At this point, you’ve probably heard of The Great Resignation – but have you heard of quiet quitting? It might be something you want to consider. Read on for more!
You’ve probably heard of the Great Resignation – people who are quitting their dissatisfying jobs and looking for work and a lifestyle more consistent with their values. The Great Resignation is occurring in a ton of sectors, including academia, health services, and other helping professions.
Hustle culture is toxic, and this pushback is good. But quitting your job is often a luxury that few of us have. Welcome, instead, a compromise: Quiet quitting. (Or for those folks who have ever been in a union: Work to rule).
Quiet quitting means cutting back (or stopping entirely) all of the above-and-beyond, overtime, soul-sucking and burnout-inducing extras you are doing at work and instead doing exactly what you’re being paid for.
Overwork can be a major enemy of self-care! It sucks up any extra time we need to put towards ourselves and can zap our energy via burnout and depression, leaving us without the emotional space we need to engage in self-care.
This post might be making some of you pretty uncomfortable! Going above and beyond, sacrificing ourselves for our careers, students, and clients, and overachieving are typical behaviors for us in the helping professions. We might worry that if we slow down, others will be negatively impacted.
Over the past year, I began to engage in some “quiet quitting” without knowing the term. (I called it “emotionally retiring”). It was an act of self-care to critically evaluate the pieces of my work that were sucking my energy and interfering with my mental health. Some of it was out of my control, but some of it wasn’t. Quiet quitting isn’t all-or-nothing; it’s a spectrum. What can you dial back on?
In self-care solidarity,
