in today's episode, i am going to encourage you to think seriously about your summer plans....no, not all the reading you'll do, or writing you'll get caught up on....but your hobbies. and i'll give you a bunch of research-backed reasons that hobbies might be one of the ways that you can make your life - human and scholarly - more sustainable!
resources:
I am giving away one FREE 45 minute session with me a month to anyone who reviews this podcast on Apple Podcasts! Leave a review and I'll announce the winners in the last episode of the month, and in my newsletter! Thank you so much for helping to spread the word about the podcast!
Summer Camp has officially kicked off!! Learn more about it here - and don't forget to use the code PODCAST for 10% off any sliding scale level or payment plan!
-
The best thing you can do for your scholarly work might be to do something completely different with a big chunk of your time. Let's talk about hobbies in this week's episode of
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for a brand new summer planning template, all available for you for free. Now. Let's get into it.
Whether it's conscious or unconscious, it's really common for academics to have a default setting of work for most of their free time. Half an hour? Get some reading in! Got a couple of days free that you didn't expect? Go ahead and get caught up on that writing project. But one of the things that is definitely true when your default for time is work, is that it is exponentially easier to burn out, lose interest, fall out of love with your project, and just generally feel less good because you're working all of the time.
Unlike other curves, the effort put in to work produced curve is not a linear one. What I mean by that is that the more work that you put in, it's not necessarily going to lead to more and more achievement. You can work 17 hours on a piece of writing, but if you're exhausted for 13 of them, it's not going to be that much better for your final project to have put in all of those extra hours, because you're just not as efficient.
What can we do about this math that we wish would math differently? And I'm here to introduce you to a secret. Maybe something you haven't heard about. Or maybe something that tickles a far away piece in your brain. Hobbies. Yes, that's right. This week's episode is all about why I think that you should get a hobby, resurrect a hobby, have a couple of hobbies, or just generally have projects that engage you outside of work.
And here are a couple of reasons why. I've always been a big fan of hobbies, but even more recently after I've read this book Rest, which obviously I'll link to in the show notes. Rest by Alex Soojung-kim Pang has lots of actionable things, but the best chapter in it for me is this chapter about recovery, where he talks about something that we all need, which is recovery time from the parts of our lives that are stressful, require a lot of effort and focus.
And if that's not a definition of scholarly life, then I don't know what is. So this chapter is pretty actionable and it's built on the workof, Dr. Sabine Sonnentag who's a professor of work and organizational psychology at the university of Mannheim. She has studied burnout and recovery from work-related stress for years and has identified four major components of what she calls recovery.
Psychological detachment; relaxation; mastery experiences; and control. Now I value your time and I don't want this podcast to take 45 minutes. So I'm just going to talk about two of these elements that I think that a hobby specifically can really help you with . But the idea behind all of these elements are that they don't just help you take a break from work. They actually help you recover, which is something different than just breaking.
It's going to replenish you recharge your batteries, so to speak. And I think if we approach the time that we're not working as something that is going to actively help restore us, it makes burnout a little bit less likely. Now of course burnout has its roots in all sorts of systemic and unjust systems. So you're not going to be able to fix work burnout or prevent it altogether with a hobby.
But it might go a really long way. And it's because having hobbies really help fulfill these two elements of recovery, psychological detachment and mastery experiences.
So psychological detachment. Is the ability to disengage from work-related thoughts and concerns during non-work time. If you laughed out loud at that, you are not alone. I did too. But it is useful to think about what activities, habits, or tools help you take a mental break from work. It might look like taking emails off your phone or reading fiction or watching TV to help put your brain in a completely different area of thought. My brain is a little bit. Uh, persistent, stubborn, and sometimes a single input isn't enough to get it to psychologically detach from work. So for me, this often looks like activities that involve my body too.
Otherwise, it's too easy for my brain to keep braining while I'm trying to watch that show. So I might add in coloring while I watch TV, or I might listen to that podcast, but go for a walk around the block at the same time. You get it. That's psychological detachment, one of the four elements of recovery.
The second element of recovery that we're going to talk about today are mastery experiences. So mastery experiences are anything that promote a sense of competence and achievement which you might feel at work, but maybe not all of the time. Dr. Sonnentag defines them these activities as engaging interesting things that you do well.
And there's a lot of research that the more uncertain your job is, the more doing things that you feel good at and competent at in your off time can help you to counteract that. Hobbies can be great for this. Games. Who doesn't love winning a game? Volunteering where you feel useful and needed. Teaching something non-related to your work like teaching a knitting class. If that's something you're into or teaching a niece or nephew, how to bake cookies.
But this element of recovery can seem kind of counterintuitive, right? Because it takes a lot of effort and mental energy to teach or volunteer or do something that is engaging and interesting. . It has that psychological detachment benefit. So it helps you think about something else on purpose and it makes you feel like you can do things and you can do them well, or that you're progressing at them or they feel supportive .
And it feels good to feel good at things. It feels good to do things ,well to be needed, to see progress, to notice achievement. And the more that you're not getting that at work, the harder those benefits are going to hit for you.
So. Why am I pushing hobbies so hard? And it's, I am pushing them because I A) think that grad school doesn't own every hour of your time. And that having more things that you're excited about or doing is only going to benefit you, but it's really useful because the time math doesn't always work out the way that we want it to.
You know, up top, I mentioned that the effort curve doesn't always make sense --that the more effort you put in you do reach a sort of plateau where more and more effort isn't going to necessarily yield the performance benefits that you want. But the time also works similarly, but to your own benefit. So if you have 40 hours in a week to work on a project and you spend five of them on a hobby or a separate project, um, hopefully something a little bit different from work.
But that hobby is going to have benefits that far outweigh the five hours that you quote unquote took away from the project. Those five hours, according to the research and definitely backed up by my own experience are going to help you focus better. When you get back, they're going to help you, help you recover more, avoid burnout, and avoid some of those crashes that's so many of us are prone to.
And now that we've reached the summertime, and if you're in the American quarter system, hold on, it's coming for you. But summer recovery is especially important because that default sense of time being work time, no matter what is intense during the summer, if you're a scholar, because that's when we're supposed to catch up. Right?
And it can feel luxurious to the point of irresponsibility to say that I have two equal goals this summer, and one of them is to learn how to crochet. And the other one is to finish this dissertation chapter. You might not want to say that to your advisor, but in my experience, if you actively invest in your own recovery, through hobbies, through other experiences that help you detach and feel good and competent, then you're going to have more energy, not just for the summer to help you kind of move past any stickiness or burnout that you might already be feeling or help you recover from any of the bumps and bruises that we all tend to get during the academic year. It's going to also make it much more likely that you're going to show up on the first day of your new term. AKA academic new year. Uh, more rested, recovered person instead of a husk that pushed hard all summer long to try and catch up, I didn't quite get there and it starting the year already behind.
And if this permission slip to have a hobby and to make that hobby important. If not, just as important as your other work, the summer appeals, then you are going to love the free new summer planning workbook that's available in the link in the show notes. It's got all sorts of questions and activities to help you plan a summer. That's actually going to help you. Move forward and not burn out. And it has all sorts of other information about things that are happening in the thrive PhD universe this summer.
I appreciate you listening to this so much, and I hope it gives you a little bit of space to start a hobby, or maybe pick one back up again in the next couple of days. See you soon!
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!