Becoming an activist is a transformative experience; supporting causes you believe in can provide a sense of purpose and meaning to your life and connect you with enriching communities. However, prioritising your activism over your other basic needs can lead to burnout.
Looking after your own and other’s wellbeing as an activist is just as important as producing an effective campaign plan, and is essential for ensuring you can sustainably work towards change.
Work-life balance
A healthy work-life balance is essential to running effective campaigns and keeping yourself well.
A helpful analogy for your wellbeing can be to think of a sourdough starter. In order to function, a starter needs to be kept in the right environment, fed regularly with flour, and given plenty of time to rest. When everything is in balance, your sourdough can make amazing things – focaccia, bagels, a perfectly scored loaf… but neglecting its needs can make your bread fall flat.
The same principle applies to yourself as an activist – you cannot effectively show up for your campaign if you aren’t nourishing yourself, getting enough rest, and doing things you enjoy. Therefore, balancing your campaign with the rest of your life is essential.
What is activist burnout?
Activist burnout is when your campaigning work leads to an imbalance in your everyday life, leading to exhaustion, disillusionment, and eventually an inability to keep your activism going. Early symptoms of activist burnout include:
- Being completely obsessed with your activist work
- Withdrawing from social life
- Withdrawing from relationships and neglecting connections with friends and family
- Believing that nothing is more important than your campaign and that you are the only person who can be relied upon to get it done
If the situation isn’t addressed, burnout can worsen, with symptoms such as:
- Exhaustion
- Depression
- Mood swings
- Anger
- Chronic fatigue
- Cynicism
- Emotional freezing
- Inability to find meaning in anything
Severe activist burnout can take a long time to recover from, but it is possible to intervene before it gets this bad. If you notice early signs in yourself or members of your campaign group, it is important to check in and seek specialist support, if necessary, to regain a healthy and sustainable work-life balance.
Preventing and reducing burnout
Create a supportive campaign team
A campaign team is not just an effective tool for organising – it can also be a brilliant support network and enriching community. Organising team socials to bond and celebrate your wins, as well as running action debriefs and creating space to share their feelings about how campaigning is going, can all help to create an environment where team members can support each other through good times and bad.
Campaigning and activism are often long-term processes, and it can be easy to be self-critical and judge yourself harshly when you face setbacks.
Self-compassion is made up of three core elements: self-kindness (showing yourself warmth and encouragement through difficult experiences), common humanity (recognising your connection to others through your experiences), and mindfulness (awareness of difficult emotions). Psychological studies have shown that workers who exercise self-compassion have decreased rates of burnout and increased feelings of hope, demonstrating how it could improve your campaigning mindset and help you to overcome obstacles.
As you progress with your campaign, you will likely face setbacks, and learn more about the root causes of the problems you are trying to tackle. To prevent this from demotivating you, it's important to nurture a sense of hope to keep you inspired. Recognising your wins is a great first step.
Imagination can also be a powerful tool. Creating a vision of the world when your issue is solved, while recognising that you can't change everything all at once, can help motivate you when things are difficult. Disability and human rights activist Eddie Ndopu said ‘another word for activism is… imagination’, as all activists must ‘envision a world which does not yet exist’. A clear vision will keep you hopeful and on track to meet your goals.
Wellbeing Support
If you or someone you know is having wellbeing concerns, you can access the following support resources:
University Services
External Support Resources
- Access talking therapies through Cornwall and Isles of Scilly NHS Trust if you're registered with a GP in Cornwall
- Student Minds are a national charity focused on student mental health, and have different articles and resources on different wellbeing topics
- The Commons Social Change Library has lots of resources on different activist topics, including looking after your wellbeing as an activist
This resource references information from The Activist Handbook by Aidan Ricketts (2012), and the article How Self-Compassion Can Help Us Deal With Stress by Sophie Olivia Hanson.