I’ve always thought of myself as a hard-worker. That being said, I always jumped at any opportunity to better myself — whether it be staying on top of my schoolwork, joining organizations that were relevant to my interests and career paths, or taking any opportunity to make some money. I always wanted to better myself, even if that meant taking on a bunch of things at once, usually more than I could handle.
It wasn’t until about the end of January where I found myself in a funk and all of a sudden I couldn’t bring myself to accomplish even the simplest tasks. Even my most favorite tasks felt like a chore to me. This was bizarre to me because we weren’t even that deep into the school year, so my workload wasn’t even at its highest, but everything that I had to do became so tedious. Therefore, it made absolutely no sense to me why it was so difficult to get anything done.
Burnout can be described as the mental and physical state of being worn out. It’s usually caused by stress building up over time, leading you to feel constantly tired and overwhelmed. Burnout was a term that I wasn’t really familiar with. However, I had started seeing a huge influx of people sharing their experiences with feeling burnt-out and suddenly everything was making sense — I was finally able to match my symptoms with the term.
College students are simply just prone to this phenomenon. On average we take about five classes, and they’re usually not simple ones. On top of that, we try to juggle extracurriculars, internships, a part-time job and a social life. We’re a ticking time bomb of stress, therefore it’s no surprise that our body’s natural response to this high amount of stress is to shut down.
