With only a few more weeks of the spring semester and academic year, many students, whether they are first-years or soon to be graduates, are feeling the worst of the academic burnout. While feeling burnout in academia is not entirely new to all of us, the feeling ebbs and flows as we conclude and begin new semesters and academic years.
For many of us, we start to feel the burnout creeping in slowly in the middle of the semester, during the longer breaks, till it finally catches us during finals week when our stress is at an all time high, trying to make sure everything is submitted into Canvas or finishing up our clinical hours. We can never truly get rid of burnout because we are human; we tend to forget or push things off, whether we are subconsciously aware of the fact or not. That being said, we still do have some control over how we can mitigate the consequences of academic burnout.
When it comes to the consequences of academic burnout, to a degree, we are the ones in control of how bad it gets. However, life has a way of having unexpected events happen in our lives that cause us to not put our academics first for a moment. While I hope no one has to experience that, I know that life never goes exactly like we want it to.
That being said, there will be some who say that we should be able to get it all done as we are adults and should know how to balance our time between academics and our personal lives. However, for some of us, we did not get all the adequate building blocks and time to fully develop those strategies, which are mostly put into practice in both middle and high school. Some people did not have much of that practice due to COVID-19 and were thrown into the metaphorical deep end.
However, I do know that with practice and time, you get better and will eventually have it all figured out. But most of us are still in that figuring-out stage, learning through trial and error to see what works for us.
Now, when it comes to dealing with the ebbs and flows of burnout, I can say that I am still figuring it out as a sophomore who sometimes stretches herself too thin. Something I found out that helps ease the burnout is making one of those reward charts that we used to see a lot as kids in classrooms or at home. While it may seem childish, the reward part helps, especially if it is something that I want to buy or do.
You can use the chart to help with finishing up some assignments that you have been putting to the side, saying you will work on it tomorrow, or to take time and help destress yourself. While this works for me, I do not expect it to work for everyone. Not everyone is motivated by the same thing or rewards.
For me, charts or lists like this help me see what I need to do and complete, and if we are being honest, who doesn’t like completing a set of tasks and getting a reward? We get excited about them in games, why not apply that to real life? However, the reverse of that can stress someone else out more. Everyone is motivated by different things and has very different ways of getting themselves to do what they need to. My method is not a one-size-fits-all; even for me, it sometimes changes.
That being said, if there is anything you take away from this article, I hope it is just to give yourself some grace and understanding, no matter where you are in your academics, from first years to professors. We all know the feeling of burnout, and while I could give you almost a million strategies that have been said before, the only one that bears repeating is to give yourself some grace.

Burnout does not discriminate when it comes to who it chooses to affect. Even the people whom we admire and look up to have gone through this again and again, and so will we. We will feel it next fall and spring semester, even years down the line, in the various career fields we plan to go into or are currently in. Like I said, it ebbs and flows, never truly leaving us but always there to remind us to take a moment and reassess how to move forward.
As many others and I would like to never have to feel burned out again from anything, if we never felt burned out, we would always make the same mistakes and choices without learning from them and creating better habits within the many aspects of our lives. So, regardless of whether you are currently going through burnout or are on the cusp of it, take a moment to give yourself grace and reassess before you jump back into studying.