Powering Down 2025 And Welcoming 2026

This episode is all about wrapping up, embracing seasonality, and entering winter break with a mindset of restoration rather than burnout, guilt, or the urge to “catch up.” If you’ve been feeling behind, overwhelmed, stretched thin, or like your writing has been pushed into the margins of your life, this is for you.

I walk you through the metaphors and practices I use to design an intentional pause rather than defaulting into the binge-and-bust cycle that academia encourages.

You’ll also hear how I’m thinking about 2026, a sneak peek of my new approach to the podcast, and why restoration is an essential part of your writing system.

The Power of Seasonality and the Off-Ramp Metaphor

One of the most significant mindset shifts I want academics to embrace is seasonality, the idea that you are not meant to operate at the same pace or with the same expectations every single day of the year. I use the highway off-ramp metaphor to illustrate how we should transition into rest rather than slam on the brakes. 

I also talk about the power-down/power-up strategies I coach in the Navigate Program. My goal is to help you let go of the expectation to be constantly producing. Seasonality gives your career rhythm, choice, and humanity. December is not a productivity crisis but a purposeful easing-off period that protects your writing, your energy, and your long-term creativity.

Creation Requires Restoration — Planning Your Academic “Off Season”

Creation requires restoration. Academics are creators: we produce knowledge, ideas, articles, books, courses, grants, and programs. That means our creative output must be supported by deliberate restorative cycles.

But academia often pushes the opposite message: “Use your break to write.” That leads to binge-and-bust patterns where you defer writing until some mythical “break” and then collapse on the other side. I walk you through how to intentionally put your writing to bed and permit yourself to pause without guilt.

I also talk about designing an “off season” using two forms of restoration: active (like reading for pleasure, crafting, long walks, cooking) and passive (naps, quiet time, sleep, stillness). The goal is to refill your creative reserves so that your January writing cycle starts clear-minded, energized, and centered.

Reflection, Release, and Preparing for 2026

The final part of this episode helps you intentionally close the year through guided reflection. 2025 was an incredibly disruptive year for academics, full of funding cuts, institutional uncertainty, and professional instability. Instead of glossing over it, I invite you to make space to name what didn’t go the way you expected, what you mourn, and what you adapted to.

I also encourage you to identify what you did well in response to those disruptions. What skills grew? What insights emerged? What mindsets shifted? This reflective pause is part of the restorative cycle. It acknowledges both the difficulty of your experience and your resilience.

Learn how to set yourself up to enter the new year grounded, intentional, and restored.

“There is never a moment when you are caught up. The work is ongoing. Take that story out of your mind. Instead, replace that story with one where you create, and then restore, create and restore.”

“I love talking about seasonality and seasonality includes the end of things. For me, it includes an acknowledgment of like, ‘Okay we need to acknowledge the ends of things. We need to pay attention and put energy into wrapping up.”

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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