There are two weeks until finals season ends and summer begins, and it feels like …
If feels like there’s a flame that’s miraculously been sustained for months and it has been burning and burning and building and burning … and it’s about to reach a point where it just ...
Burns out.
Yeah … I’m burnt out. And chances are, if you ask any other student death-gripping a Dulce latte with dark circles around their eyes, they’d say they’re burnt out too. It’s a phrase heard daily around here — and one that’s been frequently used to describe the exhaustion people have reached Year Two of the pandemic.
But it’s not just slang.
In the early 1970s, American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger first used the term, describing it as a “state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by one’s professional life.” He was writing specifically about overworked volunteers at a free clinic, and because of that, the term was initially linked to people in helping industries – ie. therapists, doctors, caretakers.
Then, in 2019, the World Health Organization actually recognized burnout as a syndrome. According to their definition, burnout stems from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It’s characterized by feelings of exhaustion, cynicism and increased mental distance from one’s job, and lowered productivity.
Sound familiar?
As finals season continues, I can bet money that at least four of my friends will joke about dropping out. There’s that cynicism and increased mental distance. We are all exhausted and it shouldn’t have to be that way.
For a lot of students who are balancing some combination of school work, class, jobs, internships and extracurriculars, burnout is, unfortunately, a word that resonates.
But because it’s used so nonchalantly, and is a World Health Organization-recognized syndrome, we can start to understand it as a phenomenon with causes beyond ourselves.
There’s no shame in needing to take preventative steps back, sometimes. Routinely practicing self-care, asking for help and being selective with what you prioritize, are all steps that can be taken to avoid reaching a point of burn out.
And if you are feeling burnt out, it could be a good idea to talk to a mental health professional about it, just to make sure it’s not overlapping with or becoming something more serious.
To those who need to hear this – good luck with finals and don’t drop out.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Cari Spencer.