Students and Academics: Don’t Guilt Yourself Into Working Over the Holidays
By: Simon Spichak
Tags: Psychology, Growth, Research, Self Improvement, Stress

Students and Academics: Don’t Guilt Yourself Into Working Over the Holidays

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

Many academics and grad students work beyond 40 hours most weeks. Experiments may warrant us staying a little longer in the lab or even coming in during the weekend. Working from home keeps us glued to screens. We anticipate emails, questions, or slack messages. We encounter distractions if you are a parent or caregiver. We are more stressed than usual. We are prone to feel unproductive during the last few weeks. But this does not justify or necessitate your work during the holidays. Take this time to mute your email notifications, delete that slack app and recharge.

The Burdens of Pandemic-Related Stress

There is plenty of evidence that this pandemic negatively impacts our mental health. Two-fifths of participants indicated they thought about leaving academia because of this stress. Specifically, adapting and designing online modules is stressful. Many academics might not have the expertise, tools or support for seamless implementation. Faculty and mentors bear the secondary emotional trauma of their students and trainees. Women face the disproportionate burden of childcare. Many of us are also living and studying thousands of kilometres away from home.

Faculty and especially graduate students are not compensated fairly for this work or stress. One of the most insidious aspects of stress is ]it makes you feel less productive and exaggerates impostor syndrome. The more stressed we get, the less efficient our work becomes, the guiltier we might feel. We might wrongfully feel that we do not deserve a break. However, working without recharging ourselves will only harm us in the long-run. There should be no guilt associated with taking these breaks.

Recharge with Tools to Improve Your Mental Health

Control when you receive new emails

Wouldn’t it be incredible if you could log-in to your email three weeks from now without 60 new unread emails? Inbox Pause integrates with Gmail, Outlook and iPhone clients to let you stop new emails from arriving into your inbox. You don’t have to worry about the temptation of checking your emails or new notifications until you decide you’re ready to get back to work.

There are other tips to control the flow of emails! Simply deleting the email apps on your phone will prevent you from checking it during your leisure time. Setting screen time rules on your phone could alternatively lock your email applications when you are off work or on vacation. The stress of being continuously present inspired the Employee’s Right to Disconnect laws in some European countries.

Clearer Thinking Suite of Tools

Through the past few decades, we’ve advanced our knowledge of psychology and mental health. Often these new advances are difficult to implement into our daily lives. I love the interactive tools and content on Clearer Thinking. They help you become more mindful and sleep better and even learn about yourself and your values. These tools are free and based on evidence-based methods. Clearer Thinking strives to help us improve our habits:

Meanwhile, positive habits are vital for sustained progress towards long-term goals, but they can be difficult to form, and the best practices for permanently instilling them remain a matter of guesswork for most people. Scientists have developed effective tactics for countering many of the problems identified by this research, but very few of us have integrated these insights and techniques into our personal and professional lives in a consistent way.

Breathing Exercises and Mindfulness

During stress, our heart rate and breathing speeds up. Quick, shallow breaths are hallmarks of anxiety and panic attacks and reduce levels of oxygenation in the body. Since our breathing is biologically-connected with our heart-rate, breathing exercises prove beneficial. Indeed, slow deep breaths reduce both psychological and physiological levels of stress! There are multiple online tutorials for this exercise. Try taking a moment to breathe in deeply through your nose. See if you can breathe in over five seconds. Then gently exhale and repeat. This might help you regulate aspects of your stress. If you would like to have some guidance towards a state of clam, there are many different meditation apps you might try including Headspace, Calm or Breethe.

A Healthy Dose of Self Care

Most of all, some time off lets us have some time for ourselves. I embrace this time to go for walks in a park or forest, read and drink coffee. It is important to catch up on all the sleep that you’ve missed! Having some time just to yourself or your family provides you room to pamper yourself and recharge. Maintaining a healthy sleep schedule and diet as well as exploring the nature around us will ease stress.