We all have that one friend who is pressed for time and says: “The whole family is burdened on my shoulders, I have to go to work after school, there’s a lot of work pending, I have no time to focus on my homework, I have to clean the house today, there is no food; I need to cook and above all, the professor expects me to meet his expectations and give my best this year”.
All these reasons that you might relate with or hear in daily life are the expressions of experiencing burnout. And any individual who expresses this way has many responsibilities but lack the energy to fulfill them. This condition is called burnout syndrome.
Burnout syndrome is defined as the physical, mental, and emotional burnout response to long-standing high-level stress. In this condition, you can be aware of all the responsibilities but still won’t be able to give the necessary responses as your functionality disappears. Moreover, you start hearing the danger bells ringing around you, whether it is physical, mental, or spiritual.
Here are all the factors that lead to burnout.
Leading Burnout Factors
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Extreme Sense of Responsibility
Believing that you should take on all the tasks that need to be done at home and school without asking for anyone’s help. For instance, when the professor assigns tasks on argumentative essay topics, which are comparatively tougher than other essays, you feel the need to start working on it as soon as you reach home due to complexity.
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Perfectionist Tendencies
You either do something very well in the first go or you spend most of the time making the task’s result perfect. And as you put all your energy into one task, you become devastated even by the slightest failure.
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Being Impatient
You try to solve all the problems immediately as they occur. Without thinking about whether it is right or wrong, you just do it, which sometimes leads you to unfavorable consequences.
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Can’t Say No
You take on unwanted responsibilities to not upset anyone and make your friends and family members happy. This makes you incapable of expressing your desires and prevents you from refusing any help requests.
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Excessive Expectations of People At Home and School
Understand that the high level of expectations of the people around you as well as your personality traits have an important role in experiencing burnout. This happens because the expectations of the people around them exceed the abilities and potential of an individual is the reason why you experience burnout in the first place.
Now that you know all the possible factors causing burnout, go through the following list of synonyms to validate your burnout experience.
Common Burnout Symptoms
- Mental and Emotional
- Trouble
- Irritability
- Tension
- Despair
- Insomnia
- Depression
- Forgetfulness
- Anxiety
- Problems with food
- Withdrawal
- Feeling weak
- Sense of failure
- Feeling blocked
- Low self-esteem
- Avoiding social relationships
- Unsure of abilities and skills
- Resentment towards everything
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Physical
- Headache
- Palpitation
- Tiredness
- Disorganized sleep
- Muscle tension
- Decrease or increase in appetite
- Digestive problems
- High blood pressure
The symptoms also include:
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Uncertainties
If you are unsure of both personal and academic choices and decisions, you can experience minor burnout. Moreover, the environment you live in and work in also has an important role in crippling or amplifying the burnout meter. For instance, you fulfill your responsibilities, such as submitting a well-written argumentative essay on time but are not appreciated. And if you still continue to meet all your deadlines and responsibilities, a time will come that you will be exhausted and want to quit giving your best but you cannot. Eventually, all these things will add up and cause burnout. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the space you breathe in and the people you surround yourself with.
Following are the factors that cause burnout at school:
- Courses where professors do not provide enough instructions or examples such as argumentative essay examples when assigning the tasks.
- Long school hours
- 24/7 work pace: bringing classwork home due to multiple assignments and working on weekends and holidays
- Not being acknowledged or appreciated for the work you do.
- Lack of interest.
- Unreliable working environment
- The thought of being dismissed for the smallest mistake.
- No trusting relationship with class-fellows or professors.
Hence, if nowhere, then an individual seeks comfort at home. But what if your family doesn’t support you or show love when you want? This can be the biggest factor leading to the development of burnout in students. So, what can you do to prevent burnout? Continue reading to know more.
- Say straight “no” to responsibilities without feeling guilty, whether it is at school or home. It is essential to keep your abilities and capabilities in mind while saying “yes” to any work.
- You must learn about your strengths and weaknesses as you encounter stressful situations, and applying them to new stressful environments.
- Ensure setting realistic goals. Because when you set meaningful and achievable goals that you can meet within the set time frame, you feel accomplished. However, you may need to plan each thing to avoid hurdles in the goal accomplishment process.
- Stop putting yourself in the forefront. When you make yourself available all the time, you start to get tired or exhausted. Therefore, make yourself a priority first, focus on something that you like doing, and not something that you just enjoy for a certain period.
- To prevent burnout, you must identify and change situations that cause dissatisfaction and problems in your personal and academic life.
- If you learn how to manage time efficiently, the rest of your problems will surely disappear. For this, you can change the time spent from quantity to quality often to give yourself some space to breathe.
- Reduce perfectionism from your personality. You must understand that you can make mistakes and can sometimes fail. However, you need to find out ways to cope up with the failure so that you can give your best next time.
- When you feel you have started to live a depressed and stressed life, it means you are experiencing burnout at the highest level. At this point, you must seek professional help from a psychologist or psychiatrist to keep yourself on track.
Final Thoughts
As seen, burnout syndrome can develop not in a day, but gradually in the process. It is a result of the accumulation of negativities in personal and academic life. Burnout not only negatively affects the work processes but also puts a significant impact on the social relations of the individual. Here, the efforts and regulations of the person along with the living environment play a great role in amplifying productivity and ditching burnout.
Therefore, if you are experiencing burnout symptoms, you must be vocal about it and let your professors know about your condition if you are a student. In cases where the problem can be solved without an expert’s assistance, don’t feel hesitant to reach out to relevant professionals for help. After all, it’s a matter of your mental stability and peace.
