Unsolicited Academic Advice for Over-Achievers: Stop being a brain on a stick and get unstuck with Caitlin Faas, PhD

In this post: Dr. Caitlin Faas and I go over wtf it means to be both "embodied" and "reduce stress," and how to know your limits while staying productive.
Next week: The real story of what happened after I left academia, on the loss of my academic career and feeling adrift.
Last week: Society tends to hate women, and the maddening experience of being victim-blamed, being gaslit, and having your experiences trivialized.

September 7, 2021

Dear fellow over-achievers and co-conspirators,

I’m thrilled to be kicking off the much anticipated (by me, mostly) Unsolicited Academic Advice, the free portion of Post-PhD 2.0 with perhaps the most important topic of all: mental health and its impact on our productivity.

If you are a freelancer, run your own business, or are rebuilding your life from the ground up, the single most essential tool you need to succeed is your mental wellbeing. In many ways, the Unsolicited Academic Advice section will focus on this aspect, and in my interview today, you'll see why. As Developmental Psychologist, Author, and High Achiever Career Coach Caitlin Faas explains:

“I truly believe academics can rule the world… if they were embodied and could reduce their stress.” – Dr. Faas

In this newsletter, we’ll go over wtf it means to be both “embodied” and “reduce stress,” especially if you fall under the designation of what Caitlin calls “high achiever.” [Confession: I come from a long line of overachievers, all of us riddled with autoimmune diseases, but most of us highly successful, so I'm Caitlin's target audience here, but I'm a reticent one.] I can all but assure you that you need to read what Caitlin has to say… if you value remaining highly productive.

A tenured professor in Developmental Psychology, Dr. Faas left academia on her own terms, three years after she earned tenure. Of the decision, she said, “I was an associate professor, and in my third year I began working closely with the president of the university, and, well, I just saw too much. I wasn’t able to accomplish what I set out to do.”

Less than a year after leaving academia officially (upgrade to paid version for the video of the full story), she’s written a book (like the boss she is), and it is of course intended to help out fellow academics and those who have left get unstuck from the shame and fear that comes with academia’s toxic culture like rice and peas (and no, you can’t order them separate from one another). Caitlin’s book is out! The title is, "Unstuck: Three-step system to help high achievers move from stress to flow" 

I’ve already read it, and done a fair amount of its workbook prompts, even though I hate personal growth workbooks (my therapist hates me for it too), I found myself realizing that despite leaving academia over four years ago, spinning a whole lot of trash talk about its toxic culture, that, goddamnit, I was still thinking, stressing, and getting myself stuck like I did back in my toxic work-every-second-as-if-your-life-depended-on-it-because-it-does mentality in higher education.

This interview has been edited and condensed for your sake, and if you want to know more about our conversation, here is a link to the first part of our conversation, titled “Stop Being a Brain on a Stick” if you want to catch the live version. 

Abridged version:

AH: Caitlin, you are- and I mean this as the ultimate compliment-- such a hustler. I remember being really inspired by your business model and all of the public-facing work you did advocate for PhDs beyond academia when we first met and your path gave me some hope that I’d eventually be able to work for myself. I really needed that when I first left, because as anyone who wants to know knows I had a bit of a rough landing in the real world. How did you come up with the idea?  

CF: Well, it began a sort of when we met back in 2017. I was in the midst of being like “this was my dream, I am an assistant professor, I went straight through college to grad school to work. I was like “Here I am, I have arrived, I have all the things I’ve ever wanted… and yet, here I am stuck and feeling unfulfilled and like this isn’t what I want to do for the next 30 years.

So, I was having that moment and over the next four or five years, I began developing this three-step system of Envision, Embrace, Envision framework for how I was feeling stuck. And I developed it for others as well. I’m someone who loves to experience something and then turn around, almost immediately, and use it to help others who are going through something similar. 

AH: Interesting. Your book is for high achievers, and I think I fall into that category if only because I’m miserable all of the time and work all of the time. I’m also a high achiever who has spent years being absolutely stuck. It’s horrible.  Do I meet the qualifications?

CF: Well you know, you can be a high achiever and we can work on the miserable part (oh Caitlin, you’re too good at what you do for my self-effacing nonsense). But generally, yeah, high achievers have a master’s degree or higher, climbed some kind of ladder—attorney and doctors, I coach a lot of them now. Anyone who followed a traditional career like that is often a high achiever.

On Being a Brain on a Stick

AH: I’ve enjoyed most about following you are your psychological take on the stress and on careers. I’m sure this was the main reason for your book. Why is it important to move beyond stress? Isn’t stress a good thing? I mean, typically when you ask a high achiever to reduce their stress, they just start stressing out about that. Or at least I do, just at the thought. 

CF: Yeah for sure, when I was at the gastroenterologist in my twenties, the doctor was like “do you think that some of your health issues are related to stress? And I was like, “No! What are you talking about?” But at the time I was hanging with other high-achievers who were a little too stressed.”

AH: The exact same conversation happened between me and my gastroenterologist in my twenties as well! So I know exactly where you’re coming from.

CF: I had a 13-year journey of shutting my body down in response to climbing that academic ladder. And at the same time, my body needs to shut down so I just become a brain on a stick, so I can do all the things. And it’s also such a powerful conversation, right? I believe academics could rule the world, if, they were embodied and could reduce their stress.”

AH: I totally agree, I think that academics or anybody who has worked very hard to accomplish anything, I think that’s our Achilles heel, right? Part of my own academic detox program has been to completely re-configure my life to avoid stress. At 35, it’s about maintenance. The body really does keep the score, and now I understand my health as intimately connected to the decade of chronic stress and being, as you say, a “brain on a stick.” Burnout is real. It’s dangerous. And it shoots all of us in the foot. 

AH: To play the devil’s advocate, or average knee-jerk academic reaction to that: isn’t stress a good thing?

CF: Part of it, right. Like the adaptive part [of stress]. But part of that is knowing your personal limits, and when it starts to go too far. Is my body tense? Or, is my sympathetic nervous system so aroused that I’m anxious all the time and I can’t bring myself down even when it is time to relax. I work with a lot of clients who are like, “well, I took the day off and I still feel like I need to do everything, I still need to be productive, I can’t handle being bored.” You gotta know when to bring it down.

AH: Fine, I guess I should start letting go of this need to be stressed in order to feel worthy or productive. Tell me how! Help! Tell me about this 3 part system you developed for Unstuck.

CF:  I’ve separated the book into four parts, so that readers can delve into each step, with the last section to help unify the concepts. I’ve provided room for readers to jot down their reflections to a series of prompts designed to help you get unstuck. “Establish” is the first step, it’s all about your foundation. So like, how do you help yourself not be a brain on the stick, what do you do about time management, so I walk through that process. I also talk about personality, being a developmental psychology Ph.D., the personality piece, and also where you are in the growing up stages. So, developmentally, do you have pieces, from your past, that you need to reflect on and heal or integrate so you can feel more like a grown-up right now.

The second step is “Embrace,” and this part of Unstuck shows you how to manage the voices in your head and stop numbing yourself emotionally. The third step is “Envision”. This is when you begin to envision your future in a new way through dreaming big and getting out of your own way. The final part of Unsuck is Connect, which explains how to get support and integrate the Establish, Embraces, and Envision flywheels.

On a Mission to Reduce Shame in Higher Education

If you want to hear more on Caitlin and I’s mission to reduce shame (and with that gas-lighting and victim-blaming) in academia, check that video out here

AH: When you first emailed me, way back in 2017, you told me you were on a mission to reduce shame in higher education. That’s stuck with me, and I think this is where our missions overlap quite a bit. 

I think that this idea of shame and gaslighting is perhaps the most urgent problem to tackle. When emails from academics the world over were pouring into my inbox over the course of 2017 to 2018, and even now I’m still getting these emails, from people going through similar crises like what I went through, when the academic hierarchy above you has closed ranks and your career is over through no fault of your own. Often because one person did not like you or wanted your work. And that’s a narrative that comes up over and over for me.

In the emails I’ve received since 2017, almost everyone blames themselves. And I think I did too, I blamed myself for a very long time. And it wasn’t until I could overcome that self-blame that I could really take ownership of what I wanted my life to be, and what avenues I wanted to seek for it to be fulfilling.

CF: That’s the growing-up part. So, all of us can see it intellectually, systems at play, like “oh here’s where the system is,” or “here’s where we are in history, here’s how groups of people are going through things. But then on a developmental level, we still feel very individual. We’re, like, maybe 5 years old or 10 years old in processing the somatic piece of it that we haven’t dealt with that shame, and that fear, and the anger, and all of that makes us feel very young. So we can know it in our brains, but until we integrate it, and heal some of it, we’re just going to be very young.

AH: You mean from an emotional maturity standpoint, right? Not like Neil Young’s “Forever Young.”

CF: Exactly, we all want to grow up.

AH: So part of growing up, part of moving beyond that, is realizing that for me at least, that shame was something I was holding on to because I wanted to have a sense of control over the situation. It felt very important that, despite my negative outcomes, I had caused it. That I had control over it. And I think this self-blaming and gas-lighting culture, I think it’s inherent to any high-achiever culture, but it’s especially toxic in academia. Because all these high achievers are graduating and not getting the jobs they were trained to do, because of the labor casualization model higher education has adopted for its own Machiavellian ends.

So there’s a profound amount of resentment and disappointment and really does all translate into shame. And I’ve seen it consume too many amazing people, which is why your mission, and the work you’re doing with this book, are so important! 

Why A Tenured Professor Leaves Academia:

AH: Ok, now I want to ask the juiciest question: why did you really leave academia?

 CF: I reached a point where I felt like I had seen too much – I had been working on a research project for the university president, whose leadership I admired, and then he resigned after an event that made national headlines. It took that event for me to see the politics and complexity of a system at large. Like hospitals, larger corporations, and governmental agencies, the system often looks better on the outside than on the inside.

Finally, I asked Caitlin the question that I hope to explore throughout the Unsolicited Academic Advice series: faced with extreme job precarity within the academe, and the reality that all of our education systems are on the brink of utter failure, what role does the figure of the public intellectual play in providing knowledge, education, and critical thinking tools to people who cannot get it through the traditional systems of education?