Summer Vacation Won’t Cure Your Burnout, But There’s Hope
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Summer is a popular time to take a vacation, especially if you work in higher education and you are stressed out, exhausted, and need to reassess your job and career. Time away from campus helps. You might even consider burnout as a disease and a vacation as the cure.
Unfortunately, burnout is often only a symptom. Your source of frustration doesn't go away just because you closed your laptop and sat on a beach for a week.
Defining Burnout
Before determining a remedy, let's define burnout. It's more complicated than simply being stressed. The top expert on burnout, psychologist Christina Maslach at the University of California, Berkeley, defines burnout as "a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job." She also identifies three dimensions of burnout: overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.
Other psychologists have categorized burnout further into types of responses, meaning not all burnout is created equal, and there are different ways to get to the root of the problem besides taking a vacation.
Three Types of Burnout
Burnout can hit you differently based on the type. According to psychologist Barry Farber, there are three:
- Frenetic Burnout occurs when someone responds to stress by increasing their work until they are exhausted. In their mind, the relentless pursuit of job satisfaction or career success is justified or seemingly balanced by the invested efforts.
- Underchallenged Burnout is presented in people who seem anything but ambitious. It's the stress of coping with no motivation or satisfaction because of monotonous or unstimulating work.
- Worn-Out Burnout is a different kind of listlessness that combines the overwhelm of frenetic work with lack of gratification. It's a response from doing too much work but never feeling like it's enough.
Identifying Your Burnout
Vacations might offer a temporary release from the following pressures based on the three types. Using the following "pressure P's" and from the perspective of a professor, ask yourself which of the following responses you feel:
- Pressured by perfectionism, you feel guilty about taking time away from the laboratory or office because you set such high professional standards for yourself. You insist on reviewing every detail, responding to every email, and overseeing every project. Even while on vacation, your mind remains fixed on unfinished research, pending grants, and looming deadlines. You strive to be indispensable and have become a victim of your own success. You are frenetic.
- Pressured by predictable plateaus, you can easily take a vacation because you were disengaged from your work long before you left campus. You teach the same courses, attend the same meetings, and navigate the same bureaucracy year after year. Having earned tenure or promotion, you struggle to find new goals that excite you. Your work feels repetitive rather than meaningful. You are unchallenged.
- Pressured by people-pleasing, you constantly respond to the needs of students, colleagues, and administrators. You serve on committees, complete assessments, attend recruitment events, and take on additional responsibilities because saying no feels impossible. Yet despite your efforts, enrollment challenges persist, expectations continue to grow, and recognition remains scarce. Over time, you stop believing your work can make a difference. You are worn out.
One Solution for All Three
Here is where the typical advice diverges into paths to address each type of burnout. Instead, the three starting points can lead to the same end of your burnout using one thing: hope.
Jen Fisher is one of the leading experts on addressing burnout. Previously Deloitte U.S.'s first chief well-being officer, Fisher is the host of the WorkWell podcast and author of "Hope Is The Strategy."
Drawing upon psychologist C.R. Snyder's hope theory, Fisher said increased burnout is a result of hopelessness and that hope is not an emotion but a cognitive process that involves having a clear goal, multiple pathways to achieve it, and agency thinking -- that is, the belief that you can take meaningful action toward your goal.
You need multiple paths because if one option presents a barrier, you won't become frustrated and give up. There's always another way.
"Where there is hope, there is possibility," Fisher wrote. "And that pushes us forward."
Burnout persists when you have no options. You have no choice but to be frenetic. You are idle from being unchallenged. You are too worn out to move.
Hopeful Actions
Goal-setting and pathway-planning are not things higher education professionals should do around a summer vacation to instill hope and prevent burnout. Why? Because things change throughout the academic year. Remember, hope is a cognitive process, not a task to be completed at the outset.
Fisher wrote that hope is "an active strategy for navigating uncertainty and driving meaningful change."
Here are three things you can do this summer to implement an active hope strategy that makes burnout less likely when the academic year begins again:
- Too much perfectionism and not enough control? Embrace possibility. People experiencing frenetic burnout often believe the answer is to work harder or control more. Hope requires a different approach: becoming comfortable with uncertainty. Fisher builds what she calls "possibility days" into her schedule. Consider turning part of your vacation into a "possibility week" by leaving room for unplanned experiences and unexpected outcomes. Progress doesn't always require a perfect plan.
- Too much predictability and not enough purpose? Cultivate curiosity. Underchallenged burnout is often rooted in stagnation. Use the summer to learn a new skill, explore a different interest, or pursue something that genuinely sparks curiosity. New experiences create new pathways and remind you that growth is still possible.
- Too much people-pleasing and not enough self-care? Reclaim your identity. Those who feel worn out often lose themselves in meeting the needs of others. Use the summer to reconnect with the parts of your identity that exist beyond work. Prioritize sleep, hobbies, family, exercise, or creative pursuits. Fisher encourages people to schedule humanity into their calendars. Hope grows when your self-worth is tied to more than productivity.
In Conclusion
A vacation can provide rest, but it rarely solves burnout on its own. The pressures that created it are often waiting when you return.
Hope offers something more lasting. By embracing possibility, reclaiming your identity, and cultivating curiosity, you can address the underlying causes of burnout rather than merely escaping them. As a new academic year approaches, use the summer to recharge if your job permits, but most of all, use it to build the hope, purpose, and agency that will sustain you throughout the academic year.
