[Mid-Career Series] You Don’t Have To Do The Mid-career Burnout (Like Everyone Else In Academia) (Re-Release EP 182)

This episode is part of our Mid-Career Series, where I am exploring what it really takes to thrive after tenure. If you’ve hit that milestone and expected relief, only to feel even more frustrated and overwhelmed, this conversation is for you.

I unpack how the academic system sets you up to sprint toward tenure, pushing yourself harder and harder in pursuit of safety and validation, and why, when you finally get there, that safety often feels like an illusion. You’ll hear why the habits, mindsets, and patterns that got you to tenure can easily lead to burnout afterward, and how to shift them now, whether you’re pre-tenure and want to avoid the slump, or mid-career and ready to reclaim joy, purpose, and balance in your work.

If you’ve ever thought, “Is this really what I worked so hard for?”, this episode will help you find your way back to a sustainable and meaningful academic career.

Tune in to hear why mid-career burnout isn’t inevitable, and how to realign your choices, priorities, and time so your academic life actually supports your wellbeing, not drains it.

What Really Causes the Mid-Career Slump

The mid-career slump isn’t a personal failure. Most academics sprint toward tenure, believing that once they “make it,” everything will finally feel secure. But post-tenure, the pressure doesn’t disappear. The same habits that fueled your success, like overcommitment, people-pleasing, saying yes to everything, and chasing external validation, come with you into every stage of your career. You may have realized that your workload hasn’t lightened, but your sense of direction has.

I share why burnout often emerges one to three years after tenure and how to spot the early signs. I also unpack the emotional undercurrent of this stage, such as the disorientation that comes when your old goals no longer fit, but you haven’t yet defined new ones. By understanding the roots of the slump, you can see it not as a personal shortcoming but as an invitation to redefine your academic mission.

How to Prevent (or Recover from) Mid-Career Burnout

Whether you’re pre-tenure, newly tenured, or well into your mid-career, there are tangible ways to prevent burnout and rebuild alignment. I share how to reframe your decision-making and daily actions through three key moves:

1. Shift from fear-based to values-based decisions. Stop waiting for tenure to feel safe enough to say no or to define your own career path. Start now.
2. Realign your career with what you actually want. Take a step back, reassess your goals, and ensure your everyday tasks reflect the kind of scholar and human you want to be.
3. Rebuild boundaries and reclaim time. The habits that helped you achieve tenure won’t sustain you beyond it. Learn to make decisions that support longevity, not just productivity.

Your career doesn’t have to follow the burnout blueprint. You can create your own version of mid-career magic.

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“Once you get tenure and that yearning for safety, or that working really, really hard for safety, will lead many many people to overwork. We have a culture of overwork anyway in academia, and that yearning for the safety that tenure supposedly provides really can make you overwork even more.”

“What often happens in midcareer is that many of us start to question, Do I even want to be here? Is academia for me? Is this what I want to keep doing with my life? The more specialized, smart, and good you are at being a scholar the more those questions might come up for you. You might think that people who aren’t very successful in academia aren’t thinking about leaving. But actually, what we see is very successful people are the ones thinking about leaving because they’re like, I’m not gonna take this anymore. I’m too smart for this. I’m too prepared for this. I’ve worked too hard to be treated this way, or to have a schedule that looks like this, or to carry all the burdens of my department.”

We’re receiving applications for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and start your application process here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Apply here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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