year (I’m on a 9-month contract). And it truly did take me every single one of those days I had left to complete everything. Would it have been the end of the world if I’d taken some sick leave to rest and came back to some of the projects in September? No. But I was also feeling a lot of guilt about needing people to cover for me for certain parts of my job in the Spring due to my new illness and felt the need to overcompensate by being super-productive.
I want to feel comfortable not completing things. I want to feel ok looking at to-do lists that I know I won’t complete at the end of the term or the year. I want to feel like I can take a sick day if I’ve slept only a few hours, even if it’s last minute and means my reference shift may not be covered. I want to be ok with letting people down if it means safeguarding my well-being. What’s really stunning is that I have much better boundaries than I used to and they are still fairly pathetic. I don’t take on nearly as much as I used to. I’m ok with saying no. I’m far better at conserving my energy and paying attention to my capacity on any particular day. And yet, I have so far to go, especially as I get sicker.
Last week, my family was visiting colleges in the Northeast. On Thursday, I had to wake up around 2am East Coast time, fly all the way back to the West Coast, and, since I arrived home around 10:30am Pacific time, I felt like I had a whole day to get household chores done, in spite of the fact that I was absolutely wrecked (that productivity urge is really ingrained in me). Instead, I spent the bulk of the day on the couch watching TV, went to sleep at 6:45pm, and have no regrets. It wasn’t laziness that kept me on the couch; it was the right treatment for my body and mind. We need to stop feeling guilt for giving our bodies and minds the comfort and rest they need.
Do we call taking a medication that we need for our survival “giving in?” What if we treated rest as a productive act like exercise? What if we saw rest as protecting our capacity; our overall ability to show up at work and in our lives? What if we saw it as being as integral to our health as the medications we take? And why are we so willing to cheat ourselves out of rest, often for things that in the long-run are not that important?
It’s one thing for me to take the rest I need at home, another entirely to do it when it will impact my colleagues (and, to be clear, I have amazingly lovely and generous colleagues who all support and cover for one another when life inevitably smacks us in the face). I need to keep reminding myself that it’s better for my workplace to have a healthy, happy colleague who is committed to the work and sometimes needs to take time off to stay healthy than a burnt out husk of a colleague. I need to remind myself that I won’t be able to be reflective, creative, or a solid decision-maker if I am too depleted. In the end, rest is integral to my doing my job well, as it is for all of you. You’re doing a service to your place of work when you take the time you need to rest and get/stay healthy because it makes you better at your job.
If you feel like you’re overworking, that you can’t slow down when you need rest, if you feel guilty for taking sick days when you need them, if you rely on getting things done for your self-worth, it’s worth interrogating the stories you tell about yourself and your work. Is whatever you’re going to do that day really more important than your health and, if so, are you really the only one who can do it? Do you give your colleagues grace when they are sick and take the time they need or if they miss a deadline because they have too many competing demands? Why can’t you extend that same grace to yourself? Why do you think you’re not deserving? (I find it sometimes helps to think of myself in the third person and imagine how I’d feel if my colleague needed whatever it is I do.) And if your workplace sucks and someone is going to resent you for doing what you need to do to take care of yourself, the problem is with them, not you. You deserve rest. We all do.
I still struggle mightily with this with my own chronic diseases. I try to set the example for my people because I want them to take good care of themselves, but am hypersensitive to people thinking I don't work hard enough. (I have the echo of an old boss in my head from when I first got sick saying, "You should have this under control by now." You, of course, know there is no such thing. Management, yes, but not the unrealistic expectation that you can make some small adjustments and be Old You.) I'm also finding there's a lot less flexibility as a dean than when I was a faculty member. I've been feeling like junk about feeling like junk (new excruciating nerve pain recently, which has also meant nearly no sleep) and hating that I'm not keeping my apartment as clean as I'd like, and reading this was a good reminder that for me, rest is medicine. When I am more ill, I need more medicine.
It helps that one of my bffs recently visited because she was also burned out, and she did. Not. Care. about my clutter. She had the spare room, a clean guest bathroom, and a cleared off couch. She never once said anything about my coffee table piles, and that absence of criticism was a GIFT. She also asked me if I wanted to go out or stay in, and was truly happy to stay in and watch Netflix murder with me with just as much joy as if we'd gone somewhere. I cried about it. It was a lovely reminder, like your post, that those who love us adjust, and we need to do what keeps us as healthy as we can be in these busted meatsuits. Sending you airhugs from afar.