When Love Has Fear Baked Into It: The Academic's Hidden Trap

"Love has fear baked into it," I read to my son last week from Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures. I loved the phrasing and the concept. It captured something I see with every academic I coach.

This insight also echoes a core principle from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: wherever you find deep values, you also find vulnerability to pain. You can't care deeply about something without opening yourself to the fear of losing it.

For academics, this creates a peculiar trap. We love research, education, and intellectual discovery. These aren't just jobs, they're callings that drew us through years of PhD struggle and career uncertainty. But that love makes us vulnerable to exploitation in ways we might not even notice.

We might say we love research but spend our working hours in committees that achieve nothing. We feel that teaching matters most but rush through marking because we are overwhelmed with administrative tasks, and deadlines and volume do not allow us to do our most effective work. Intellectual freedom is something else we value, then we spend evenings filling in forms that measure "impact."

Sometimes I wonder if we are so busy performing academic identity that we never stopped checking whether we are actually doing the work we came here to do.

That's the love that drew us here. But where love lives, fear follows. Fear is quite present in the sector; with the financial crisis, redundancies and recruitment freezes. But we can also examine the fear that has always been there. Not about losing your job, rather a fear about confronting the gap between what you thought academic life would be and what it actually is. Because of this fear, you have stayed busy, saying yes to everything that sounds vaguely academic, because busyness feels safer than examining whether your daily reality matches your stated purpose.

Try this exercise: list everything you did last week that wasn't direct research, teaching preparation, or meaningful student contact. Then ask yourself: if I stopped doing each of these things tomorrow, what would actually happen? Does this activity move me closer to why I became an academic?

Most academics discover they're drowning in work that serves institutional needs while their own purpose gets pushed to evenings and weekends. The committee that meets monthly but never makes decisions. The peer review that takes hours for a journal you don't respect. The emotional labour disguised as a professional development opportunity.

I am not suggesting we all become selfish. Rather this is about recognising that when you spread yourself too thin, you serve nobody well, least of all yourself. You can't mentor students effectively when you're exhausted. You can't produce meaningful research when your time is fragmented. You can't teach with passion when you're running on empty.

One of my clients recently left academia for another sector. Not because she stopped loving intellectual work, but because she realised she could do work she actually valued without the constraints of working as an academic. We continue working on academic papers together whilst she figures out what to keep and what to shed of her academic identity.

The love is real. The work that originally drew you to academia still matters. But perhaps it's time to examine whether your current activities actually serve that love - or whether you're just afraid to admit they don't.

Sometimes protecting what you love means saying no to things that claim to serve it.

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Hi, I am Wendy. I work with overwhelmed academics to help them escape the endless treadmill of competing demands so that they can reconnect with their identity & purpose.

Packages start from £499.

With me you can expect to achieve:

• A comprehensive mapping of where you are now, and where you want to be.

• Clarity on what matters to you both professionally and personally.

• Practical tools to set work boundaries that actually stick in academic environments.

• Strategies to protect your wellbeing while still delivering quality work.

• Emotional support and understanding.

• Confidence to make decisions to support your future personal and professional life.

Book a chat in my diary, it is free for a 30 minute conversation to find out if working with me can help you take the next steps in your academic life. https://tidycal.com/drwendynicholls/letschat

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