Barre with Justine

First, a personal story.

There was a moment last fall when I nearly lost it. I raced home from working late to pick up the skating bag and then rushed to my parents’ house to pick up my littlest. The entire night had been carefully orchestrated so that drop off for my oldest daughter’s dance was taken care of, my husband had my son at his hockey, and my job was to get our 5 year old to her very first skating lesson. She was so excited and had talked about it for days. I hadn’t eaten yet, but we drove across town to the rink, figured out where to go and headed to the changeroom. Right after I began to do her skates up, I reached in the bag an realized we were missing her helmet. No helmet. She burst into tears and I felt my own eyes well up as I basically carried her back to the car. I texted my husband after and said I can’t live like this anymore (maybe in all caps)…I felt so burned out by our pace of life and the endless demands on our time.

In a few weeks,, my librarian colleague Chelsea Humphries and I will present at the Ontario Library Association conference, leading a discussion about burnout in academic librarianship. Burnout is a hot topic in nearly every profession these days but Chelsea and I found some unique perspectives and experiences of burnout in our research on movement instructors who also teach in academic librarians. More on that at a later date, but there are so many parallels between feeling the need to bring positive and sunny energy into a class at the library and a fitness class.

I reached out to the barre community to get their feedback on feelings of burnout and heard stories about feeling pressure to perform, mental stress learning choreography, taking on too much teaching, saying yes too often, along with physical fatigue. Luckily, I also heard some great ideas for managing burnout including taking time to attend other classes (how often do instructors really have the time/energy to do that?), taking rest seriously, and keeping things fresh.

What I think doesn’t get addressed as often are the emotions involved in teaching fitness. As instructors, we love teaching and care deeply about our classes and members. There is some pressure that goes along with this, whether we recognize it or not. There are days that feel heart-heavy or days when the body is aching, and it can be difficult to “smile through the shin splints” (as I once joked) or encourage others when you feel let down by the world around you.

Burnout can be insidious and sneak up on you. You feel like you have your life polished and put together only to have it all crumble at the forgotten skates, the phone call from school, or the frustrating meeting at work. If we can notice the signs before our light is fully extinguished, it may not hit as hard or require quite so much to build back up again.

Here are a few things that I’m trying to do in 2025 to avoid that dreadful moment of the forgotten skates:

• taking a yoga class, in-person or online, whenever possible. It’s lovely to teach people how to relax, but even better if I can do it myself every so often.
• really respect my sleep. I spent most of last year getting 6 hours or less and it just simply isn’t enough. I want to wake up feeling energized and happy.
• eat more nourishing meals. I love to eat healthy but I am guilty of eating crackers and cheese for lunch sometimes, or eating just a smoothie and nothing else until dinner. I don’t feed my kids like that so probably it’s not the best for me either.

Have you ever experienced burnout? How did you manage?

thanks, as always, for reading!