It’s that time of the semester. You are dreading opening your laptop and writing that essay or studying for that test. You identify as an academic victim after claiming to be an academic weapon. But that’s fine!
Burnout is defined as a condition characterised by excessive mental, emotional, and physical tiredness resulting from an excessive amount of stress. Burnout can feel like detachment, powerlessness, and loss of motivation; it can result in decreased performance in everyday tasks, procrastination, isolation, and irritability; and it could manifest in headaches, fatigue, and changes in sleep and dietary patterns.
Mid-term, this could be an extreme inconvenience and a huge impediment to the process of studying and can produce guilt when not addressed properly. This guilt can come from the lack of productivity and procrastination, especially when you have a huge test or assignment coming up.
Here are a few tips to help reduce it and get you back on track!
- Do things that make you happy
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This one is a bit self-explanatory, but with the pile of responsibilities that caused the burnout and created the stress, there needs to be a pile of “happiness” that eliminates stress. This can look like taking time off from responsibilities to do something you love, like sports, crafts, or any activity that helps you recharge.
- don’t skip out on physical activity
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Although with burnout one might be compelled to stay in bed and scroll through reels on social media, this might do harm more than good. To remedy that, exercising for at least an hour is a good idea. Exercising has studied benefits that include bolstering physical health as well as mental health. Since a healthy body leads to a healthy mind, it is imperative to move your body to stimulate your mind and make you feel more powerful.
- remember your priorities
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You may be under a lot of stress due to perfectionism or the need to get the highest grades possible. While this is very valid, your mental health comes first, so focus on trying your best within boundaries, don’t set high expectations that might cause you more stress, having a balance between your academic responsibilities and the rest of your life is so important.
- chunk down your tasks
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One of the things that makes burnout even worse is seeing how much you have on your plate. Sometimes, a lot of the things you have on your plate are unnecessary and can be crossed off your list, so give your to-do list another read and cross off any tasks that are unneeded. Make your already existing tasks a little bit smaller. For example, if one of your tasks is to finish writing a paper, you could divide it into parts and have the tasks be the following: compile a list of sources, write an outline, write the introduction… This way, you’re likely to reduce your general levels of stress and increase your sense of accomplishment after finishing one of these tasks.
- sleep !
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One of the most underrated measures to take in such a situation is sleep. In stressful scenarios like assessment period, all-nighters are like your toxic best friend because you know they’re no good for you but you’re still friends with them. With all-nighters, everyone knows how awful they are, yet everyone pulls them out of fear of not finishing certain tasks on time. With the fear of losing time comes actually losing brain cells. To give your brain a proper rest to be able to tackle a new set of tasks for another day or finish any current ones, you NEED to sleep.
Burnout sucks, but you don’t have to be its next victim. It’s something you can avoid, and overcome. Make sure to take care of yourself to relieve some of that stress, and remember you can do anything life throws at you.