Teenage Burnout In The Education system

 by Annabel Heaton

Burnout is “the state of chronic stress that leads to physical and emotional exhaustion, depression, detachment, cynicism, and lack of accomplishment including feelings of ineffectiveness”. Many teenagers are feeling this way in the education system, with Covid-19, the stress of the old fashion nature of the curriculum and exam stress that haunts teenagers with a tormenting doom every year. In a 2013 survey of adults and teens conducted online on behalf of the American Psychological Association (APA) by Harris Interactive, teens reported stress levels during the school year far exceeding what they believed to be healthy, 5.8 vs. 3.9 on a 10-point scale. The average reported stress level of adults was 5.1 on a 10-point scale, demonstrating that teens' feelings of stress rival those of adults. 

In the survey, results indicated that: 31% of teens reported feeling overwhelmed, 30% of teens reported feeling depressed or sad as a result of stress, 36% of teens reported feeling tired and 23% of teens reported skipping a meal due to stress, all in the UK. This shows that teenagers, being ages between 13 and 19 years old, are being expected to cope with social pressures in everyday life alongside a pandemic that not even the most powerful members of society knew how to handle. This is just the surface level of burnout when there are actually more forms of burnout than casually spoken about, such as burnout by volume, burnout by boredom and burnout by socialisation. These forms of burnout can either dominate alone or snowball into one, bringing others down with it, leading teenagers feeling defeated and alone in this system. 

In order for these such features to be eliminated, in terms of burnout by volume: people must recollect on their past few days and see how much time they have actually spent purely on themselves, in contrast to other work and tasks at hand. If there is an imbalance here then this must be fixed to fit your balance and capability of time management for your own work and lifestyle, as this is not anyone else's life but your own. Similarly, if you are feeling burnout by boredom then you need to find a topic to relight this fire inside of yourself, if you are unaware of what this is, then go and search for things that excite you just at the thought of doing them and start to do these things. This will even link back to burnout of volume as this will enable you to have a targeted release for stress and being able to leave the “work mindset” away from your everyday life. 

Lastly, burnout by socialisation is too damaging as this is where most prioritise others over themselves, and this is disguised by being what society and social standards think is a “good friend”. Quite frankly, this is a good characteristic to have but when the balance is knocked off kilter this is when you can burn yourself out and not be able to look after yourself. This emphasises the point that in order to avoid burnout one must look after themselves before helping other, focus on how much time you are spending on yourself but also maintaining a passion to keep you spirited.