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Today we’re talking about academic burnout, including burnout when completing high school, university, or college.
As always, please note this is general advice and is not exhaustive for every individual situation. You should seek help from a qualified professional as soon as any causes of stress or symptoms begin to feel more than what you are able to handle on your own.Defining Academic Burnout
Defining Academic Burnout
Academic burnout is going to be different for different people. In most cases, academic burnout comes around from the pressure that someone feels to achieve certain grades or a certain outcome, like submitting that thesis. This pressure to achieve may come from yourself. You may perceive or know that in order to continue towards your long-term goals, you need to achieve a certain level of grades. It may be the pressure you put on yourself because your study and grades are part of your identity; you want to be seen by others as successful in your actions.
This pressure can come from others, such as parents, teachers, lecturers or even friends. This pressure can be overt, such as parents or teachers saying, ‘You better achieve As if you want to get anywhere in life’. The pressure can also be subtle, coming from others, such as friends saying things like ‘You succeed in everything you do.’ or ‘You’ll definitely get Dux’. We know they mean well and say these things as encouragement, but these messages can cause us to feel pressure to perform, meet their expectations and not disappoint others.
Symptoms of Academic Burnout
Academic burnout can leave you feeling absolutely drained, both emotionally from the exhaustion of constantly worrying about you academic achievements. It can also leave you feeling physically exhausted, either due to lack of sleep or healthy lifestyle choices due to preoccupation with academics, or even not having a healthy life-study balance; staying up late and studying rather than resting. For some, academic pressures lead to them working harder and harder in their studies, spending countless hours studying for that test or writing that paper.
For others, however, the academic pressures actually lead to procrastination and not working on what they should be working on. This can be from a fear of failure, or simply avoidance of work. If you’ve been in this situation, as I certainly have been, this can lead to a spiral of shame and guilt of not doing the work that you know you should be doing, which leads to more coping through procrastination. For me this was watching TV shows and going for walks, which lead to further guilt and shame.
Ultimately, academic burnout can leave you feeling helpless, hopeless and ineffective. Self-doubt can creep in from every angle about your skills and abilities to do the simplest academic tasks. If you’re investigating academic burnout, it’s likely you’re experiencing it right now, and instead of more about what academic burnout is, you’d much rather find out how to stop experiencing it, so let’s discuss that now.
Recovering from Academic Burnout
Recovering from Academic Burnout
Recovering from burnout is going to look different for each person, but I’ve got some overall tips that will help almost anyone on the path to recovery from academic burnout.
An important tip for recovering from academic burnout is to get support. Surround yourself with friends, family, other students and advisors or mentors who will validate your anxieties and self-doubts. When I say those who will ‘validate’ you, I’m talking about people who won’t say things like ‘There’s life other than your study’ and ‘Cheer up, there’s a world out there even if you fail’. I’m sure you’ve probably heard those things before and can agree that they didn’t leave you feeling heard or supported. Ask your school or university if they have counselling services available.
Recovering: Identifying Sources of Stress
Firstly, we need to identify exactly what the source of stress is for your academic burnout. I like to talk about barriers; what is the barrier that stands between you and your goals? These barriers are the things that are most likely the stressors in your situation.
For many experiencing Academic burnout, the barrier is going to be some form of self-doubt. As we’ve already discussed, this self-doubt can be caused by numerous external pressures, but also internal pressures. Also, again, there can be a cycle between academic burnout and self-doubt. We need to break this cycle.
Getting really practical here, find something to write with and write down any self-doubts you have about your academic performance. For me, it was a doubt that I could successfully complete a thesis. Then comes the part that often requires a lot more thought: See if you can write down why you have that self-doubt. For example, for me, it was because I kept getting negative feedback on my thesis progress from my supervisors. For you, it may be that there is a specific subject that you are really struggling to commit to memory for an exam. It may even be you failed something in the past. It may be that you are seeing fellow students around you succeed around you and are worried you’ll be compared to them by others.
Once you have written down these reasons for self-doubt, we then need to work on challenging these negative thoughts. Oftentimes, this will require the help of a trusted friend, teacher or parent who you know will be able to validate you in your burnout. So, again by example, for me and my self-doubt that came from the negative feedback, I needed to challenge myself that previous negative feedback did not necessarily mean future negative feedback. I also needed to challenge the thought by assessing to what extent their feedback was subjective, based on their experiences, rather than objective opinions on what was ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ in my thesis.
Recovering: The 'Why' Behind Project Management to Combat Academic Burnout
Recovering: The 'Why' Behind Project Management to Combat Academic Burnout
The second tip for academic burnout recovery is project management. I’m sure you’ve heard from someone else the necessity of project management when you are working on large tasks like a thesis or studying for tests and exams, but hear me out, because I want to tell you the why behind the management: It helps you to not do study.
By having your study realistically project managed, and I’ll tell you a simple way to do this in a moment, you’ll see that there is only a finite quantity of things you can do to reach your goal. Once you have your goals in your calendar, here is the real kicker; don’t do more than you have scheduled. Once you have completed everything scheduled for the day, you can give yourself permission to stop studying, because you know you will have the rest of your goals and tasks nearly scheduled and ready to go!
So, how to project manage your study:
- Write your goals. Your goals are real, tangible, measurable things. So ‘Get good grades in biology’ is not the sort of goal we are looking for. The goal here would be ‘complete assignment 1’, ‘complete assignment 2’, ‘complete exam’ etc.
- Once you’ve got these big goals, you need to break them down into smaller goals. For example, for ‘assignment 1’, first task could be ‘read assignment instructions’, second task could be ‘set out assignment document format’, third task could be ‘write introduction’. The smaller the goal the better, because when you complete a goal, you can tick that goal off your list and notice that you have succeeded in something towards your bigger goal.
- Once you have all your goals, next step is to try and estimate how long each goal would take, and yes, this does take practice and may require readjustments if your estimates are off, and then assign it time in your calendar. Here, the tip is you will nearly always underestimate how long a task will take. It’s human nature to do so. So don’t feel your calendar to the brim but make sure you have flexible time between tasks.
Preventing Academic Burnout
Preventing Academic Burnout
So that’s some tips on recovering from academic burnout. How about preventing burnout in the future? And by the future, I’m talking not only about next year if you are starting a new course, but I’m also talking about… tomorrow. Firstly, have a look at the recovery tips we already discussed. All of those things; uncovering self doubt; project management and getting support; are going to be incredibly helpful for avoiding academic burnout.
The other really helpful thing you can do it start identifying your own personal goals and values. What exactly are you hoping to achieve through your academic achievements? Is achieving a great score really necessary for that goal? For me, I started with wanting to write the best thesis ever. I soon realised, however, that there were no differences, outside the university walls, for achieving a perfect thesis over a great thesis, especially when it was a non-graded pass.
Your situation, however, may be you are required to get a certain grade in order to get into the next course. Therefore, you really do value getting that high grade. In this case, you may need to consider how much you value other hobbies, such as gaming or TV or time on your phone, and whether you need to create some healthy habits around these other things that could eat into your study. Again, get project management happening so that you have clear time to do these hobbies, but establishing boundaries so the balance is not out between work and play is important for avoiding unneeded stress in the future.
Also on this topic, consider learning to be mindful about what you are doing so that you can have these boundaries between work and play or work and rest. This essentially means learning to be ‘in the moment’ when you are trying to do other things so that your mind isn’t constantly thinking about your study when you are trying to do other things in your personal life.
This isn’t necessarily about yoga or breathing exercises, but rather focusing your attention n on your immediate surroundings. Next time you feel yourself thinking over and over again about your study, pick something in your environment to focus on. It could be the sound of birds, someone else’s voice or even the feeling of the wind. Focus on it for as long as you need. If you notice your mind start to drift away and start thinking about study, don’t get upset with yourself or disheartened or judge yourself for not being able to be in the moment, but rather acknowledge the thought as a thought and try to bring your focus back to your environment. This might take some doing, but really, by doing this, you are practising being in the moment, rather than thinking and thinking about things in the past or things coming up in the future about your university, college or high school work.
Concluding Thoughts on Academic Burnout
Concluding Thoughts on Academic Burnout
Thank you and I hope there was something helpful in there for you today to help you overcome and avoid academic burnout. I’ve experienced it personally, it sucks, but there are ways to stop experiencing it.
Best studies to anyone out there finishing a thesis, paper or studying for their tests and exams.
Stay Connected with Coolout
Stay Connected with Coolout
Thank you, and I hope there was something helpful in there for you today. At Coolout, in 2023, we're developing Stress Management, Burnout Prevention and Burnout Recovery self-led online courses, a book and doing one-on-one burnout coaching. If you want to stay up to date, you can find a newsletter subscription where you can stay up to date with new content and information about upcoming training and product releases.