As academics, we’re pretty good at critique.
It’s a big part of what we’re trained to do. We question assumptions, identify gaps, challenge established ideas and look for ways things could be done differently.
Take teaching as an example. In one of my courses, students learn about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and then I ask them to pull the goals apart a little. Are they too broad? Do they let businesses claim they’re contributing to sustainability without changing very much? I want students to question, probe and think for themselves.
And it’s not just teaching. As researchers, we’re constantly reading other people’s work or poking at data and asking what’s missing. Even the administrative side of academic life runs on critique. My university is preparing to introduce a new assessment policy, and much of the implementation work comes down to asking what might go wrong, what we haven’t considered and how we can make it better.
It’s all important work, and some of it can even be quite fun. But lately I’ve been wondering: might our constant drive to question, analyse and improve also come at a cost? And what might we gain, at work and beyond it, if we occasionally gave that critical voice a rest?
When thinking gets in the way of doing
I’ve recently started a “get back into running” programme. It’s nothing particularly ambitious – just two runs a week, planned for me by an app. I open the app, it tells me what to do, and all I really need to do is lace up my running shoes, head out the front door, and follow the instructions. Simple, right?
Apparently not, if you’re me.
Before each run, I find myself thinking deep about it. Is it going to be too hard? Am I ready to run that distance? Is the programme progressing too quickly? Or perhaps too slowly? Should I be doing something different? Will I manage the hills? What if I can’t finish? I somehow manage to turn a perfectly straightforward 30-minute run into an elaborate intellectual exercise.
The funny thing is, once I’m actually out there, it’s usually fine. Or even better than fine! Recently I had a 3.5 kilometre run I was convinced I couldn’t do. It was early, fresh and cool, the flowers were out, and Sydney smelled delicious. I loved it. The run itself was so much simpler than all the thinking I’d done beforehand.
Meditation is similar. I’m trying to establish a daily ten-minute practice, and OMG it’s hard to get my brain to settle. Even when the whole point is to sit quietly and notice what’s happening, my mind keeps working. Am I doing this properly? Is it working? Why can’t I stop thinking? And should I make pesto or bolognese pasta for supper?
There’s something ridiculous (and very, VERY me) about overthinking whether you’re successfully not thinking.
Of course, critical thinking and overthinking aren’t the same thing. One is a valuable intellectual skill; the other can leave us going around in circles. But I wonder whether spending so much of our professional lives in an analytical mindset makes it harder to recognise when that mindset has stopped being helpful.
The joy of just doing something
There are parts of my life where I don’t seem to have this problem.
My daughters and I love making art together, and my favourite medium is collage. We sit around the kitchen table tearing pictures out of magazines and moving pieces about until something feels right, mostly in silence, with the sun streaming in through the window. I can lose myself in it.
I’m not interested in whether the finished collage is any good. I’m not optimising the process or checking whether my artistic skills are developing quickly enough. I’m just enjoying making something, and it’s wonderfully freeing.
Perhaps that’s because I’ve given myself permission to be creative without needing to be good at it. I haven’t turned collage into something to achieve. And there’s something in that I’d love to carry into the rest of my life.
What might we be missing at work?
I’ve started wondering whether there might be value in occasionally quietening that critical voice at work, too.
When we finish teaching a class, how often do we focus on what didn’t quite work, rather than the discussion that really took off or the student who finally grasped a difficult concept? When a colleague shares an idea, are we sometimes too quick to spot its limitations rather than getting excited about its possibilities? And when a new policy comes along, might we approach it with curiosity before working through everything that could go wrong?
There are times when identifying problems is exactly what’s needed. But I wonder whether we’re sometimes so busy looking for what could be better that we forget to appreciate what’s already good.
Being kind enough to switch off
Which brings me to kindness.
When I think about being a kind academic, I usually think about how we treat others: our students, our colleagues, the environments we create. But perhaps there’s also something to be said for extending that kindness to ourselves.
We don’t always have to be improving, evaluating or questioning. We can be beginners without constantly assessing our progress. And sometimes, rather than interrogating whether we’re doing something correctly, we can trust ourselves enough to simply give it a go.
Maybe the challenge isn’t learning to think less, but being more deliberate about when we think critically and when we simply let ourselves experience something.
I’m still working on that. But the next time my app tells me to run three and a half kilometres, I’m going to try not to turn it into a research question.
I’m just going to put on my shoes and run.
*Dictated by me, polished with Claude (Anthropic’s AI), edited by me.
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