Overwhelm: our career-long friend

If that title sounds scary, you really need to read this!

But how can you afford the time? After all, you’re overwhelmed!

​One of the biggest ironies about wellbeing and productivity in the workplace is the belief that we don’t have time for our own mental wellbeing. Under everyday pressure, we blunder along on three cylinders, hoping that working ever harder will solve our overwhelm problem.

​It won’t!

​All it will do is reduce our capacity by exhausting us. Our to-do list will remain infinite for all the reasons described before!
 
Working long hours at an intense rate for a short time can sometimes be useful. It can give us a productivity boost that gets us over the line with a major project. But it only works if we do this intentionally and build in deliberate rest time afterwards. If instead we do it in a state of panic, in the belief that our world will end if we slow down, we are heading for a crash sooner or later. 
 
Like all negative emotions, overwhelm is actually there to help us. It is a message that there is a problem, requesting us to take an appropriate action. So what problem is it, and what action do we need to take? This is where we usually go wrong. 

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​Separating feelings from facts
Having too much to do is not the same as overwhelm. Overwhelm is an emotion, dominated by confusion over where to even start and a feeling of ‘what’s the point?’. It is a sense of hopelessness, loss-of-control and impending disaster. It feels awful and it needs to! 
 
An impossibly long to-do list, on the other hand, is an inescapable fact of modern life, especially for anyone with an open-ended job description, an imagination and a helpful personality. That’s most scientists! The altogether healthier, and more productive approach is to accept that our tasks will never end (at least not until we do), to prioritise them rationally in line with our values, and commit to doing our best at a sustainable rate.
 
The crucial message overwhelm brings us is that we are living beyond our means. This is why it needs to feel bad - that sense of hopelessness and confusion is an important warning. If we don’t slow down in a controlled manner, a crash is inevitable. But most of the time we make a futile attempt to speed up instead!
 
We know this if we think about it rationally. But however much we try, at any career stage, we often lapse back into overwhelm. Why?

​​​Early-career overwhelm: insecurity
In early career, it is feeling a need to prove ourself, insecurity, financial needs and a craving for recognition that tempt us to grab every opportunity, and follow every idea, that comes our way. The nagging thought that ‘this may be what makes the difference’ is never far away.
 
The problem here is uncertainty. In retrospect, I can certainly identify specific actions that helped launch my career, from being fastidious about adding control lanes on a gel to initiating an international conference series. In truth, however, we simply cannot know in advance which of the commitments we take on, or which ideas we follow up, will be the one/s that ‘make the difference’. Many other tasks I spent significant time and effort on led nowhere.
 
What we do know, however, is that diluting our efforts too far is counterproductive. If we rush everything or get too tired, our work quality suffers. Worse, it can undermine our health and private life. All we can do is to make an educated guess which actions will ‘make the difference’, give them our best shot and – crucially – accept there will always be uncertainty.
 
It can help to deal with uncertainty if we recognise that there are many paths to ‘success’. What matters is not just the choices we make but how we handle the outcome. We can be on the ‘wrong’ path and quickly correct without anguish as soon as we realise it, or the ‘right’ one and self-sabotage in any number of ways.

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​Mid-career overwhelm: habit and addiction
Getting a more secure position, such as a five-year fellowship or tenure-track post, should be a sign that our efforts are paying off. It also gives us more clarity on which of them have been most effective so we can focus our efforts around these. But old habits die hard. Invitations to conferences, new collaborations, or ideas or contacts that could lead to funding opportunities are not easily turned down, even if they divert our research topic. Committee work, reviewing requests and teaching requirements also accumulate. We need to play our part, but where is the line between doing that and doing someone else's too?
 
There may be a legacy of earlier roles that have outlived their usefulness. Ending them can be even harder than turning down new ones, but doing so is an important step. One specific example is being reluctant to stop labwork. In my case, I only did this after the most basic error in my final experiment, one I would never have made a few years earlier, brought it home to me that I was out of practice and rushing! What we need to do instead is to adapt, learning how to spot and support the best students and postdocs, people we feel safe to hand over control to. Outside work meanwhile, any family responsibilities can limit the time and energy available while also ratcheting up our financial needs, making career progression even more important.  

This career stage is tailor made for workaholism if we don’t see it coming. We may work all hours not because we have to, but because we have stopped getting satisfaction in other areas of our lives. Anna Lembke’s excellent book Dopamine Nation describes in graphic detail how our reward system can lead us to obsess over one particular action, and crucially how to stop.

​Late career overwhelm: struggling to accept the end!
Learning to live with infinite demand is one thing, but accepting that we are finite is even harder.
 
For most of our career, we tell ourselves there will always be another day to follow up all our ideas. Work swamped out today by administrative tasks or distracting emails can at least be done tomorrow. But one day it hits us: it can’t!

A warning to anyone with this date on their horizon: this can spark utter panic! Overwhelming ourselves, as we try to pack ever more goals into an ever decreasing time, is a common, understandable, but very dangerous reaction. Interestingly, however, accepting this unfortunate truth can be exactly what releases us from the overwhelm trap. It gives us more strength to turn down persuasive but endless requests that do not align with our most important goals. It is tremendously freeing to realise that we could only do them if we neglect something that matters to us more. It also helps us accept that however our compelling our ideas may seem, our time may be better spent inspiring and supporting the next generation to follow them than by trying to do everything ourselves.

​Living forever
A craving for immortality is a central part of the human condition and researchers are no different! And, in two important ways, it is actually achievable.
 
No, this isn’t yet another questionable claim about Resveratrol! It’s about having a sense of purpose, the feeling of being part of a story greater, and more enduring than ourselves. One that will go on long beyond our fleeting contribution.

​Whether our career in science spans four years or forty, whether we publish one paper or hundreds, our original contribution is something no-one can take away. It is one part of a bigger, and forever developing picture, however small or large our part may be. We might be lucky enough to be remembered, and cited by others for decades to come, or we may simply be content with the knowledge that we have placed our own personal brick, or bricks, in the wall and moved our research field forward.
 
All that matters is that we make a reliable foundation for others to build on, and that they have the chance to learn about it. In other words, we need to do good quality research and make it public, in any journal or any preprint.

​Immortality through people
The contribution we make to specific people, and to research culture, is just as important. Moreover, we can make a difference here at any career stage. A student presenting an inspirational talk to schoolchildren, sowing the idea of a scientific career in a young person’s mind, can have this kind of impact just as well as a seasoned PI or department head supporting students, postdocs and fellows. These people will one day make their own contributions to science, and influence yet another generation. By putting aside our own time for them, we can be an important part of their story too. We don't have to do it all ourselves - the story goes on!

​Making it work
These thoughts are easy to write, and perhaps to agree with, but harder to implement. In the heat of a typical day, demands fly at us faster than we could possibly think, and the danger of being panicked into overwhelm, rather than a rational response to this, is always there.
 
We can never prevent overwhelm completely but we can learn to understand it, and respond accordingly, rather than fear it. It is our friend not our enemy, a sign that we must slow down to avoid a crash. If we get our response right, it may save our productivity, our relationships and our sanity. It may even save our life!