Dealing with burnout while at school is never easy. You know that you have to do the work to get through this semester, but even waking up seems like a task. The last thing you should do in this situation is give up, even though you want to.
First of all, what is burnout? If every day feels like a bad day, if you’re constantly exhausted even when you slept a ton or if caring about your work or home life seems like a waste of energy and time, you may be on the road to burnout. If this is you right now, read the rest of this article.
The best way you can get out of this burnout feeling is by getting support, whether that means friends, family, the school counsellor or your significant other. Any kind of support from a loved one or trained professional should be able to help you a little bit. It may seem like an impossible thing to ask for, but all you have to say is that you feel burnt out and don’t have a lot of energy and whoever you tell that to can assist you in even the smallest of ways.
Look at the work you have to do differently. Yes, the syllabus lists all of the work for the semester and you can’t even imagine looking at the textbook right now, but hear me out. If you have some assignments close to being past due, make it a game to organize them by either the grading weight or by what you find most interesting. If you chose grading weight, do the assignments from least amount of weight to most. This way, the ones you care about the least get the worst energy put into them. By the time you get to the higher-graded ones, hopefully, you’ll feel more productive because you’ve done the other ones already and will have more mental ease for the harder ones. If you choose to do the most interesting first, try to bring a passion into the assignment. If you love psychology and have one assignment on it, try to make it interesting in your own way.
Try not to procrastinate. This one may seem impossible when all you want to do is lay in bed and watch Euphoria, but seriously, try your best. When you start to fall behind on your work, you start to care less about it in general. Making excuses for why you’re behind can become too easy. If you have an assignment due tomorrow and you haven’t started it yet, write a bunch of random things related to the assignment on a blank page and see if any of that can become the assignment. Anything is better than nothing at this point, and maybe this would spark an idea for you actually to get started and finish it in time.
Burnout sucks. We all know it. But if you can avoid making it worse, I hope you can. Don’t be too hard on yourself; remember that other people can help you!