With the school year now well underway, it’s not uncommon for kids to start feeling the stress of assignments, homework and extracurricular activities.
Clinical psychologist Dr Joyce Chong, from The Skill Collective, recently sat down with Embrace @ The Kids Research Institute Australia senior researcher Dr Alix Woolard for an episode of our podcast Embracing the Mind, in which she offered the following tips on dealing with burnout.
You can listen to the full episode of Embracing the Mind here.
What causes it?
The major drivers of burnout fall into three categories: organisational, situational and personal.
Organisational factors include workload (or study load), workplace (or school) culture and the type of work undertaken (difficulty level). Even boredom and under-stimulation can contribute to burnout. If the work is boring or repetitive, you can start to feel detached as you stop finding the work fulfilling.
Situational factors often take the form of drastic changes in circumstances, best exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic’s varied impacts, when we experienced stress from finding toilet paper, to doomscrolling and uncertainty around the ability to leave the house. Nowadays situational factors may include pressure as you move towards the pointy end of school, or problems in the workplace.
Personal factors include your identity (are you a people pleaser that doesn’t set boundaries to protect your own time and space?), your way of thinking (do you stress that people think you are not efficient and productive?) and the actions that flow from those two factors. For example, you may work additional hours, struggle to relax because you feel like your time always needs to be productive, or fail to prioritise self-care.
How to treat/prevent it?
Fortunately, treatment and prevention of burnout are very similar. It starts with being realistic about which factors you have some control over. Many of the organisational factors that drive burnout cannot be changed, or can only be influenced marginally.
Next, you can consider those factors that are under your influence.
Look after your body first: Having enough sleep and exercise allows you to better regulate emotions and creates a buffer that allows you to respond to the demands of your body.
Take the opportunity to put your identity under the microscope. If you feel the need to be productive all the time, ask yourself why. It’s also common to experience burnout if you struggle to say ‘no’ to requests, either because you want to appear competent, or you don’t want to be disliked. This can lead to catastrophising regarding the outcome of not meeting a minor deadline, or not studying for that extra hour.
Coping skills then become important, and it’s helpful to consider what you need to reduce burnout. This will vary from person to person – for some it can be about being more organised at school or at work to reduce stress and improve time management. For others, it may be about building a more assertive communication styles to help you support boundary setting.
Peak performance
For athletes performing at their peak, a recovery phase is built into their training programme. But this idea is foreign to most schools and workplaces. When we complete a deadline, a test, an exam, we move straight onto the next project or assignment.
But like athletes, for us to perform at our peak, we need recovery. Perhaps we could look to athletes to inspire how we work and rest so that we can sustain high performance without burning out.