So, here we go, first proper blog post! Which, I’ll be honest, I’ve been nervous about doing so I’ve been putting it off. I’m probably doing it wrong, but that’s how you learn anything new, right? Anyway…let’s dive right in.
What even is self-care?
There’s a lot of discussion on social media these days about self-care, and what that looks like. Self-care can be crucial to our mental health and well-being, but the concept of self-care can be very fuzzy and ill-defined. Probably because it’s such a new concept. For decades, women have been trained to put themselves dead-last on the list of people they should care about (otherwise they’re selfish and greedy), and men have been told that they just need to “man up” and not take care of themselves (otherwise they’re weak and effeminate). Finally, people are pushing back against these outdated and toxic ideas and realising that they have to take better care of themselves.
In academia in particular, it can be hard to make time for self-care in between all of the other things you have to worry about. The workaholic, hyper-competitive environment of higher education (HE) lionises “hard work”, but defines it as working excessively long hours, not taking breaks or holidays, and taking on additional work for free. As though that’s something to be proud of. You might think in the world of the intelligentsia that working smarter, not harder, would be the cultural norm. Instead, people who protect their mental health by practising self-care are often resented by those who don’t. In this sort of toxic environment, self-care is especially necessary. The pressure can be relentless and crushing. It’s up to all of us to change the paradigm together.
For many people, according to what you might see on the #selfcare hashtag on Twitter, self-care might be as simple as taking regular breaks or going to the gym. Or cake and coffee with a friend. Maybe making time to call family and friends. It might look like creating a peaceful environment to retreat to outside of work, or going for a walk. For you, it might be something else. I’m not going to argue against of these, because the primary aim is to create a protective barrier around your mental health, and everyone has different needs. On this particular occasion, everyone is right. So what I want to do instead is to shoehorn another little self-care definition in there.
Self-care looks like self-parenting
When I was younger, my mum taught me all about self-care, although it wasn’t called that back then. When she shared her wisdom with me, I didn’t realise how much she was teaching me alongside the obvious stuff, like doing laundry, budgeting, cooking, grocery shopping, etc. She also taught me how to set boundaries, of when to help others and when to focus on myself. How to protect and respect myself enough to say “no”, and how to recognise when someone was being manipulative or unreasonable or wanting too much. The sort of things a parent would to protect a young child, she taught me to do for myself. Self-parenting, in other words.
Some of it was about being disciplined about the Little Things, day-to-day, so that they don’t spiral into Big Things that cause huge amounts of stress and anxiety. Nothing teaches you to keep on top of laundry like sitting in the campus laundrette for 5 hours on a Friday night when everyone else is out, because it’s the only time the machines are free. Grabbing groceries from the campus shop is convenient, until your balance tells you your budget is screwed for the rest of the month. Saying “yes” to “opportunities” may seem good for your CV, until you realise that there was a good reason no one else had volunteered for the unpaid/underpaid labour that’s now sucking up all your time with no actual reward for your efforts (not even a reference).
Believe me, this sort of discipline does not come naturally to me. Self-kindness and allowing things to slide have their place, but too much of that can create much bigger problems. So sometimes, I have to be my own parent and push myself into doing things I don’t want to do for the sake of Future Me. Her mental health is important, too.
Protect yourself from toxicity
Setting boundaries is the hardest part of this kind of self-care, because it requires self-respect. This doesn’t come easily in an academic environment where you’re supposed to feel grateful, irrespective of how you’re treated, as though your University doesn’t garner any benefit from your academic output. If you try to set boundaries, there’s the unspoken, nebulous (but ever-present) “others” who will do all the things you’re balking at, who are prepared put their mental and physical health way down on their list of priorities. “They will get all the papers if you don’t spend every waking moment working,” the unspoken threat goes. “They’ll get all the postdocs, all the permanent jobs, and you’ll be replaced”. This seems even more potent a threat when you consider the reality of how few permanent positions there are, and Universities and journals are relying on this to keep the culture of exploitation going. Whether it’s intentional or not, they use the hypercompetitive academic job market, and the fact that people really do love their research, to their advantage in order to keep researchers feeling “lucky” even as pay and working conditions get worse year on year.
No amount of cake, walking in nature, or “resilience training” can make up for the fact that the HE sector as a whole is doing extremely poorly by staff and their students. Stress, anxiety, depression and burnout are rife. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a PI who will watch out for you, shield you as much as they can, and warn you if they think you’re taking on too much. Sometimes, Ph.D. students who already got burned will give you a heads up about what they’ve already suffered to warn you not to do the same. If you’re unlucky, you have to guard against exploitation yourself. My advice? Keep your eyes wide open to the reality around you and get comfy with the word “no”.
Tips for self-protection
- Read your contract and know what’s in it. If you’re not contractually obliged to do something, you better be getting paid to do it.
- Join the students’ Union.
- Make sure you know who’s representing you at student-staff liaison meetings, and keep in touch with them.
- Put yourself, and your own interests, first. Decide for yourself where your boundaries are.
- If you’re not contractually required to do teaching, do it on your own terms. If you want the experience but the Uni won’t pay, offer yourself out as a private tutor so you can at least make money. Your time is your most valuable commodity!
Say no to labour “opportunities” from the University unless they have some material benefit to you. If you do outreach, get paid for it – most Universities have funding set aside specifically for this and it makes them look good, so don’t let yourself be conned into doing it for free. If you do teaching, get paid. If you do lab work for someone else, get paid or get co-authorship. By all means, help your fellow Ph.D. colleagues because they’ll help you in return, but don’t give away your valuable labour for free to your University. The fact that so many postgraduates, postdocs and staff have been doing this for so long – operating in firefighting mode for the sake of their students – is precisely why your pay and working conditions are deteriorating. The more you give, the more they’ll expect from you for free.
Be your own parent. Hold firm, know your worth, and don’t let others exploit you.
