{"id":890,"date":"2020-09-11T17:33:55","date_gmt":"2020-09-11T16:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/?p=890"},"modified":"2020-09-21T13:10:26","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T12:10:26","slug":"just-take-it-slow-how-to-beat-pandemic-burnout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/just-take-it-slow-how-to-beat-pandemic-burnout\/","title":{"rendered":"Just take it slow: how to beat pandemic burnout"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In July 2020, Emily Murphy was invited, by the Literature Speaker Series within the School for English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle, to run a seminar on \u2018Reinventing Your Work in Lockdown\u2019. Emily workshopped ideas with a group of PGRs within the CLU before running her seminar. What followed was a series of honest, challenging and hopeful conversations about how to move forward in a field of work that has, just like everything else, been deeply affected by our current pandemic. This is the first of a series of reflections from different members of the CLU, born out of these conversations in July. The subsequent reflections will follow as we move into autumn. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emily Murphy<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me\nprovide full disclosure: I have a very energetic two-year old who hasn\u2019t been\nto nursery since March. Nearly six months post-lockdown and I\u2019ll admit that my\nresearch is intermittent, nowhere near what it was earlier in the semester\nbefore everything closed down in the UK. My situation is hardly unique and many\nof us are facing our own challenges caused by the coronavirus pandemic. While\nI\u2019ve certainly practiced selfcare, including indulging in an afternoon nap or\nNetflix binge when needed, I also want to get back to the projects I started before\nlockdown. So how do you manage when your mind is actively turning back to your research\nand yet you still feel exhausted from the emotional stress caused by the\npandemic or the extra workload in either your personal or work life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take\u2026it\u2026slow.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having recently picked up running like so many others during lockdown (thanks, NHS, for the nifty Couch to 5k programme), it strikes me that research is a lot like running. Many of us have taken a long break from research out of necessity, and to try to work in the way we did pre-lockdown is just not feasible. If you suffered a knee or ankle injury and took four months off of running, you wouldn\u2019t just step out your door and start running a 10k. No, you\u2019d do gentle exercise, perhaps even walking, and radically increase your mileage and pace as you eased back into your normal routine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Even in running circles, the benefits of taking it slow are advocated.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Even in\nrunning circles, the benefits of taking it slow are advocated.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same should go for our research. Just like exercise, daily research and writing is a habit that we have to build, and it\u2019s perfectly possible for our \u2018mental muscles\u2019 to atrophy a bit during a long break. I don\u2019t mean that we\u2019re less capable of this work, but it may be hard to sustain the same kind of focus that we once did. So, while pre-lockdown you may have been happy to read for two hours and write for an additional two, you may want to cut that down to just twenty to thirty minutes to start out. By slowly building up and seeing the progress in your research project, you can then add more time as you feel ready. (For running, it\u2019s 10% per week and we might equally apply rules of building back up to our research intensity as scholars).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly,\nwe need to be attentive to our \u201cburnout threshold.\u201d In building back up to a\nmore intense research capacity, we also have to be honest about what we can\nmanage to do. Five minutes once a day while you take a shower? Great! 10\nminutes to jot down a few sentences or two? Sure, that\u2019s still more than what\nyou had written yesterday! As newspaper headlines continue to remind us, we\u2019re\nstill in a \u201cnew normal,\u201d meaning that work life is anything but the same with\nmany of us dealing with much higher workloads to meet the demands of changes in\nthe higher education sector. In such a situation, slow-paced research makes\ngood sense as a way of protecting our mental health and avoiding burnout, and\nin fact is a method that some of the most active and respected children\u2019s\nliterature scholars I know practice (because let\u2019s face it, time for research\nis never easy to find). Pre- or post-lockdown, taking it slow just works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the next\ntime you feel guilty about not working, just repeat the mantra, \u2018Take it slow.\nTake\u2026it\u2026slow.\u2019 We\u2019ve all got our own needs, and there\u2019s no shame in working at\na pace that enables you to be happy and healthy, and that will allow you to\nmaintain your research agenda for the long-term. Happy writing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Banner image by Green Chameleon on Unsplash<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In July 2020, Emily Murphy was invited, by the Literature Speaker Series within the School for English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle, to run a seminar on \u2018Reinventing Your Work in Lockdown\u2019. Emily workshopped ideas with a group of PGRs within the CLU before running her seminar. What followed was a series of honest, … Continue reading Just take it slow: how to beat pandemic burnout<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7893,"featured_media":886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[297,24,293,294,296,258,295,93,284],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-burnout","tag-childrens-literature-unit","tag-covid-19","tag-pandemic","tag-reinventing-your-work-in-lockdown","tag-research","tag-running","tag-school-of-english-literature","tag-self-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/childrensliteratureinnewcastle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}