If you're the kind of student who deals with a demanding, ambitious schedule, then it's possible you've experienced feelings of burnout. Especially if you're watching a video called How to Deal with Student Burnout. But what exactly is burnout? Yes, it's a series of near-perfect arcade racing games that sucked up large amounts of my time as a teenager, but it's also a debilitating state you don't want to find yourself in. If you're looking for a definition, David Ballard of the American Psychological Association defined job burnout as an extended period of time where someone experiences exhaustion and a lack of of interest in things, resulting in a decline in their job performance.
Replace job with student, and that definition doesn't lose its accuracy. But here's a more practical definition. Everything makes you tired, you don't care about anything, and everything sucks.
Burnout is characterized by near constant exhaustion, a lack of motivation in everything, frustration, cynicism, and a lot of other different symptoms. It's something that can happen when you're dealing with large amounts of stress for a long period of time, which is something that's sadly all too common for students. Here's the kicker though.
Burnout is a state of being that takes a while to get to. It doesn't happen overnight. And the good thing about this is that you can recognize the signs that are indicative of burnout and take steps to prevent actual burnout before it actually happens.
The first step in being able to prevent burnout is to figure out what exactly causes it. Now, a 2006 study at the University of Southern Maine surveyed 354 students to figure out what the cause of student burnout is. A small percentage reported mental or physical issues to be a cause, and a few others reported that problems with professors were causing their burnout.
About 13% felt that it was caused by a lack of personal motivation, either a lack of interest in their major, or as they describe in the paper, an overactive social life. A full quarter of the students surveyed reported outside issues to be the main cause, either family or financial issues, or time management problems mainly caused by things like part-time jobs. However, by far the largest cause reported was assignment overload. A full 49% of the students who actually reported feelings of burnout cited an overbearing, overtaxing course load as the main cause of the problem.
So now that we know some of the common causes of student burnout, we can actually tackle the issue of preventing it or fixing it if you're already feeling it. Now, the most important thing to note here is that it's essential to recognize the early signs of burnout if you can and prevent actual burnout before it happens. You're going to be much better equipped to tackle these problems if you're not hampered by constant exhaustion or the depressive state that burnout brings. So if you feel like you're on the road to burnout or you're experiencing some of the symptoms I mentioned before, take that seriously and take steps to prevent what they lead to.
That being said, even if you feel like you're past that point and you're completely burnt out right now, hopefully some of these tips that I'm going to round out the video with can help you out. My first and foremost tip is learn from that 49%. Don't bite off more than you can chew with your course load.
A more general way you could put this is think very carefully before committing yourself to overstretching for long periods of time. Be willing to challenge yourself, but realize that you do have limitations, just like the rest of us. And if you go beyond those limitations for too long, there are consequences.
Now, if you've had a look at my free book on earning better grades, you'll realize this is a rewarding of the very first tip in the first chapter of the book, which is don't overload the system. And speaking of the system, my second tip is to make sure that your system, your brain, and by extension, your body are in working order. A lack of sleep, good nutrition, or exercise can put you in a non-optimal state.
And when you're in a state like that, you're less able to deal with the challenges of your schedule and also things that can cause burnout. A third tip is to make sure that you're organized. I found in my life that if I feel unorganized, if my task management systems are full of tasks that I don't need to do anymore and everything just seems messy, it causes a lot of undue stress, which can lead to feelings of burnout.
So if you're feeling like this, maybe take a day or a weekend to clear out your task management systems, get all that entropy out of there, clean your room, and make sure that going forward, you feel like your life is organized. Another tip, and I think this is a really important one, is to make sure you're taking breaks. Get away from your school or work life on a regular basis and give yourself some time to relax. Now, as I've talked about in a previous video, when you're taking breaks, you want to make sure you're having high density fun.
Don't just go on Reddit or Facebook and give yourself like 10 minutes away from your work. Actually schedule some time to completely separate yourself from your work life and find something else you enjoy. You also want to make sure that your work or school can't seep into that break time, that it's sacred. As an entrepreneur, I've found that, in particular, my email is something that can seep into my break time.
So I make sure my phone has no notifications on it, and I make sure I only check email at certain times of the day. That way, my breaks are actually relaxing. Now, small breaks should be a regular occurrence in your schedule. There should be little ones each day, and then you should give yourself some time each week to really unwind.
However, sometimes that alone isn't enough, and you might need a longer break. Part of the reason I took my three-week vacation to Japan is because I was starting to feel some of the early signs of burnout. Making a video and four different podcast episodes each week was really starting to be taxing and I just needed some time to unwind and not have to work. Now that I've had that break, my mind is reset, I'm energized again, and I'm ready to jump back into making videos and podcasts. Now, related to taking breaks, I find that it's useful to have a hobby or pursuit where you can feel a sense of progress when you do it.
For me, at least, I find that taking breaks that only consist of consumption of media like movies or video games, which is honestly what a lot of people do, is not enough. So instead, I think it's good to take at least some of those break times to do something that has some progression to it. My next and final tip is to simply ask for help. You don't have to do this alone, and if you're in college, there's probably somebody on your campus whose job it is to help you deal with stress-related issues. Even if there isn't or maybe you don't want to, talking to friends or family about what's causing your stress can really help you relieve it.
So that's it for this video. Hopefully these tips will help you deal with some of the feelings of burnout that you may be feeling and we will be dealing with more stress-related topics in the future on this channel. In the meantime, if you've got other tips for dealing with burnout that I didn't mention in this video, feel free to leave them down in the comments and I will see you next week.
Hey guys, thanks so much for watching my video on dealing with burnout. Now if you want to get new videos every single week on being a more effective student, then you can click that big red subscribe button right there. If you want, you can also get a free copy of my book on earning better grades by clicking the book's picture.
And if you want to find links and other resources that I used to research this video, you'll find them at the companion blog post, which you can get to by clicking the orange logo right there. If you missed my last video, it was the conclusion to my accelerated Japanese learning challenge, and you can click the thumbnail to watch it. And if you would like to connect or ask questions or have ideas for new videos, you can find me on Twitter at TomFrankly, or leave a comment below. Thanks!