Breaking the Cycle of Overwork and Recuperation: Altering Somatic Engagement Across Boundaries

Past research often relegates the management of the ideal worker’s overworking body to the nonwork environment. Reflecting a segmentation approach to managing the boundary between work and nonwork, the nonwork setting is treated as a context for recuperation. Yet, segmentation may, ironically, support the ideal worker image and reinforce the persistence of overwork. Drawing on two-year-long ethnographic studies of yoga teacher training, this paper considers how individuals shift how they manage the boundaries around their bodies. In doing so, we challenge the notion that segmentation of nonwork from work is an ideal boundary management strategy for addressing the negative impacts of overwork. Rather, we suggest that an integration strategy developed in a nonwork community may be productive for breaking the cycle of overwork and recuperation promoted by the ideal worker image and creating a virtuous cycle of activation and release. We bring forward the bodily basis to overwork and conceptualize somatic engagement as a form of engagement through which actors come to connect reflexively with their bodily experience across domains. Relatedly, in revealing how individuals come to connect reflexively with their bodily experience, we elaborate our understanding of the relational phenomena that enhance individuals’ somatic experiences across boundaries.