Sierra Smith
In a school environment, and society as a whole, burnout is becoming increasingly common. Burnout is a mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion resulting from intense stress. Often, this stress is caused by school or work. With students and teachers starting a second semester of in person classes, many are experiencing burnout. But what is burnout, why is it an issue, and how can we fix it? Some students shared their thoughts and experiences with burnout to help investigate the answers to these questions.
From the data collected, it’s clear burnout is a real problem at Central. Of the students who participated in an anonymous survey, all reported that they had experienced burnout. Students further described how burnout occurring during the school year affected them, with one saying that burnout “made [them] just feel really stressed, tired, and depressed.” Meanwhile, another student exemplified how burnout affected their day to day life; “it felt like this cloud of something was over me. I did not enjoy the things that I did. I really did not enjoy getting up and doing anything, not just school.” This student also described the complexity of burnout as “...a weird feeling of not being motivated and just wanting to run away from school.” These intense feelings as a result of an abundance of work can often cause one to become more and more exhausted over time. Another student described this continuous effect burnout has, stating “it wears you down emotionally and physically until you feel like giving up.” This developing effect of burnout on students' wellbeing is apparent not only mentally and physically, but in academics as well. Many students have reported the influence burnout has had on their academic performance. All of the students interviewed claim that burnout has negatively impacted their schoolwork. One even explained that their grades began to rise after they were able to overcome burnout.
As for how to cope with burnout, there are many options. Research suggests that relaxing activities, exercise, sleep, and mindfulness/meditation can help to treat burnout. Some students also mentioned their personal methods of dealing with burnout, which included listening to rain sounds, talking to loved ones, taking a break, spending time alone, and doing other activities they enjoy. Unfortunately, getting over burnout is neither quick nor easy. Recovering from burnout is a long process that can take anywhere from weeks to years to fully complete. Nevertheless, if you’re a student who finds themselves constantly burnt out, it may be beneficial to contact teachers or your counselor for further guidance.
However, you may be wondering, why is this happening? If students are feeling so overwhelmed with work to the point that they’re experiencing intense burnout, why don’t we just lessen their workload? With this information, it can be easy to paint students’ teachers, who are assigning the work, as the villains of burnout. On the contrary, this issue relates to teachers as much as it does students. Many teachers experience burnout when it comes to things like grading assignments as well. One teacher, Mr. Morton, shared his experiences with burnout: “Regarding burnout, it’s real…everybody and everyone goes through things like burnout”. Morton also commented on how burnout can affect students outside of school, saying, “...a lot of students work, they take care of siblings when they’re at home…[when] the school day’s over, a lot of my students go on to do other things that [are] sometimes equally, or a little more, challenging for them”. However, Morton touched on the fact that many teachers are aware of this and “[it’s] not lost on [them]. [They] empathize with [students] and know it’s very difficult for [them]”.
Regarding the lack of awareness of teacher burnout, Morton commented on the fact that the state of Illinois added five mental health days for students, but none for educators. Mr. Morton explained that the mental health days were certainly good, but they could go a step further, stating, “I would love to see them add [mental health days] for teachers, because for some reason they acknowledge the fact that this affects students and not teachers, that’s just outright silly”. Despite the many negative impacts burnout has, Morton explained how Central’s staff still works together. “I think Central the school itself, particularly administration and teachers, do a really good job to have each other’s backs”. Seeing that both students and teachers face issues with burnout, it may be a much larger societal issue of many individuals, students and teachers alike, feeling the need to push themselves to work as hard as possible. While we should try to be our best selves, as a society we need to move past this idea of how much work is the “right amount”, and not working to the point of exhaustion.
To conclude, how do we ‘fix’ burn out? It appears that to truly end (or at the very least minimize) burnout we need to rethink our views on work and school as a society. For some reason we’ve made an agenda that pushes many of us, students, teachers, and more, past our capabilities. This creates an astounding amount of work that overwhelms us, leading to burnout. Burnout affects students, and people, in enormous ways, by destroying motivation and often causing immense stress. If we want to move forward in an attempt to reduce burnout and its’ intense effects, we need to first and foremost acknowledge ways in which we may be working beyond our limit, and from there talk as a community to lower these personal, and societal, expectations.