What I Learned About Burnout, and Life, After Leaving Academia

Posted on June 24, 2025 by Robert Cabin PhD, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

After ten days of camping in our house with no power, water, or internet thanks to Hurricane Helene, my wife and I jumped at the chance to spend a few days squatting in a friend’s house that had all these modern conveniences. We were painfully aware of how privileged we were to have this refuge during the day, and a home to return to at night.

This house also afforded me the privilege of reflecting on my former academic life from a novel vantage point. This was because it happened to be about a block away from the college where I had worked for 18 years until leaving two years ago. So when I sat out on the front porch and craned my neck forward, I could see one of the rooms where I had taught countless classes and attended endless meetings.

Gazing at this room, I thought back to how motivated and inspired I had been by the energy, creativity, and dedication of many of my new colleagues when I first arrived at this school. However, I was also frustrated by some of the older faculty who just seemed to be taking up space and marking time until they could retire. I remembered promising myself at the time that if I ever became like that, I would leave.

But as the years rolled by, slowly for a while and then all at once, I somehow became that withdrawn, disillusioned, burned out professor I had vowed never to become. At first I tried to blame it on Covid. After that passed, I tried my best to change–I threw myself into some new challenges and extricated myself from some of my most soul-sucking responsibilities. But nothing really changed. So even though I was only 57 years old, I left.

I had naively assumed that after I left, at least some of the energy and passion and sense of purpose that I had once had would come flowing back. I had also looked forward to finally living that more relaxed, balanced, deliberative life I had vaguely fantasized about since graduate school. But to my chagrin, although my external life was completely different, my internal life was still more or less the same.

Why hadn’t leaving academia fundamentally changed anything? As I looked down the street at my former colleagues scurrying around as if they were carrying the weight of the world on their anxious shoulders and were late for something terribly important, just like I used to do, I had two insights.

First, like many if not most of my fellow academics, I am an overachieving workaholic. As much as I liked to blame my former trials and tribulations and ultimate burnout on the ever-increasing demands of our academic rat race culture, I had to admit that I was also pretty darn good at overloading and exhausting myself.

For example, when I first started teaching, I often “had” to get up before dawn to finish preparing my lectures. I was sure that things would get progressively easier once I had more knowledge and experience (and didn’t have to worry about tenure). Yet that promised land always seemed to recede before me like a false horizon.

Some things did eventually become less onerous, but my plate nevertheless remained overflowing. I kept reinventing my courses and creating new ones. I became more involved in extracurricular projects and administration and research. I got married and had kids. Consequently, a dozen years later, post-tenure, I was still getting up before dawn, but instead of frantically getting ready for class, I was frantically revising our campus sustainability plan, doing program assessments, and trying to finish my overdue second book before the kids woke up. Leaving academia didn’t change this life-long tendency of trying to do too much too quickly.

My second insight was that life has a way of throwing one damn thing after another at us regardless of where we work or what we do. In my case, shortly after I left the college, perhaps not coincidentally, both my parents began to deteriorate rapidly. Caring for them while navigating the end-of-life medical/legal complex more than consumed my newfound “free time” and almost made me nostalgic for all those Friday afternoon Institutional Review Board Committee meetings I was missing.

After my parents died, I had to deal with the seemingly endless messes they left behind. Cleaning out their house finally made the permanence of their deaths and unfulfilled lives viscerally real. All that fine china in the expensive glass case reserved for the special occasions that never came. All those unread books and unplayed records and overflowing filing cabinets. All those pills and lotions and gadgets that never really diminished their pain and anxiety and boredom and bickering.

Early in my life I had made a conscious decision not to live like my parents, and now, as I hauled truckload after truckload of their stuff to thrift stores and the dump, I vowed not to age and die like them either. I also thought about all the colleagues I had known who had either died while still working or shortly after retiring. As far as I could tell, a few of them truly loved what they did; their work was their life and there was nothing else they would rather do. But this hadn’t been the case for most of them. And despite the all-consuming passion I sometimes had for my own work, I never wanted or intended my career to be my life.

So why did we work so hard and sacrifice so much? Certainly there were some good and perhaps even noble reasons, like a sincere belief that our work could lift people up and make the world a better place. And perhaps some more selfish reasons, such as getting paid (however poorly) for doing what we loved.

But are we being completely honest when we tell ourselves that we have to work so hard for so long to get and keep our jobs and advance our careers? Or could it be that all that perpetual busyness also provides an acceptable and even admirable excuse to avoid examining and addressing some of our most personal and important and painful issues?

As I walked out the door of my parents’ empty house after dumping out their last junk drawer and throwing away their last ziplock bag of inedible frozen food, I thought about the sobering parallels between cleaning out their overflowing house and cleaning out my overflowing academic office after I resigned. I told myself the time had finally come for me to take a long and hard look in the mirror.

Among other things, I ended up working with a seasoned life coach. It didn’t take long for him to conclude that like so many other academics, I had an overutilized brain and an underutilized and malnourished heart. This led to my taking a deep dive into some neglected and well defended aspects of my mental and physical health. This in turn motivated me to recommit to some long-neglected things that my heart knew were essential to my wellbeing, such as meditation, quality time in nature, exercise, and cold water exposure.

After more training in and experience with these kinds of practices, I started working at a local wellness resort providing life coaching services, leading mindfulness in nature activities, and teaching meditation classes. I also launched my own business helping others look in their own mirrors and figure out how to identify and get what they really want. One of the first things I learned from doing this work is that plenty of people outside academia were exhausted, disillusioned, and burned out too, and that they had similarly been ignoring and suppressing their deepest needs and desires and dreams.

I discovered that we academics aren’t the only ones with overutilized brains either. Indeed, many of the people I work with also tried to understand and solve everything with their intellects while neglecting or discounting their hearts and bodies as a whole. Of course, the obvious yet easily forgotten or discounted truth is that our minds and hearts and bodies are deeply intertwined and interdependent.

If this all sounds a little woo-woo, I invite you to take a cold shower, or better yet, if possible, jump into a freezing lake or river. First, notice how summoning the will to do this requires engaging and aligning your mind, heart, and body. Then, while you are in the cold water, and immediately after coming out of it, observe how each of these seemingly separate parts of you become fused, how fully alive and in the present you are, and how your mood and motivation and mental clarity have all improved. Finally, compare the power of this experience to utilizing only your intellect by, say, just thinking, reading, or talking.
If I could go back and do it all again, I would prioritize paying more attention to and taking better care of my heart and my body. I think this would have resulted in a much healthier work/life balance, and made me a better professor and person in general. I also believe that this would have actually increased the quantity and quality of my accomplishments and warded off my premature burnout. And whenever I felt my cynicism and depression rising, or just felt stuck or lost or uninspired, I would go for a long run in the woods and then march myself into the coldest water I could find.

I know of course that there are many paths toward mental and physical well being and resilience, and that the things that have been most effective for me are not necessarily the most effective or even possible for everybody else. Through training, experience, and trial and error, I have found that helping people choose and follow the paths that are best for them involves both internal factors such as their psychological histories, physical abilities, and current aspirations, and external factors like their larger obligations and responsibilities, economic and social status, and access to natural and cultural resources.

Nevertheless, despite these and other individual differences, the first step for virtually all of us is to explicitly acknowledge our deepest and most important personal challenges and prioritize finding real solutions. This in turn requires not using things like our perpetual busyness and dedication to serving others to justify suppressing our own needs and dreams. Similarly, while it is painfully true that the main drivers of the current burnout epidemic in education and other mission-oriented fields are not our personal failures but rather our exploitative, systemic, institutional policies, perceiving the problems and solutions as exclusively external can be yet another convenient justification for personal avoidance and inaction.

As I sat on our friend’s porch and looked at my former campus, I had to admit that my life since leaving academia hasn’t been easy, straightforward, or lucrative. But I can honestly say that my mental and physical health are better than ever, and that I have no regrets.