Exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, and depression are commonplace topics in most workplaces in the United States. Higher education is no exception. In the Healthy Minds study from the 2021–22 academic year, 44 percent of the student respondents reported symptoms of depression, 3 percent reported anxiety disorders, and 15 percent reported having seriously considered suicide in the past year—the highest recorded rates in the survey’s 15-year history (Hienze, 2023).
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Creating an Academic Culture of Working to Live
I’m often asked how I succeed at managing work-life balance—or as I call it, “life-work balance”— and it stems from my childhood. My parents both worked as educators, and