Balancing Schoolwork and Living Life: How to Prevent Burnout

Hello beautiful! Today's post will be the last one intended to help you all with this back to school season. Most of you are probably back in school by now, and your curriculums might be starting to pick up the pace. Last week I talked about the trend known as toxic study motivation and how it can affect students; you can read that post here. This post will be a little bit similar, but I want to focus in a little bit more on what we know as burnout. This is a term that we use often in academic and productivity spaces. It's can be used to describe a minor slump or a major period of sadness, so I think it would help me to define burnout before I get into the rest of what I have to say.

To me, burnout is an intense exhaustion that makes someone lose energy, passion, or enthusiasm for things they once enjoyed. Burnout can come from pushing yourself too hard or a very difficult and heavy semester in school. No matter how it comes about, burnout affects the way you live your life; it actually affects whether you truly live it at all.

From my experience, being burnt out meant losing my spark. When I was burnt out, I didn't want to do my schoolwork, my hobbies, or chores around the house. All I wanted to do was sit in my room and scroll or watch TV, occasionally walking to the kitchen for a snack.

Still, it wasn't enjoyable. I wasn't technically doing any work, but I felt burdened by some vague sense of guilt. That's why I feel so passionately that burnout is always something to be taken seriously.

As a high school student, I've noticed, from my peers and myself, that burnout often occurs after a period of constant work and no breaks. We can't control the amount of homework that we get, especially during the end of a semester of finals season or if it's just a busy season of your life.

What we can control is how we manage the time that we have left in the day after all of our work, whether it be 2 hours of 10 minutes.

In my case, one of the first signs of burnout is a sudden inconsistency with my routines, For example, I start skipping my skincare in the mornings and evenings, and I stop journaling before bed. Like I said earlier, during burnout, I can't bring myself to do anything, even if it's something that I used to enjoy.

This is one of the scariest things about burnout to me, but we can also use this principle to form a strategy to prevent burnout. It's easier said than done, but if you want to know how to avoid burnout before it happens, I would suggest keeping up with the little things that make up your daily routine.

Making a tea or coffee in the morning, playing with your pet for 5 minutes, or reading before going to sleep are all things that take very little time, yet we often forget them when our lives get busy. Of course, this system isn't perfect, but I truly do think that it can help to ground you in a time when your life feels like the epitome of overwhelmingness.

I would also recommend taking up a practice or hobby that allows you to express yourself and your emotions, or at least navigate them in your own mind instead of just leaving them in your brain so they can grow into a negative and destructive attitude about yourself and your life.

I'm partial to journaling, but any form of art, music, meditation, or physical activity could work. As mentioned, these hobbies don't have to take up more than 5 or 10 minutes of your time. The goal isn't to make a stunning painting or write 20 pages in a journal. The goal is to let out what you're feeling before it manifests as burnout.

Those are the two maim suggestions that I have for you today. I hope they were helpful for you. Seeing as school started up again recently, I anticipate that some of you might be feeling down, and I want you all to know that you can come back to this post if you want to prevent the impending doom that is burnout.

Remember, if you ever need a hand, girl, let me help!