May 6, 2025

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

Every year, you hear people talk about “senior-itis,” where in their final year of high school, students are struck with the inability to care about class. This year, however, the juniors have been taken by burnout a year early. The class of ‘26 has been struggling for months to simply find the motivation to pick up a pen and write , and their work ethic has reflected it (as a junior myself, it has taken me a month to sit down at my computer and get this story down). 

“I doom-scroll on Instagram without doing any work until the last second,” junior Tyler Stinson says. “At eleven o’clock at night, I do my work unproductively and against my will. None of the classes has been intriguing whatsoever.” 

The cause of it is not simply that graduation is just on the horizon as it is for seniors, rather, it seems that the root of the burnout epidemic is the mental and emotional overload this year has put on students. 

“Not only do you have a heavy workload, but you also have the stress of knowing that you’re going to have to pick what college you go to, which shapes your entire future,” junior Zoe Gillett says. “Then you have to start thinking about scholarships and how you’re going to make that happen, and then you have to think about testing, AP tests,  SATs and ACTs, and how you prepare for those best.”

It is not just a handful of the class either. It is very evident that there is a mutual feeling of exhaustion among all juniors this year, which teachers and students alike have commented on more than once.

“I think most juniors have progressively gotten manic throughout the year,” Gillett says. “Just sitting in class, I’m not sure that any of us can sit still for nearly as long as we could at the beginning of the year. You hear people just complaining more about everything. There are definitely a lot of us who are skimming through assignments and having to go back and reread because we don’t understand what we’re reading, even though we’re all mostly literate. I think that most people just have less drive this year than they did in past years.”

The juniors have found ways of combating this issue, however. For some, it’s having a hobby or sport that gets you excited about something, for others, it’s taking the time to rest as it’s needed. There is one failsafe that the whole class can agree on: caffeine. 

“The FDA suggests 400 mg of caffeine in a day,” Gillett says. “I have since realized that you can drink more than that and still be okay. My daily average is probably around 300 mg, but if I have to take a test or something, I drink significantly more than 400 mg, and I’ve yet to have a heart attack. Don’t hold me to that.”