RESEARCH FATIGUE? WHAT NOW?

What is this Strange Feeling?

We're coming to the end of another election cycle. Sometimes it feels like they've started to cycle through us rather than the other way around. We start to think about something like the midterms as a continual train that runs on schedule, ready to run us through every few years. It can feel that way with most elections really — it's just a wheel that keeps on turning. And really, it's not just that way for political researchers.

This cyclic problem is one faced in many realms of research. Say your focus is medical. Flu season comes and goes. Most products are more popular at certain times of year. Retail stores are built in one town this month, three other places two months later. It can start to feel like a rather endless cycle of going through the motions of our jobs.

Really, our whole lives are composed of these seasons that come and go, and it can be difficult to avoid fatigue as we move in and out of them. But perhaps one of the reasons for this is our mindset. We think of life as a wheel, spinning around. We keep hitting different spokes on it. The elections come, then they come again, then they come again. We have the same job — make sense of the data. And there is always more data.

But perhaps a wheel isn't the best way to think about how these things cycle. Perhaps it's more like a dance. A set of moves back and forth that become more rewarding the longer we hold on. We just have to keep from stepping on toes. Ours or someone else's. So what can we do to avoid this mindset, and what can we do to get out of it when it comes?

The Problem Under the Problem

Volume of work is not the cause of this feeling of fatigue, at least in most cases. Rather than work gained, the core is about meaning lost. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, often cited for their academic work on career burnout, draw a careful distinction between exhaustion and the deeper condition it often masks: people feel a disconnect between the work they do and the meaning it carries. Until you restore a semblance of purpose to the work that is done, that feeling of disenchantment will remain. We must be re-enchanted with our work.

Sit in that for a moment. Without a concrete understanding of the purpose of our work, we lose the interest and energy necessary to complete it. This is not a problem wherein the work actually has no meaning. When we say it's been lost, we do not mean it has been destroyed. We mean that we've forgotten where to find it — how to describe it.

The election cycle is a good example. At the beginning — the first midterms, the first presidential study, the first time you sat in a back room watching a focus group and understood that you were watching something that would actually change how a campaign spoke to voters? Obviously, in that moment the feeling was palpable, and the stakes felt more real. The data seemed to be illustrating something that mattered which you could see with your own eyes. None of that has actually changed, and elections still matter. What did change was your perception, beginning to treat the moments leading up to the big reveal of all your data as data in and of itself. It became this rote collection of tasks that culminated in a report, which felt alien compared to the way these elections actually shape policy and force people to reconfigure their lives on the ground.

"This is not a problem wherein the work actually has no meaning. When we say it's been lost, we do not mean it has been destroyed. We mean that we've forgotten where to find it — how to describe it."

— On the nature of research burnout

What Happens When We Turn to Stone?

There is a clinical observation worth borrowing from outside the research world. Psychologists who study professional burnout consistently find that rigidity — an inability to adapt and change your process over time — to be a chief predictor of future fatigue. In the attempt to be consistent, you can stop being curious. You can actually fail to notice the new lines in the sand. Voters become numbers and percentages, not poor folks worried about gas and grocery prices and whether or not they can afford that medication on their current insurance.

When we feel depleted, when we get tired because everything just feels samey, we tend to reach for what is familiar, what requires the least additional cognitive investment. That just continues the cycle. The election study becomes a template. The focus group becomes a script. We stop asking what is interesting about this particular group of voters — and start asking only whether the numbers match what we expected. We can miss the forest for the trees because we retroactively decide we know how a certain population thinks, and not even recognize that they just don't think the same way anymore. This kind of thinking is how people lost the plot in 2016 and didn't see that Donald Trump was playing right into the hands of middle-class voter complaints. Populism is only traceable if you actually have a grasp on public outcry. That's not something you can just glean from polls and a Facebook feed — you have to talk to real people in a room, which is the whole point of political focus groups.

Dancing Around the Wheel

The earlier wheel image is intuitive (though flawed) because it is partially accurate. Things do repeat. The midterms come back around, and the flu season, and the product launch window, and the annual benchmark study. There is a genuine pattern, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But that's not everything there is to the passage of time.

A wheel returns to the same point. A dance does not — or not exactly. In a dance, the same steps appear again, but they appear in relation to what has come before, to what the music is doing now, to what the other person is bringing to this particular moment. Another example of this would be poetry. The stanzas in a line rhyme and have a rhythm, and it makes for a certain predictability to its movements. The lines reflect each other, yet they are rarely the same. New things happen. Choreography improves through memory, but dancers are human, and we end up making little differences in each move of the waltz.

We're not talking about a cure to all boredom you'll ever face in the workplace, mind you — we're talking about recognizing the change in the pattern, learning to look for the extraordinary among the ordinary. If you look hard enough, you'll come to the realization that there's actually something quite extraordinary about the dance as a whole. The way it moves across time and changes while retaining shape. It makes you actually want to look closer and see what is causing the changes, understanding the intricacies of the poetic metre.

This is, in fact, a more accurate description of what cyclical research actually is, when it is working well. The cycle has made them better at their job because they see it for what it is. Presents wrapped in the ever-flowing patterns of time. The question is whether they are letting themselves use what they know — or whether the wheel image has convinced them that arriving at the same point means nothing has changed.

"A wheel returns to the same point. A dance does not — or not exactly. In a dance, the same steps appear again, but they appear in relation to what has come before, to what the music is doing now, to what the other person is bringing to this particular moment."

— On how to think about cyclical work

What Does the Cure Look Like?

The practical cure for research fatigue, in almost every case, is the deliberate restoration of genuine curiosity. This is less an emotion than a discipline, and it's one that can be cultivated — though it doesn't always come naturally. We live in a world where we often don't do what we want to do. Where we don't see the things we want to or ought to see. But that does not mean we are without hope.

The most direct way to cultivate this sense of the extraordinary ordinary is also the most obvious: ask a question you do not already know the answer to. I know, I know — it sounds like a dumb piece of advice. You probably think this is what you're already trying to do. But hear me out. Ask a question you do not think you already know the answer to. When you look at the demos of your recruit, stop thinking you've already read their minds. You (like many of us) probably perceive yourself as knowing generally what people will say before they say it. You've met these audiences before. You know the drill. But you have not met this audience. Here and now. Listen to them, really listen. Do not fill your head with a notion you haven't heard. Don't let it color your speech patterns and listening cycles. Maybe you'll start to see a person.

These questions will have a clarifying effect in the long term. They reintroduce the researcher to the live dimension of the work — the part that the template cannot capture and that the routine cannot anticipate. They are a way of remembering why the work is not just repetition. The data does not repeat, even when the cycle does. These people have not been in a room with you before, and you do not know what they are going to say. Let yourself be surprised and feel the rhythm of the dance. You'll find soon enough that you never left the real world in the first place — you just grew blind to it.

Practices Worth Building In

Build in one fresh question per cycle. Before each recurring study begins, identify one thing you genuinely do not know — something specific enough to be answerable, interesting enough to be worth answering. Let it run alongside the standard metrics as a private inquiry.

Compare across cycles explicitly. Fatigue often comes from treating each cycle as self-contained. Reviewing what was surprising the last time — and looking for whether it has resolved, deepened, or disappeared — restores a sense of longitudinal meaning that isolated studies cannot provide.

Talk to people outside your discipline. Isolation is among the strongest predictors of burnout in research. A conversation with someone who approaches the same electorate, the same patient population, or the same consumer base from a different methodological tradition can reintroduce genuine surprise into data you thought you knew.

Let the unexpected slow you down. When something in the data does not fit, resist the efficiency impulse to move past it. Anomalies are where the new things live. In a mature cycle of work, they may be the only place left where something genuinely new is available to be found.

Name the accumulation. Experience is not the same as repetition. At the start of each new cycle, take stock of what the previous ones have taught — not as a ritual, but as a genuine accounting. The researcher who recognizes how much they know that they did not know before is less likely to feel that they are simply running in place.

What if it's Too Late?

This all comes across a bit easier to read if you already feel okay, and you view the article as more of a preventative. But if you're in the middle of exhaustion, or a pattern of fatigue, it probably comes across a bit less easy to swallow. Dragging yourself out of the pit of mundanity is not easy work, and the "asking the right questions" and "not assuming" the answers are supposed to be faux magic trick-esque ways of throwing confetti at an actual problem.

But one of the most important things to recognize, when fatigue has already arrived, is that rest alone is unlikely to fix it. Rest addresses exhaustion. It will get you back on your feet. But it will not fix a mindset. If you still dread the work when it comes back, you still have a problem, regardless of how long a break you take. What fatigue really requires, in addition to rest, is reconnection with the question the work is actually trying to answer, with the people whose views are being studied, with the moment in which the research is happening, as stated above.

What that process of changing your mindset looks like could be different for different people. I'd argue that it's very likely one best solved in community. Talk to those that are in your field that have been where you are. Don't have great connections? Find them. Go to conferences. Ask for advice. Reach out to people like FGA Research™ (shameless plug, but there's more out there than just us). It might look like spending time on a study in a subject area you have not worked in before: not to become expert in it, but to recover the beginner's attention that expertise gradually trains out of us. It might look like sitting in on a focus group as an observer rather than a moderator, removing the procedural demands of research and learning to listen again. It might look like going back to a study you conducted several cycles ago and reading it with the knowledge you now have. You might even discover it was a lot more interesting than you realized at the time.

At the end of the day, our work matters. If we lose touch with the real world people, the lives impacted by what we do, no matter how small it seems, then we lose sight of the whole. The sense that this is all moving towards something important? That's a sense that must be cultivated, deliberately. It probably means trusting in something bigger than yourself, and building community. But if you do hold on to the beautiful ordinary, you'll likely find that the dance does keep going, each step sweeter than the last. ◆

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."

— G.K. Chesterton

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