3 minute read
LEARNING THEIR LIMITS
An AP student sleeps at her desk, exhausted from the work load, stress, and pressure as a water bottle and energy drink also sit on the desk. Photo illustration by Andy Waliszewski.
Living Beside Burnout
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High-achieving students facing exhaustion due to stress, pressure, and workload
By Rachel Blanchard
Staff Reporter
For high achieving high school students, like Rabeea Bari, who is enrolled in five advancedplacement classes this semester, stress has become a normal part of day-to-day life, and a part of her. Bari, and students like her, are no strangers to the stress. For Bari and other students in similar situations, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the average high school student has the same stress level as psychiatric patients in the 1950s, according to the American Psychological Association. But when all the extra work from numerous college level courses piles up, and the stress and pressure piles up with it, then these students may run out of fuel, and experience a lack of motivation and interest, inability to focus, lack of creativity, and decreased academic performance, which is commonly referred to as ‘burnout’.
AP and Honors classes are meant to prepare students for their futures, but in order to avoid drowning in the stress, pressure, and responsibility, they are prepared through gifted programs in elementary and middle school. These students can often look back to their childhood and see that this future was predetermined for them when they were labeled as “gifted” and “bright.” When a child grows up being told that they must be “the perfect student” then what other choice do they have but to shape themselves to fit into the mold made for them? Bari, now a high school junior, still feels the pressure from gifted classes she was enrolled in during elementary school.
“With the gifted program, it’s like, you go the first ten years of your life, or however many years saying, ‘Oh I’m smart, I can do X, Y, and Z,’ and then you get to high school and it’s like, well how else do I measure my own success if that isn’t true now?” said Bari.
At the first sight of something that may be more than average, expectations of friends, family, and teachers, become more than average. For these gifted students, easily achievable expectations are something of the past. As they were growing up, expectations grew with them, but they didn’t grow at the same rate. Expectations soon became something that was completely out of reach, though it was still expected that they
would find a way to reach them, as they had in the past. The goals set by others, and themselves, become something they have no choice but to meet. So rather than students pushing themselves farther and reaching higher out of their own ambition, they end up doing so out of fear of letting people down. When this is combined with the pressure that comes with being labeled as “gifted,” you end up with a recipe for burnout.
“I [feel] like if I can survive AP anatomy and AP chem and AP world at once, then I should be able to do [anything], and I think that’s burning me out already,” said Bari, “And, I feel like if I step away from those things, I’ll be hurting myself and other people.”
Whether it is fear of failing themselves or fear of failing others, it is apparent that the leading cause of burnout in students is fear of failure. This fear is what causes students to never learn that setting limits isn’t a sign of failure, but rather a sign of success. When students don’t learn to set limits, they will always push past them, and experience burnout in areas of their lives other than academic, creating a cycle of stress, pressure, and general unhappiness. There is a difference between a challenge and overexertion, and students must learn where the line is, and when it is best not to cross it. For students who are experiencing burnout, setting limits will be a more important lesson than any one you could learn in an AP class. College and career counselor, Michelle Breuer, agrees that it is far more important to learn limits rather than continuously pushing past them when it isn’t necessary.
