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Know yourself to avoid burnout

By Elizabeth Shushkovsky

Published 2:40 PDT, Fri August 30, 2019

Last Updated: 2:13 PDT, Wed May 12, 2021

As a student with school right around the corner, it’s easy to slip into the mentality where this year is going to be “the year.” You know the one. The year you imagine is coming where you get better grades, balance your schedule, and get more involved in sports and clubs.

As a student with school right around the corner, it’s easy to slip into the mentality where this year is going to be “the year.” You know the one. The year you imagine is coming where you get better grades, balance your schedule, and get more involved in sports and clubs.

The cyclical mindset that fixates you on the chance to prove your own worth has an ambiguous outcome. The opportunity could make you hopeful or hopeless depending on how you approach its ambiguity?

Rick Dubois, the executive director of Richmond Addiction Services, suggests you deal with this ambiguity by being in tune with how it influences your life. 

“Tune in and get to know yourself in order to prevent things from becoming too much to manage,” he says.

With a healthy mindset, concrete boundaries and balance, you can set yourself up for success in this new school year and for the rest of your life. 

Dubois says healthy habits can include a wide variety of things, but making sure they include “nutrition, regular and nutritional food intake, exercise, recreation, and healthy coping in both short and long term scenarios,” is the key to doing it right. With this in mind, you should be set to prevent normal stress from rearing its ugly head and turning into something worse...

Burnout. A term that has been used time and time again and yet is still difficult to understand. 

This condition manifests itself in many different ways. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health defines it as “a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.” 

Referred to as the “silent epidemic,” its effects often going unnoticed, the cruel irony lies in how it happens to those too busy to realize, the condition often goes untreated. 

In order to stop it in its tracks, you need to be self-aware of how you’re dealing with it. Dubois says that if you’re always “distancing yourself, distracting yourself, numbing out, etcetera, then you’re just letting the problem linger and trying to bury it. We should process it, talk about it, learn about it and be curious about it.”

External players in your life also have a significant influence in this scenario. Building healthy relationships and maintaining them can be used as one of many preventative measures to burning out as you have individuals you can rely on when times are tough. 

Figures in life such as parents can become overbearing and thus can lead to burnout as well. According to a study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, “children of parents who put pressure on them by “over-managing” their lives at school ended up having higher levels of depression, decreased satisfaction with life and lower levels of autonomy and competence.”

Be a good friend. Be a good parent. Be a good sibling. Be a good significant other. 

This goes back to the importance of boundaries. Knowing the boundaries of what your responsibilities are, and to what extent you are responsible to others, lead to a solid foundation for preventing burnout.

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