Earlier this month, I was at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. At the conference, I was asked to sit on a panel discussing mental health in heliophysics. Specifically, I was asked to discuss burnout. My Ph.D. is in physics, not mental health or medicine, so all the following is from what I've read and my experiences.
Our field has a real problem with burnout. We're seeing people leave because of the lack of financial security, the culturally pressured work hours, and the physical and mental toll that it takes on individuals and families. How we fund science, especially when a community becomes hyper-competitive, quickly leads to burnout. Our system of metrics to show success individually and at institutions contributes to a field becoming hyper-competitive and burnout. The more we push "publish or perish,"; the more we push graduation rates and the number of graduates; the more we press quick turnaround times for papers; the more we push significant grant funding for tenure, the more we push burnout. These shortcut metrics do not quantify quality, and all are "hackable." More than once, I, and many others have been told that we have to play the game to get into positions high enough if we want to change the system. I don't know if I'm in a "high enough position" yet, but I'm here to ring an alarm bell… We are burning ourselves out trying to succeed in this system. Because of this, we are losing good people, not allowing ourselves space to be genuinely innovative, and further hurting our community needlessly.
Statement on my privilege
Before diving in, I think it is important to state my privileges. I am a woman in physics, so I am not at the pinnacle of privilege - but as a white middle-class woman in a secure job position, I’m pretty close. I am also cis-gendered with blond hair and blue eyes. And while my parents each grew up poor, I grew up middle class in a very homogenous town. My genetic makeup and the economic class I was born in have afforded me privilege within the US and many western and colonized countries. It is from here that I provide my experiences and approach this topic. Others have likely experienced burnout differently, given their access to support networks, stability, and safety.
Burnout
From what I have read, burnout is not currently a medical diagnosis. However, there are clear causes, risk factors, and consequences, as described by the Mayo Clinic. Burnout is a serious issue that can significantly impact individuals and organizations. Therefore, it is essential to recognize the risk factors and causes of burnout and implement strategies to prevent and address burnout. Organizations must acknowledge the impact of workload, measures used to identify work success and work overall culture on burnout. Addressing burnout requires a collective effort from individuals, organizations, and society to create supportive environments prioritizing mental health and well-being.
Burnout symptoms
Symptoms of burnout can span from becoming cynical, irritable, or lacking energy to abuse of food or drugs and physical symptoms like headaches. Of course, these can all be symptoms of other issues one might face, but it is good to be aware. It is also essential to be aware that these symptoms can affect your mental and physical health - thus, we must take burnout seriously if we want to remain productive and healthy. Without feeling physically and mentally safe, we will be unable to set our full mind to the creative task of our scientific research.
Many of the above symptoms are familiar in my everyday life. I've also seen and talked with many others in our field who experience these symptoms monthly, weekly, or daily. Recognizing that many of us may experience burnout was not all too surprising. In graduate school, many of my colleagues, including myself, were told that we were expected to work over 40 hours a week; some were told they needed to work 80 - 90 hours at least if they wanted a "good recommendation letter." Whenever a conversation about reasonable work hours comes up, there are always a few who want to point out and state that many like and want to work more than 40 hours a week, and we should be inclusive of them. Yes, people can work more, but we should acknowledge that the expected is an 8-hour work day and not punish those who only want to work the hours they are being paid for. Thus, it was not unexpected to see many symptoms of burnout within our community. However, it was the possible causes and risk factors that just hit home how bad the problem is in our field - and how the current work environment in space physics likely ensures we will experience burnout.
Burnout risk factors
There are several factors that can increase the risk of burnout, including:
Excessive workloads with long hours, a high volume of work, feeling and/or overwhelmed with responsibilities
Lack of control over your work or how you do it
Unclear job expectations: Not knowing what is expected of you or having conflicting or ambiguous job expectations
Insufficient support from supervisors, colleagues, or other support networks
Lack of rewards or recognition leads to feeling undervalued or unrecognized for your contributions
Poor work-life balance
Unsupportive work environment
Many jobs can lead to burnout, and science is not alone in that. However, the constant demands on our time, the last-minute deadlines, the increase in reporting, the increase in financial insecurity - and the follow-on of insecurity in healthcare, retirement, and visas are leading to more good people leaving our field.
How science is done contributes to burnout.
We talk very little about how science is done in public. It can be difficult as there are many paths for science. Within heliophysics, there are a few main paths that people take. For all of these paths, there are some commonalities and expectations to serve as a reviewer for papers submitted to journals (volunteer time), reviewer for proposal panels (sometimes volunteer time, sometimes paid), and service to the community through work for societies (such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, or the other organizations - also often unpaid work). As you go through your career, you will also be expected to take on roles like conference organizer or editor of journals. Most of this work is unpaid or provides only a tiny amount of travel funds. Most talks, invited or not, are not paid (except for the odd times when travel and food may be covered). And in the pyramid scheme of publishing, we pay to publish the papers we write, and then our institutions pay to access the journals we publish in. These tasks are common across all of the primary job paths within science. Almost all tracks also necessitate applying for grants. The proposal calls come out throughout the year and sometimes get skipped or delayed for a year or so at a time. Once you submit the grant, it can take a year and sometimes longer before you receive the funds. Thus you must always be aware of your current funding, when the different grants end, and prepared for potential breaks in funding. Each grant tends to fund a single scientist from 10% - 30% of your time. Often people have to have 3 - 5 grants going simultaneously in order to cover 100% of their time.
The professor path
The first is that of a Professor. Professors in the US are often on 9 - 10 month contracts. This means that they are paid for their work during the school year. Their jobs often include teaching classes, mentoring students, meeting with students for help outside of class, leading research groups with students, service jobs for the university and their department, and other odds and ends that need to be done. In addition, professors can apply for grants to fund the continuation of their research during the summer. These grants often include money to support students, postdocs, engineers, and other service jobs. Additionally, the grants must cover travel for conferences, publication fees for papers, and overhead (an additional 20 - 200+% that the institution takes to cover costs like those of buildings and operation fees).
The government lab scientist
This job can differ from site to site and depends on whether you are at a contracting institution or a civil servant. In these jobs, you are acting as a knowledge resource for the government and your country. For some, that means focusing on completing cutting-edge research. For others, it might mean providing insight into state-of-the-art research to inform policy. Others still may run different programs, from helping with contracts and running individual missions (e.g., Parker Solar Probe) to entire funding divisions (e.g., the Guest Investigator program at NASA).
If you are on the research side, you are expected to compete for grants to cover your entire time. You may also be asked to work and serve on other service projects for either your institution or your agency, similar to that of the professor's path's service to your department or agency. This may include mentoring postdocs, research with interns, or serving on committees. Suppose you do not win enough grants to cover your time. In that case, you are expected to pick up jobs that may or may not have to do with your science, like helping with running proposal panels or becoming a building manager where you have to run the fire drills, ensure that the building and labs are up to code, and work to get things fixed with they break - like a toilet going out.
Soft money scientists
A soft-money scientist sometimes sounds like the perfect science job. All your time is yours for your science research… if you win the grants to cover it. Soft money scientists have a lot of freedom - but no clear avenues of advancement and no secure safety nets if one doesn't win enough funding to cover their salary and benefits. Often soft money scientists are researchers at universities or contractors at government labs or larger institutions. Within these structures, there are some safety nets such as picking up teaching (typically at adjunct rates), helping with other groups, or finding odd jobs at your institution that can help cover your time. However, this is not guaranteed. So considerable freedom can come with significant risk, especially if your healthcare, visa, or other benefits depend on full-time or near full-time employment.
Industry scientists
The industry sector also has some scientists. However, I am less familiar with this path. Some places act more like a government lab, others like soft money scientists, and a third group exists where you are given much stronger direction for what you can research and work on.
Why this structure contributes to burnout
With all these paths, the consequences of being overfunded are far less than underfunded. Being over-funded means that there is too much work, so you either have to volunteer your time, push off (if you can) grant awards received, or hire someone to help. All of this leads to less time at home and away from family. Being underfunded has much harsher consequences, with the potential of losing benefits. Most grants last, on average 3 years, with some less than a year to missions, at times being a decade or more long. Thus, every year there is the concern of being able to fully fund yourself and your research group, along with maintaining health care, retirement, and visa requirements can be straining.
Additionally, the metrics to show progress and success are often similar regardless of career path. Usually, these metrics are centered on winning grants (i.e., bringing in funding), publishing papers, the number of paper citations, mentoring students or early career researchers, and sometimes other service activities. Some of these activities are funded through current grant awards or through your institution but not all.
Heavy workloads and long work hours are rampant in the sciences. We in the sciences could be better at managing and respecting work hours for ourselves, our colleagues, and collaborators, especially those who work under us. We know that many love what they do, and this is often taken advantage of. Not only do you usually feel pressure to work constantly towards your next research goal, but we are often explicitly told that we must work longer hours than we are paid in order to succeed. Our time, on and off the clock, is constantly focused on our job obligations or full of guilt when they are not.
Additionally, our field has become more competitive, where winning a proposal needs more trans-disciplinary skills and covers less and less of each person's time. Thus, for a grant proposal to be seen as winnable or even just compliant, we devalue our time on the proposal. Therefore, it has been ensured before we even begin that we will need to give volunteer time to achieve the goals set out in the proposal.
We compound our paid work hours with more free volunteer or service work mentoring students, postdocs, and each other. In addition, we serve for free, reviewing papers and serving on committees at our institutions and in the general community. And the list goes on. Of course, some places will pay for part of your time for a few of those activities. But the dark secret is that this all adds to more than the 40 hours a week we get paid, as many/most of our positions do not cover overtime. It might seem easy to say no to volunteer service activities. However, many of these activities are expected on CVs in order to be competitive in the job market or receive a job promotion or advancement.
Extremes of activity are another risk factor for burnout. For example, many of our proposal calls are now spread throughout the year. This is great if you want to or need to submit to many, but bad if you have to go into overdrive every few months to write and submit your proposal. Then you have the mission proposals, which can be an extreme of activity for months at a time, months of waiting, a flurry of activity to respond in 24 - 48 hours for the major strengths and weaknesses, and then months of uncertainty and waiting to find out if your proposal was funded.
Lack of control is embedded in our jobs. We propose for grants and projects, and we have little control over the outcome as many calls have less than a coin flip (50%) chance of a proposal being funded. As a scientist, you must be prepared for a lot of rejection and constantly worry about being able to cover your time, any student or postdoc you may want to work with, and the time of others in your group. This lack of control over funding leads to financial instability and a lack of control over our livelihood. Many institutions try to ensure there are ways people can collaborate, so if you have a lousy year, someone else can help cover you. However, this leads to other issues with feelings of inferiority, continued lack of security, and embarrassment of having to "beg" for funding crumbs from others. If one can not cover their full salary, more significant issues appear. If you are in a permanent position, you may have different ways to address this. For example, you can pick up teaching other courses or add odd managerial or lab jobs. If you are not in a permanent position - you may also have access to some of these options, but only if the people in permanent positions are already covered. Thus, there is a higher likelihood that you will lose your benefits, healthcare, retirement, and possibly, your visa.
Another risk factor includes unclear job expectations. As a scientist, it's clear that the job is to research new ideas, write papers and share those results at conferences. But how does one "move up the ladder?" What does it even mean to progress? At a university, there are different levels of Professorship. At many institutions, there are job titles like junior and senior scientists. But there are few steps in those ladders, especially for a 30 - 60 year career. And besides, success as a scientist is not only measured at your institution. What do you need to do to become a society fellow - or a fellow in multiple societies? How many scientific discoveries do you need, how many students must you mentor, how many committees do you need to serve on, and how many books do you need to write/edit? And the answer is not the same for any two individuals. What you as an individual see as a successful career may not align with others, such as your mentor, and that can cause stress and further burnout.
All these issues, along with those of toxic work culture and compounding problems of physical and mental health, lead our community towards burnout. With support networks, we can help each other. However, not everyone can access those support structures in a cis-white male-dominated field.
Since tracking demographics in our field, women, the largest underrepresented group, have never reached 30% of our community. We keep asking why our field compared to Astrophysics, or even Geophysics, is so slow to become more diverse, yet we disregard the impact our current work culture may have. However, it is not just minority and underrepresented groups that are affected. Every year we hear of people from all backgrounds choosing to leave the field partly due to some of these issues which cause burnout.
Mitigating burnout - how you can help
There is hope. There are straightforward ways our institutions can change to address this issue. There are also individual steps we can each take to help support each other and have a lasting impact on our field's culture.
One of the most significant areas for burnout is the continually increasing number of short-term deadlines. Many are self-imposed by institutions to help improve their success metrics. For example, the impact factor for journals is, in part, judged based on how quickly a paper goes from being accepted to being published. This has led to journals enforcing rapid turnaround times for reviewers and author revisions. Unfortunately, this metric does not help improve the quality of publications, as rushing edits or reviews means things will be missed and mistakes will get through. It also means that the increase in emails from journals and the constant and continual urgent and angry emails will increase, causing a worsening of any work environment.
But what is the downside to pushing out these deadlines? Well, sometimes other awards are determined based on who published first - so that is a problem if one paper's reviewer needs more time than another. But that's an impact on another metric, awards (and sometimes, instead of publication in peer review, they use the arXiv date, which is not dependent on peer review - so no need for the deadline by the journal).
So what impacts society at large if these deadlines are pushed out? Not much. Perhaps we should re-think the metrics we use to determine if they benefit science. And if they don’t, but contribute to burnout? Then we are likely better off not using those metrics.
Journals are not the only quick turnaround deadline that comes up. Grant reporting has become so extensive that you spend a significant amount of time preparing the yearly, quarterly, or sometimes monthly reports and no longer have time to do the research the grant was funded to do. We need our funding agencies to look at both their proposal deadlines, the review panel deadlines, and the reporting needs and deadlines and ask if they are providing helpful information and aid in the goal of completing good research.
At the individual level, we are also responsible for mitigating burnout. Support networks and our daily culture start with our local communities and workplaces. We are also not immune from setting up unnecessary meetings and deadlines. Those in supervisory positions also can set up success and performance metrics that do not contribute unnecessarily to burnout. Senior and more stably funded/positioned members can help guide and set work expectations. So here are some small ways we as individuals can help:
When you control a deadline/meeting, ask if it is reasonable and necessary.
Is this here to help another metric? If yes, is it just improving numbers or helping ensure quality?
Is this a useful meeting? If not, remove it.
Is this an important deadline, e.g. if not met, will there be the loss of a launch opportunity, will a unique proposal deadline be missed, or will the next observing opportunity be months or years away? If it is not a critical deadline and the team is burning out or would have to work overtime, push it out.
Don't expect people to regularly work more than 8 hours a day (including yourself)
Include in your email signature your "normal" work hours and let people know they are only expected to reply during their "normal" work hours
Don't ask people to work more than 8 hours without pay - or acknowledge that this is a short-term thing to hit a specific deadline (see above).
Be respectful of lunch breaks, you may work through lunch, but others may need the mental break.
Don't expect people to work on vacations or on weekends regularly.
Don't take work with you on weekends or on vacation.
Use your out-of-office messages.
If a colleague is on vacation, respect their time off - most things can wait.
Support each other.
Respect people's needs as they may be different from yours.
Support each other through your community, mentorship, and allyship
Check-in and ask how colleagues are doing.
Culture takes time to change. So be patient and understanding as we adopt new norms. And be brave and point out when structural institutional standards or individual actions lead to burnout. We are in this together, and together we can make a difference. So be kind to yourself and take care of each other.
This is a very clear and comprehensive exposition of a deep problem in science. I recognize every bit of it personally. I am a white cis male in astrophysics, so out of your immediate demographic but this set of problems is universal.