Breaking the Cycle of Achievement Addiction in Higher Education

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Academia is structurally engineered to exploit achievement addiction. Breaking free means choosing to uncouple your personal self-worth from the external validation of the university hierarchy.

“Well, this feels anticlimactic.”

This was the second thought that I had leaving my candidacy exam (aka Comprehensive exam). I had written for weeks and agonized over every decision, section, paragraph, and sentence. Then I stewed for weeks, realizing the mistakes I had made, and preparing to answer “why” I made every choice.

I passed; I should have felt elated, but instead the first thing my mind said was, “Okay, what’s next?” I knew in the moment that this was not the right response. I was going to be the first person in my family to get a PhD. But all I could think was, " Now what?”

That might have been the first time I had that thought, but it certainly wasn’t the last. It came up again after defending my dissertation, getting my first job, getting my first grant, achieving tenure, and many other big and small moments in my career to date.

The Anatomy of the Validation Loop:

Recently I’ve been thinking about that moment in the hall outside that conference room more than a decade ago and asking myself why achieving doesn’t feel better. So, as any good academic would, I’ve been doing some reading. Apparently, we have a label for my experience: “achievement addiction”. According to the article, reaching goals feels good, but that high doesn’t last because we are confounded by both the “arrival fallacy” and “hedonic adaptation”.

The academic world is built on a foundation that capitalizes on academics’ ability to never be satisfied. And let’s be honest, part of how you got to this point in your career is relying on that very trait. But here’s the problem: maintaining your performance in that way is not satisfying. If you don’t build a version of you that is disconnected from your work, no award, acknowledgment, or praise will ever be enough.

Performative Rest vs. Psychological Detachment:

The technical term for your first step in creating this new version of you is to establish “psychological detachment”. Psychological detachment is the ability of individuals to “switch off” from work by not doing work-related tasks and not thinking about work during non-work time. The ability to switch off has been found to be crucial in recovery and protective of individual well-being. From personal experience, a real and meaningful break from work is also key to long-term productivity, quality, and feeling empowered in your career.

Setting the New Baseline:

Of course, finding ways to “switch off” is easier said than done. We’ve all been practicing being “on” for most of our adult lives. So here are a few things that I do (starting small) that have helped me:

1. Turn off email notifications on your phone. This way I can’t see unread messages unless I open the app.

2. Block time on your calendar for a lunch break every day so no meetings can be scheduled for this time. You might do work here, but you could also stare off into space.

3. Stop responding to emails immediately and set aside time twice a day to respond. Of course, use your discretion here, but I have found very few things in my work-life require an immediate response.

4. Keep work materials in your home office or, minimally, out of sight (they don’t belong on your kitchen table). Do work at work and keep home for everything else.

5. Turn on “Face ID” or use “Downtime” to prevent yourself from mindless email checking after work and on the weekend. This is admittedly a little more advanced. I have Downtime running from 4-8 pm every day. No email, no social media, no news, unless I make multiple clicks to turn things back on. And it is always time-limited until 8:00 pm.

So many of these tactics are about making myself slow down and ask, “Do I really need to do that right now?” And to follow up with, “What else could I do?” when I’m at home. Since making these shifts, I’ve been reading, finishing puzzles, catching up on shows, working in the garden, fixing things around the house, and, on the weekends, “losing” my phone for hours.

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