Half-Assed Self Care for Weary Academics

Hi, Professors! This is Karen Gonzalez Rice, art historian, professor and life coach for academics.  You are listening to “The Good Enough Professor,” the show that reimagines academic life for overwhelmed professors.  Let's create a more supportive, more humane academia, one small, intentional choice at a time. Listen on for how we can do this together.

Today, I want to acknowledge that we are all so weary right now. We are so weary, and we could all use some self care.

Recently, I heard a story from a friend. This is a friend who is an administrator at another institution. She told me about how her colleague approached her and said, “Have you heard about the dumpster fire?”  And she said, “Oh, yeah, you know the world is a dumpster fire right now, right like, whatever's going on campus and what is going on at the national level, like everything is just a dumpster fire.” And her colleague said, “No, no, for real, there's a dumpster fire behind, you know, such and such building,” right? So this is the reality that we are living with right now. The dumpster fires are actual, they're actually occurring, not just metaphorically, right?

So I thought this would be a good time to talk about half-assed self care for weary academics, because we are so weary and we don't really have the capacity for, I don't know, full-assed self care?  Full self care?

So I'm coming to this topic with skepticism of the wellness industry.  I'm drawing on Pooja Lakshmin's framing of self care from her excellent book Real Self Care, in which she critiques self care trends as inadequate to addressing systemic oppression, which is the root of our suffering in the first place.

So I want to quote from an interview that she did with NPR in 2023, and she described it this way: “Buying a new day planner and signing up for a meditation class isn't going to change the fact that 30 million Americans are uninsured and that a quarter of American workers don't have paid sick days, or the fact that if you're a Black woman, you have to work for 19 months to make the same amount of money that a white man will make in 12 months. So the meditation apps, the bubble baths, the sensory deprivation tanks, all that stuff doesn't actually fix any of the real external problems that have caused us to feel so terrible to begin with, whether we're talking about white supremacy, toxic capitalism or patriarchy.”

For Pooja Lakshmin, real self care is about building skills in boundary setting, in self compassion, clarifying your values, and then using your power to support your communities. This is really parallel to the emphasis in disability justice spaces on building communities as self care, which we can see in the work of folks like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.  So in this episode, I'm taking more of a “How can I be useless to capitalism?” approach to self care. 

For many of the reasons that Pooja Lakshmin named, many academics rightly are skeptical of self care.  Within higher ed, our systems encourage and reward us to continue the grind.  And some of the practices that are sometimes framed as self care could actually be really useful in navigating higher ed. There is significant evidence to suggest that practices like meditation and gratitude and journaling,  creative pursuits like drawing, that these activities can create better health outcomes for mental health and wellbeing, yes, but also for our physical health.

These kinds of real self care can help us reduce stress, can help us understand and get some distance on our thoughts and emotions and connect us with what matters to us, and to consider how to use our unearned advantages to support our communities. So there are some real potential benefits.

In this episode, we are going to talk about some evidence-informed self care practices, specifically for weary and skeptical academics. So we're going to talk about journaling for people who hate journaling. We're going to talk about gratitude practices for the cynical. We're going to talk about meditation for the unmotivated, and we're going to talk about creativity for the arts shy.

When I talk with my coaching clients about these practices, the response is often, “I don't do that,” or “I don't have time for that.” And part of this issue is that in social media and regular media, these practices are often framed as, oh, just a simple thing, something that you can add to your day, right? But adding something to your day is not simple. Many of us are already falling down with exhaustion at the end of the night. We may have perfectionist tendencies and want to do things the right way, and that feels like a lot of pressure. Or we may be feeling so overwhelmed already that the thought of adding something, you know, gives us hives. We may just not have the spoons for it, period. There may be accessibility barriers preventing access to one or another of these kinds of activities.  Or the logistics of this, whatever your life situation, just may not seem possible right now.

So my response is this:  half-assed self care. This is self care that is good enough.

The power of half-assing it is deeply undervalued in the academic world.  We don't have to go all in or do something perfectly for it to have benefits. You can do something in a way that gives you the benefit, without the inconvenience, without the discipline, without the commitment.  When we half-ass it, sometimes we feel like imposters. But in fact, being able to half-ass it is an amazing skill that we really should value, and it's something that we can apply to taking care of ourselves.

So how do we get the benefits when we're half-assing our self care? I think the most important thing is to understand how these practices of self care create better health outcomes. So let's really distill a couple of self care practices into their most basic functions. This is sort of my way of distilling down what really matters and what we can focus on in these practices.

Okay, so journaling is about translating thoughts and emotions into words.

Gratitude practices create new perspectives on our experiences.

Meditation cultivates attention and acceptance and similarly

Creativity lets us practice non judgment and also experience a flow state.

When we know, for example, that the benefits of journaling come from expressive writing, we can focus on that while we're half-assing it.

To really make this work, we have to dismantle our assumptions about self care activities rather than getting caught up in having the right journal or doing meditation the right way.  We can really just lose those extraneous parts, the aesthetic trappings, and reframe that activity for ourselves as engaging the benefits that matter.

You can also consider what kinds of self care you might already be doing in your daily life, and this might require you to think a little bit differently about what self care looks like, right?  And if you can find these things that you're already doing, you can continue them with a little more intentionality. Really get in that half-assed perspective.

Do you already walk the dog? Great. That's a good time to do a walking meditation.

Do you already have a notebook that you carry around as a to do list? Fine, you know, do some journaling in that.

Are you already laying awake at night trying to fall asleep? That's a perfect time to do some really brief gratitude thoughts.

Where are you already on the path? Where are you already doing some piece of this being more intentional about something you're already doing that is a classic way of half-assing it, and we should do more of that!

To really set ourselves up for half-assing self care, we need to talk about a couple of logistics. Okay, first, half-assed timing. For half-assed self care, you cannot do it regularly. It cannot be every day or every week. You cannot do it on a set schedule unless you really want to. Instead, half-assed self care happens when you need it and or when you feel like it, and you don't have to have a large chunk of time. You can have five minutes and do really effective, half-assed self care.  You can use these real self care practices only when you need them. You don't have to use them all the time. You can pull them out when you really need them. It doesn't have to become a habit. We are just practicing, and practice is a space of learning.

How about where your half-assed self care takes place? Sometimes, I think we associate self care with a kind of perfect setting. It's quiet, there might be candles, depending on what kind of activity you're doing, you have a perfect yoga mat or some shit, right? No!  Self care happens where it's needed. There might be children screaming in the background. You may have to put your headphones in. You may be sitting in your car for a few more minutes before going into the grocery or onto campus, releasing the expectation of some sort of esthetic that is really built on an illusion. The illusion of social media tells us that we need to have this kind of ideal moment, releasing that expectation.  No!  Self care happens where it happens. You don't need to create a stage set for your self care.

Before we jump into how to half-ass particular self care practices, just one more logistical thought.  How do we show up with a half-assed mindset? This is not you being fully present. This is not you feeling fully centered or grounded or calm. No. Show up as you are.  Real self care happens, where, when, who and how you are, right? Don't wait, like I sometimes try to do, until your neck doesn't hurt, right? Don't wait until you feel really ready to embark on a new project. You don't need to wait, because this isn't a big thing. It is just something that you are half-assing.

Okay, I want to dig into four specific forms of real self care and talk about what is really at stake in these practices and suggest some different ways that you might half-ass them.

Let's start with journaling, journaling for people who hate journaling.  At the heart of journaling as a real self care practice is expressive writing. Psychologist, James Pennebaker has done literally decades of research on how translating our thoughts and emotions, especially difficult experiences, into words, can really help our mental health.  So journaling works by externalizing and giving us some distance on our thoughts and feelings, and specifically by translating that internal experience into language.

Pennebaker himself gave a great example of half-assing journaling in a podcast last year.  The host asked if people should be journaling when things are going well, and he responded, “Well, you can, but I don't know why you would want to spend your time that way.” Which I thought was so great and really pushed up against some assumptions that I had about what a journaling practice should look like.

So what are some low stakes approaches to journaling?  I think that we have this kind of Dear Diary, letter-based assumption about journaling, unless you're somebody who journals a lot. You know, we have some of these old-fashioned ways of thinking about what journaling is, but really, you don't have to worry about clarity. You don't have to write full sentences unless you want to. You can use bullet points. You can just dump in that stream of consciousness way.  The act of producing words is more important than what you write. Don't use a pretty journal. Get the ugliest or the plainest one that you can find—and Katherine May has a really excellent piece about why this is important. You could also do post it notes stuck on your computer. You could keep a stack of post it notes by your refrigerator, and do one when you feel like it, stick them on top of each other, or use a piece of paper or a simple notebook, or just do a phrase or a word or one doodle.

I'm going to depart from Pennebaker here for a minute. I'm an art historian, so I think that journaling, perhaps, doesn't need to result in words. The act of articulating in drawing or in stickers or in some kind of relationship of images to objects, can be really powerful. It can be doodles or drawings or collages. It could be impressions. It could be emojis.

Let's talk about gratitude practices for the cynical.  I think gratitude can feel a little bit maybe wishy washy or a little bit pointless for some folks, but I think that what that perspective might be missing is that gratitude isn't necessarily about the positive. I mean, I definitely see a lot of writing about gratitude as this focus on the positive, and, you know, turning your mind away from the negative. And I actually don't agree with that. I mean, it could be but it doesn't have to be. Gratitude can be much more about a new perspective, thinking about your day, or thinking about what happened to you or what you made happen in the world on a given day is quite different.

When you think about, what are you grateful for? Like, it's not the same as positive. It could be neutral, it could even be sort of difficult, but it's your relationship to what has happened that is shifting a little bit when we talk about gratitude. Here are a couple of examples. You know that I struggle with some chronic conditions, and sometimes my gratitude for the day is simply I feel okay today. I see this in disability justice communities that, you know, “Wow, I had the spoons to get out of bed today,” and that's a powerful affirmation. I don't know that it's necessarily positive, but it's a powerful act of gratitude to think of being able to get out of bed as something for which I am grateful.

Some low stakes approaches to gratitude. First of all, you don't need to write it down. It can be audio into your phone, any of the ideas that we talked about for journaling, so post it notes or a doodle, you know, these can also work for a gratitude practice.  Also making a gratitude practice collaborative or shared. So this is something that you could do with a friend, maybe someone on campus. When you see that person, you share something that you're grateful for, or you could text a friend occasionally. I've also recently seen in my feed some ideas around reverse journaling.  Instead of what you're grateful for, thinking of a few things that you have contributed to the lives of others. So an interesting twist on a gratitude practice.

Let's talk about meditation for the unmotivated.  So lots of folks have big feelings about meditation, and if you have big feelings about meditation, if you've already decided that meditation is not for you, that's totally fine.  And I do have some suggestions for thinking a little bit differently about meditation. So what does meditation do for us? Why is it a practice of self care?  Meditation helps us with two things. First, it helps us cultivate attention, and second, it helps us practice acceptance. It helps us cultivate a less self critical space.

Now, I do know academics who are committed to meditation. You know, one of my friends has a regular meditation practice, and in my mind, it looks really beautiful. She has a little meditation cushion. I actually don't know what her space looks like! It's important when we half-ass things, that we release our aesthetic assumptions. So I actually don't know if she has a beautiful blue velvet meditation cushion. I'll have to ask her. In my mind, that's totally how she's doing it, with a little bell and a candle. She'd probably laugh at me to hear my imagining of this perfect scenario!  Regardless, my friend has a regular meditation practice, and she asked me a few weeks ago if I have a meditation practice, and I was kind of taken aback.  And I said, Oh no, no, No, I don't. But then, with some thought, I actually realized that I do regularly listen to guided meditations on my chronic pain app. It's something that I'm already doing. Her question helped me realize that my meditation is going to look really different from hers, even though it may not correspond to my assumptions about what meditation looks like. I am practicing attention. I am practicing self acceptance. It's still my own beautifully half-assed form of meditation.

Some of my clients use movement practices as meditation. When I say movement practice, I just mean sports or exercise. I have a wonderful story from a client about learning a new sport at midlife.  She just decided that she wanted to learn this very extreme sport. Her experience was that the demanding process of learning a new sport took a lot of attention. It took a lot of focus, and in particular, a lot of kind of inner focus. And it also required that she release self judgment.  In order to make the kind of progress that she wanted to make in this sport, she really had to pay attention, to accept what her body could do in any given moment. And she noticed that that was a meditative practice.

Your meditation might be going to ultimate Frisbee. It might be learning a new physical skill. It might be walking the dog.  Any activity in which you are building your ability and your capacity for attention, for paying attention, where you are cultivating a non-judgmental space, can be considered meditation.

The last real self care practice that I want to talk about is creativity:  creativity for the arts shy.  Making is powerful. Making uses a different part of your brain, and it puts you into a flow state. Creativity and making can feel fraught for some folks, but half-assed creativity is being unattached to the end product. 

Process art is the absolute best for this. Process art is a focus on the materials. It's a focus on the act of making, and the object is kind of incidental. Not only is this a way of teaching art to kids, process art is actually an art historical movement from the 70s, when artists just decided, I don't know, let's just use all these industrial materials and throw them in a vat, or let's tie some rope on the wall and think about texture, right? So less concerned about the object and more about the materials, the acts involved in making.

If you have access to kids, if you have your own kids, or maybe you're an auntie, you can do process art with kids, and this is a really helpful way, like meditation, to create and practice a judgment-free zone. You can just make a mess with painting or drawing. You can build robots with recycled materials. And then a really half-assed way to do creativity is to do puzzles, to build Legos. You absolutely get all the benefits without the mess, and also maybe without some of the stress. If you're someone who's a little bit freaked out about creating.

I've actually been thinking a lot about this because I've been doing some more creativity-focused workshops at my institution, and I have been actually shocked at how different the conversations are when we're doing something with our hands.  When we are building something or making something together, the kinds of topics that arise and the way we talk about those topics are quite different. Petra Kuppers, wheelchair dancer and English professor, talks about creative practice as self care, and particularly has some lovely descriptions of collaborative art making, collaborative movement that bridge creativity and meditation in really beautiful ways.

So I'm wondering, what kind of half-assed self care are you going to do today? And I just want to emphasize that half-assed self care is what works for you, given whatever level of capacity you have. Put aside my suggestions, put aside social media suggestions, and just really think about what works for you. How can you engage in an activity that meets your needs?

Real Self care is available to us. You may already be doing it right, no matter how wary we are. We can half-ass it. We can get the benefits of real self care.

As you half-ass it, I will be thinking of you, as always.

Thanks so much for listening to “The Good Enough Professor Podcast.” If you want to release academic grind culture and embrace your own Good Enough Professor within, join my email list. You'll get my reflections, gentle challenges, and simple prompts, all aligned with the rhythms of academic life and designed to disrupt the assumptions that get us over committed and keep us overwhelmed. Because remember, you are already good enough.