Am I among friends? Can I be honest? Being a midlife student is challenging. Making the decision to pursue a B.A. in English has been the best decision but that hasn’t prevented burnout and tears. But all is not lost, friend, we can still turn this thing around. In honor of spring, let’s begin an academic glow up to heal from burnout, prepare for academic success, and create healthy reading and writing practices to pursue our goals with intentional ambition.
Identify What “Academic Success” Means for You
Academic glow-ups are most successful when grounded in self-reflection. Reflecting on your prior term helps identify the root cause of burnout. Five common triggers for midlife students include perfectionism, lack of work-life balance, lack of support systems, poor time management, and taking on too much. Understanding your triggers supports recovery and prevention.
To start, define why academic success matters to you and who you need to become to achieve your academic goals. Gaining clarity on why this matters reignites your passion, motivating you to confront what’s preventing your progress.
Begin this reflection session by using your favorite journal, be it digital or physical, and ask yourself these questions:
- Why does achieving this degree or pursuing this academic goal matter to me?
- Will this help advance my career?
- Will this support a transition into another industry or a career change?
- Does achieving this support a personal achievement goal?
- What areas in my academics or life did I excel in?
- What areas in my academics or life did I struggle?
- Who do I need to be to successfully achieve this goal?
- What actions, habits, lifestyle, and skills must I acquire to support reaching this goal?
Reflective journaling sessions always lead to breakthroughs, helping you gain clarity and identify patterns, self-limiting beliefs, and roadblocks. Next, take this information and turn it into an action plan. First, address your burnout. Take time to prioritize self-care. Take yourself on a solo date, hang out with friends, exercise, eat nutritious meals, spend quality time with your family, and feed your soul.
Now you’re ready to address the issues that lead you into falling into a burnout spiral. Did you fail to prioritize self-care? Or did you fail to establish an academic schedule prioritizing intentional learning and regular studying? Was the lack of organization contributing to late assignments and chaos? Or, did pride prevent you from reaching out for help? To prevent recurrence, create systems that support your goals and remove these roadblocks.
Systems and goals create life-changing results. Goals provide direction while systems are the regular habits, routines, and behaviors that guide you towards your desired outcome. Additionally, systems create mindset shifts, increasing sustainable results.
Examples of essential systems for mid-life academic students include:
- Time management systems: Utilizing techniques such as time blocking, the 1-3-5 rule, Pomodoro technique, or Eisenhower Matrix allows you to optimize your time with a busy schedule, allowing you to prioritize different life areas to ensure you’re able to meet your needs while safeguarding wellness and self-care.
- Task & Project Management Systems: These are necessary tools that allow you to organize tasks, to-dos, projects, deadlines, meetings, and appointments to ensure you stay on top of it all. Platforms such as Notion, Todoist, ClickUp, and Trello are amazing tools that help you manage your personal, professional, and academic life, reducing stress and overwhelm.
- Focus systems: Apps, phone settings, and website blockers allow you to remain productive during academic work so you’re efficient with your time. The Forest app, Pomodoro Apps, Focus, and Downtime features on iOS all help you remove distractions to improve concentration and workflow.
- Life organization systems: Creating a game plan for how cooking, cleaning, errands, child care, and who’s taking care of the dog during busy semesters removes stress and allows you the freedom to focus on your studies. Have a family meeting to create a game plan that delegates tasks and duties for times you’re unavailable. For my independent babes, reach out to friends and family to help you during stressful semesters. Can your sister watch your kiddos for an hour while you study? Would your friend mind dog-sitting for a bit while you do school work at the library? Create a system that works and use an Ultimate Planner, either physical or digital, to lock it in and make it a repeatable process. Specialist Dr. Tiffany Shelton, a neuropsychologist on YouTube, has helped me build the systems and goals that benefit my neurodivergent brain. Check her out for inspiration.
- Self-Care & wellness: It’s vital to take care of yourself as a midlife student. Not allowing yourself time to rest and recalibrate increases stress and decreases cognitive function, leading to poor performance. Use time blocking to schedule time for yourself. Reserving one day a week to step away from school and be a human goes a long way.
To prevent burnout, you must clarify your why, identify roadblocks, and create systems to support your academic success. With the first phase of your academic glow up complete, you’re ready for an academic reset.
Perform an Academic Reset
You already reflected on the past term. You identified your why, what works, and what doesn’t. And you began creating systems to address roadblocks and guide you towards your goals. Now it’s time for an academic reset to prepare for the next term. The goal for this part of the academic glow up is to apply what you’ve learned.
First up is decluttering your workspace. For your workspace, organize loose papers, notebooks, binders, and pens. Pull items from your school bag and archive information from prior classes.
Then organize your digital spaces, such as your desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone. Organize documents and folders to reduce clutter on your homescreen.
For tablets and phones, conduct an app audit to determine what you need and what needs to go. Organize academic apps like Goodnotes, Notability, Notion, and school emails.
To prevent clutter, consider reorganizing or using organizational tools such as paper trays and pen organizers on your desk, an anti-malware app such as Clean My Mac for iOS users to improve performance and decrease the accumulation of large, old files.
Once you’re organized, work on planning for the next semester. Knowing what to expect reduces stress, allowing you to prepare in advance and increase efficiency. Preview course syllabi, learning about the course, learning objectives, your professor, and how the course is graded. Then, identify course materials, assignments, deadlines, projects, and resources.
Next, strategize your approach to the course. Create your workflow, determine the best note-taking system, identify how to adapt the course to complement your learning style, and build a schedule for reading, assignments, study, and projects. Focus on creating sustainable study habits.
Also, educate yourself on academic support resources your school provides, such as tutoring, coaching, advisement, and writing centers. Save them in your academic planning systems and don’t be afraid to use them.
Finally, get an early start on coursework. Complete required readings, outline discussion posts, and begin researching essays and projects. Save your work in your school organization system so it’s ready to turn in when the term begins.
Getting a head start is the best way to optimize time creating soft productivity habits for busy midlife academics short on time. This way, you’re a week or two ahead, allowing you more time and flexibility, which I’m sure you’ll need at some point throughout the course.
Make sure to balance this head start with self-care and relaxation, and be gentle with yourself. Speaking of self-care, it’s time to create systems to incorporate hobbies and passion projects into your life.
Rebuilding A Reading Routine Beyond Academics
Regardless of your concentration, if you’re an English major, reading and writing are your top hobbies. Hence, it’s imperative to nurture your creative and intellectual well-being. First, let’s explore how to rebuild reading habits.
Chances are you fall into one of two camps. Either you lack free time to read, or you have academic reading fatigue. I have solutions for both situations.
Often, we feel we don’t have time to read when we do. Analyze your schedule for a second. Do you notice fifteen-minute, twenty-minute, or thirty-minute blocks? You do? Perfect! When you notice those little gaps, squeeze in a reading session. If this time occurs often, you may create a mini reading routine. Remember, focus on the fun, escapist pleasure of reading without deadlines, stipulations, or rules. Just have fun escaping into a good book.
Another option for those short on time is to listen to audiobooks during your commute, while cleaning, cooking, or folding laundry. This is a fabulous way to engage with literature in a new format, cultivating an entirely new experience.
For those struggling with reading fatigue, it’s ok to take a break from reading. You want reading to be enjoyable, not a chore. When you feel up to it, perhaps during your free time on the weekends, try reading short-form literature such as graphic novels, short story collections, poetry, articles, or essays.
Another idea is to try thematic reading and supplement books to pair with your courses. For instance, if you’re taking a creative writing course, heighten the experience by reading Save the Cat Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody.
Finally, look at your schedule to determine which days you have to complete complex reading assignments. Take a break from reading on those days and elect to read on low-academic-reading days. The goal is to develop an intentional reading practice. It doesn’t mean you have to read every day, but read in a way that supports your time and academic commitments. If you’re looking for inspiration for what to read, visit my book nook on Bookshop.org.
The final part of your academic glow-up is to create a writing routine to develop your craft, improve your writing skills, and build your portfolio.
Cultivating A Writing Practice
For aspiring writers, cultivating a writing practice is imperative. Following a consistent writing routine improves your skills, allowing you to develop your voice and style. Plus, you get to experiment with diverse writing genres and formats to find what interests you.
First, begin with a consistent journaling practice. You can choose to use writing prompts for inspiration or free write. Both are magnificent ways to spark creativity. Additionally, applying this practice to school essay projects helps improve your grades and strengthen your writing.
Next, join writing groups at your school or local community. Writing groups are excellent for making contacts, receiving feedback for your work, and learning from other aspiring writers. You may also find freelancing gigs for proofreading, beta-reading, or ghost writing. All of which are perfect to add to your portfolio as you gain experience in the field.
As a midlife student juggling responsibilities, committing to a regular writing practice is challenging. Be gentle with yourself and remain flexible. Your writing practice may be snatches of time here and there. For instance, bedtime journaling or weekend writing sessions are perfect when life is hectic.
Don’t become too attached to your writing practice fitting certain romanticized parameters. Structure it in a way that works for you. As you build confidence and grow your skills, you open yourself to freelancing opportunities, moving you closer towards your goal.
Being a midlife student and committing yourself to elevating your career is stress-inducing. Juggling work, school, family, and time for yourself can quickly become overwhelming, leading to burnout.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Recognizing who you have to become to achieve academic success guides you towards creating systems that balance all areas of your life. Helping to ease stress, reignite your passion, and make the most out of your current era.
Share what your academic glow up looks like in the comments!
