What does a person even do with this much apathy?
Dear Apathetic,
I am sad to hear that you are having a season of exhaustion, disconnection, and missing motivation. Particularly during a month like September that is inundated with ‘back to school’ buzz and excitement to ‘get our lives together’ with new stationary supplies.
I tend to find it extremely challenging, personally, to be misaligned with cultural associations like those we come to in September so I wonder if that is adding any pressure to you? Even though you mentioned there isn’t anything external, like your supervisor or committee, that you associate these feelings with right now, it is worth considering if there are pressures even more macro than the people in your university ecosystem.
As for the apathy itself, I don’t want us to think about ‘doing’ anything about it. I deeply understand the pull to transform apathy into something else; to do away with it even, but apathy is one of those emotional experiences (or lack there of) that does much better when we try to befriend and understand it rather than change it.
I’m a big fan of thinking about emotions and emotional experiences as showing us something or communicating information. Information that we feel in our bodies rather than a cohesive thought that has next steps or a narrative behind it. So we’re going to take the connective approach, rather than transformational.
I was recently talking to someone who was telling me how it doesn’t always feel intuitive when someone says ‘feel your feelings’. (Admittedly, I agree; it took an entire therapy program for me to feel as comfortable as I do with it). They were speaking to the idea of noticing sensations as taking practice, not inherent for many of us in the world we are raised in.
So when we think to your apathy, what are the sensations? Apathy is often characterized as a state without emotions, but I want to invite you to tune into even smaller components than emotions. Do your hands feel cold? Does the back of your neck feel hot? Are your feet tapping? Do your eyes feel heavy? Are your limbs weighted?
Sometimes all sensations or emotions really want is to be acknowledged and felt through.
And I suspect that when you notice the sensations around the times of apathy, they might lead you down the road of identifying some emotions (fear of what not feeling motivated right now ‘means’, anxiety about your future, grief toward not feeling motivated, sadness for the disconnect you feel, worry in comparison to other people, etc.). This is through the process of connecting sensations to the emotions you notice just before or afterwards.
The connection of the sensation to the emotion to then a situation is exactly what I mean by emotions and sensations and emotional experiences are trying to tell us something, give us information.
That is how they get us there to the information.
You may find you feel a lot of sadness, for example, but you don’t know what about yet, the connection to the situation or the story in your head doesn’t feel clear; that’s okay. Spend time with the emotion (some ideas below) and see what comes through.
Emotions are actually quite fleeting, meaning we cycle through many, but we may only label one (the one we are comfortable naming or maybe the one that comes up frequently). Where my thought process with this is going is that you may feel anxiety and then experience apathy and then grief and then disappointment and then sadness and then back to a state of apathy.
And because apathy is showing up more frequently, or you notice those moments the most, you may think you’re struck in apathy or there is too much of it. I’m hoping to encourage you to tap into the sensations that provide you with evidence that you’re feeling more than just absence which is important because you might already have a toolkit for certain emotions.
You might have a grief ritual or a wallow routine or someone you always call for motivation co-working. And while engaging in any of these tools won’t cure burnout or remove apathy from the range of possible human emotional experiences, there is a chance it reconnects you to a sense of feeling capable or empowered or able to move forward through the PhD. (We don’t have enough time to unpack this, but it is also a possibility that your tuning into sensations leads you to the knowledge that a PhD isn’t right for you, and you want to stop - either for good or momentarily - and that deserves space and consideration too)
The ‘to-trys’
Look up ‘window of tolerance’ and find a worksheet that suits your style (or make your own) - this is designed to show you how sensations and bodily experiences impact you and how you can move through the different phases to get back to a window of tolerance. (You’re not supposed to live in one section, it’s a cycle up and down because you’re human and we feel all the things)
Have a watch of Inside Out and Inside Out 2! Specifically take notice to how they introduce the emotions at the start of both movies and then try to do the same for the emotions you are noticing most frequently around the PhD right now. What would be the purpose of disappointment? What is dread protecting you from? What color would your personified emotions be? How much space on your Headquarters dashboard do you think they have? This can be an art project, a writing project, a thought exercise, a conversation with your therapist, etc!
Evaluate your ‘doing everything right’ list of activities: are the people you spend time with draining you? Are you finding joy in the type of movement you’re doing for your body? Would it be helpful to order a grocery or meal service for a month rather than cooking? What hobby are you missing right now? Not every type of burnout or apathy comes from the amount you’re doing, but sometimes the quality of what is being done. Just because these activities exist on a list from a therapy account or show up in a self help book does not mean this is the right recipe for you. Be intentional with the limited effort and energy this current season of your life is bringing you.
I hope you move through autumn with your apathy with curiosity and playfulness and with interest in what it has to teach you.
I believe in you.
Til next Sunday,
Dr. Sydney Conroy
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