(posted on behalf of @Suzana Varga)
With the new academic hiring cycle around the corner, I thought it would be helpful to reflect on well-being-related themes that can become prominent in times when many of us may be reaching the pressure point known as the job market. While my job market experience was interrupted in the midst of it by an extended leave due to burnout, I do think that such an “extreme case” offered opportunities for important lessons to derive. I hope to be able to depict these lessons in a way that can support my peers’ job market journey and serve as a reminder about the importance of taking care of ourselves at all times, particularly in those of heightened demands.
For many, it won’t be a surprise to hear that continuously trying to optimize our time and efforts so that we maximize our productivity seems to resemble what we may refer to as “business as usual” within our academic jobs. The job market, entailing extra added demands to our already busy and overbooked agendas, can easily prompt us to find ways in which we could optimize even further. While there is nothing wrong with aiming to further optimize our schedules and efforts, such added demands way too often result in added work hours at the cost of our mental and physical health. And sooner rather than later, many of us find ourselves rushing from one demand to another as we aim to work around the clock. Unfortunately, we usually only notice the consequences of such extended workdays when these are coalescing way beyond the state when a good night of sleep or a (self-care) day off could easily recover us. In other words, way too often we recognize that we need rest only when we have already been in heightened and often extended distress.
What could help us prevent this from happening is to build awareness about how we feel physically, mentally, and emotionally. Namely, we are all different and there can be different indicators of the stress levels that are present in our lives. Encouraging ourselves to explore what forms such indicators may take up in daily life can be beneficial for regulating our energy levels while navigating the job market journey as well. For instance, I notice that when I feel at my best, I am calm, composed, optimistic, motivated, creative, and able to maintain consistent and healthy levels of productivity. While being in such a state, my life resembles routines, stability, and regularity. I pay attention to what I eat and aim for a healthy and diverse high nutrition diet. I sleep relatively consistently in terms of duration as well as times when I go to bed and wake up. I stick to my workout routine, and I mindfully alternate between taking time for myself and spending it with the people I love and care about. In other words, I am in my green zone.
As my stress levels start increasing, my routines start gradually eroding. I start skipping few of my weekly sports classes and I replace my healthy home-cooked meals with quick and ready-made options. My sleep gets disturbed as the quality and quantity of the time I spend asleep decreases. My productivity begins to suffer as my concentration levels become more volatile. In other words, I am entering my orange zone.
If the added demands further intensify or are steadily present over an extended period of time, I begin noticing that I quite literally “stop” my life as the central and only theme towards which I exert my efforts becomes work. I engage in overoptimizing my schedule – planning tasks minute by minute and figuring out how I could squeeze in just few more to do’s in a day of work. I start ordering takeout way too often, eating the first edible thing I bump into or skipping meals altogether. I restrain myself from any sports activity “as time away from work is time wasted”. And guided by a similarly destructive logic, I start slowly isolating myself and avoiding others’ company. “I have better things to do – I have to be productive, after all.” My sleep starts oscillating anywhere between five hours of sleep and full insomnia. And guess what, demanding and forcing high productivity levels at all costs, just harms and deteriorates my output more than ever. In other words, I’ve reached my red zone.
The good news is that building awareness of such indicators that can signal a change in our state of being (physical, mental, and emotional) is possible. By doing so, at any stage, we can start turning things around by engaging in activities that can counterbalance the overdrive we find ourselves in. How much time such “reversal” may take depends on how deep into a certain zone we pushed ourselves. If you haven’t yet, I would like to offer a friendly nudge to take a moment and reflect on how you feel and how your life looks like at your best (green zone), at moderate stress levels (orange zone), and at heightened stress levels (red zone). During my job market experience, I definitely pushed and kept myself in an extended and intensified red zone. With these reflections, my intention is to encourage you to be more mindful than I was, and bring this supporting tool along and occasionally revisit it during your job market journey.
What may be helpful to keep in mind is that the process of arriving into any of the zones is not fully linear in its progression. In my subjective experience of the market, I had good and bad days. On the good days, I’ve seen the whole process as a two-way street – yes, schools are selecting candidates, but we, as candidates, also have a choice to make. In my process, I heavily leaned into what my intuition was telling me and based on that created a relatively narrow selection of schools where I eventually applied to. Choosing a place of future employment does not only center around tenure requirements, available research time, funding, prestige and so forth…, but it also involves choices around what colleagues we want to be surrounded by, what is the nature of the working culture we join and become both receivers and contributors to it, and how we feel about becoming a potential future member of a certain group. When in the hiring process, I would like to remind you that you also have a choice. While schools might select you (which is great news!), beyond the hard criteria, it is more than alright to ask yourself whether you’d enjoy the company of those who are selecting you. In essence, at some point settling the question whether I would be happier with any academic job or no job at all, was giving me most comfort and confidence in knowing that I am keeping my interests and values in check.
Making decisions about how to approach the market can be overwhelming – so many schools out there, so many selection criteria, how to decide where to apply and how to draw boundaries around our job search. Preparing for the market, in my experience, really helped me to reflect on what are my values, wants, qualities, achievements as well as important attributes of a job that I would feel fulfilled doing day-in-day out. Making these instances more available to my conscious mind supported my efforts in exploring where I could find such academic environments that would match my qualities, interests, and values.
On the good days, I also looked at the market experience as something close to a fun experiment. The purpose of the experiment was to stay true to myself without compromising my wants and personhood and see what the market’s feedback may be. Intense attempts at self-promotion as well as self-aggrandizing efforts were always way too far away from me and always felt like playing a role that I just couldn’t afford playing. Drowning in the overemphasized importance of publications and R&Rs, we tend to underestimate the role and power of personality in the job search and hiring process. While the hard indicators that we all hear about at all times are important, the reality is that hiring committees most of the time look for a well-rounded colleague with whom they can genuinely enjoy a conversation and/or collaborate with. Being pleasant, collegial, having a generally bright and up-lifting approach to life, exercising curiosity and genuine interest in creating meaningful social connections are all qualities that many of us share and can have tremendous value during the job market experience, yet somehow, we unjustly underplay their importance.
On the bad days, however, well… I would lie if I would say the bad days didn’t feel like something close to hiding under the Dostoevskyan floorboards. The tight, dark, and close-to-suffocating space under the floorboards – where it felt like I was stuck with negative self-talk, self-doubt, frustrations, self-criticism, and assuming the most catastrophic outcomes. Deeply into my red zone and losing out on any capacity to regulate my inner state of cognitive and emotional being, I kept fixating on those potential negative outcomes that I’ve feared the most. In all this, I was very harsh with myself, and was trying to prepare myself for intense external scrutiny. The anticipation of which just created a strong urge to isolate, hide, and avoid exposing myself to any levels of external assessment and evaluation. While on the better days, such preparatory activities would translate into active steps of planning and constructive action, on the bad days, they meant drowning in fear as I “actively” scared myself with all the possible scenarios that could go wrong, paralyzed to do anything that could move me forward.
I cannot know for sure, but I would say that my bad days were probably on the far extreme, and while I really believe that the job market experience doesn’t have to be so negatively tilted, I also know that it is unrealistic to expect for it to be all butterflies and rainbows. Hence, my intention with reflecting on the worst of my bad days is not by any means to scare or discourage my peers who are approaching their job market experience. Instead, it aims at creating and managing realistic expectations from this particular phase of the academic career path. Accepting upfront that there may be fewer great days can help with better navigating the journey, preparing for and coping with the hardships. Knowing also that some days are better than others can serve as reminders about the transient nature of experiences. No storm will last forever, and after the storm, the sun will shine again.
When it comes to my fixation on negative outcomes and coping with catastrophizing tendencies, what helped me tremendously was what I’ve feared the most – facing and honestly exploring what may be the absolute worst thing that can happen. Following the profound wisdom that I found in the words of one of the greatest lyricists of all time: “I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest (…) And I’ll tell it, and speak it, and think it, and breathe it”, I would go down the path to confront what is the worst that may come and accept it as a plausible possibility. And most of the times, the worst thing was as much as closing the market without an academic job. Is that really all there is to life?! What brought me further is to think of all the alternative possibilities that could be viable options if my imagined worst-case scenario actually takes place: “I can be on the academic market the following year; I can search for non-academic employment; I can be self-employed; I can take a short time off to recalibrate and explore what the next steps may be…” Just seeing the mere number of possibilities that one has even if their absolute worst happens, can be reassuring on those bad days.
Departing from the hopeless and cynical Dostoevskyan narrator speaking from the underground, I would rather believe that the words I’ve written here will be helpful and that my fellow PhD colleagues on the market will manage to successfully turn the bad into more of the good days and stay within or swiftly return to their green zones of being. There is nothing that would make me feel more fulfilled than if the thoughts shared here would be used as tools to enhance my peers’ subjective experiences of the job market – after all, what do we need hammers and chisels for if not to break out from under the floorboards and into the streaming sunshine.