Fighting the Burnout Blues

The plan file that pops up on telnet when someone "fingers" Rachel L. Brown '01 reads, "Back to basics..."

Her message refers to her new life outlook. Recently Brown has decided she needs to balance her priorities, a technique she says many other students need to learn.

The former Undergraduate Council presidential candidate surprised her running mate two weeks ago when she decided to drop out of the race, but she says she wanted to protect herself from the campus plague. Burnout.

"It bothers me that people lose sight of what's important--maintaining sanity," Brown says. "If I had [run], that would have been a step too far."

With a student body accustomed to packed schedules of courses and activities and high expectations from family and friends, Harvard's environment sends many students overboard, according to Charles P. Ducey, director of the Bureau of Study Counsel.

While he says it is difficult to define burnout precisely, the symptoms include a sense of being immobilized, withdrawn and apathetic.

Burnout is not a medical term, which complicates the process of gathering exact statistics on burnout. Conversations with students, though, reveal that the feeling is widespread at Harvard.

"Anecdotal indications suggest that burnout is a fairly widespread phenomenon on campus," Ducey writes in an e-mail message.

Students tend to define themselves by others' expectations. When students avoid addressing these problems, the burnout escalates, according to Ducey.

Peak burnout time is now--the Bureau of Study Counsel calendars are full with students who complain about uncharacteristic exhaustion and lack of motivation. Recognizing the signs early, he writes, can stop this burnout before it becomes debilitating.

Kindling the Flames

Members of the administration say Harvard students are in some ways selected for their tendency to overextend themselves.

Associate Dean of Harvard College David P. Illingworth '71, who used to be an admissions officer, says they never directly aimed for burnout-prone students.

"Some of this makes me think back to my days in admissions and say, 'Did we ever make the decision to admit intense people?'" Illingworth says. "The answer is no...I don't think that's an attribute we intentionally look for."

But in seeking out high achievers in academics, athletics, music and other activities, Harvard annually yields a crop of first-years ready to take on everything, not hesitating to put their names on every list at the fall activity fair.

"I think our students tend to be the kind of people who get intensely involved in just about anything," he says.

Dean of Freshman Elizabeth Studley Nathans says her office counsels a fair amount of burnout cases each year.

"The one thing we do know is that some people come here having spent so much time trying to get into a place that they don't know what comes next," Nathans says. "There are a whole lot of reasons why people get burned out. It's a catch all term for a lot of things. It's really such an individual thing and it requires many, many hours of talking [to solve]."

That's the hard part.

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

Travis D. Wheatley '99-'00 had to solve it by leaving for a while.

When Wheatley hit the second semester of his first year, he fell into a pattern that he says was induced by a case of burnout.

"I just wanted to sit around and drink and play video games and sleep," he says.

The full effects of the burnout came gradually, but he really hit his breaking point junior year.

"I skipped one class totally. I just sat around," he says. "I realized I just wasn't having fun. I couldn't drag myself out of bed until three in the afternoon."

After taking a year away from school to reflect, Wheatley says the time off was extremely positive and he recommends it to anyone who feels unable to handle Harvard.

"Now whenever I feel like I'm getting burned out again, I remember that after this semester and next semester I'll be graduated," he says.

Some students claim the burnout arises from the Harvard atmosphere, which can be stifling and stagnant.

"Just being here, being in the same room all of the time, eating the same food every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday," says Tiziana Vargas '01. "You get tired of everyday being the same."

"My body gets up, gets showered, gets dressed and gets to class just because it's used to it," she continues.

Vargas says she has realized all-nighters are not worth the drowsiness and always gets her eight hours of sleep.

Right now, she is just concentrating on making it through the next year and a half.

Other people have found ways to fight the burnout before it strikes.

Brown crafted her "back to basics" philosophy the week before Thanksgiving.

"I had a realization that I was miserable. I had overextended myself," she says.

So she figured out what was important to her and went ahead with her "three-pronged attack on life," which focuses on classes, relaxation and one important activity. As long as additional time-consumers don't get in the way of these three items, she can do them.

Brown says the plan is her method of keeping burnout out of her life and enjoying her time at Harvard.

"A lot of my friends, especially with their academics, get so overwhelmed they can't break out of it," she says. "I've seen people that have done one activity for a very long time, leave and then have nothing to fall back on."

Firestarter

A difficult class or just one intense activity won't usually break a student. But when numerous different sources draw heavily on students' time, problems arise.

Ducey and the other psychologists at the Bureau of Study Counsel have studied patterns of burnout among students.

Burnout happens, Ducey writes, when what students have to do overwhelms the resources they have to deal with them.

"These resources help us to make decisions about what we want or need to do, solve problems, plan for the future, and so on," Ducey writes.

He adds that some pressure is stimulating, but when they face too much, students sometimes just give up. Some students' tendency to just sleep or drop out of activities when they are burned out is symptomatic of another cause of burnout: long-term inability to adapt to rising challenges.

"Burnout basically means surrendering in the face of defeat, giving up on even continuing to try," Ducey writes.

Other sources of stress come from below the surface.

"These remote causes often involve a sense of feeling emotionally neglected or abused or mistreated in childhood and/or in current life, in ways that may still be unconscious to the student," Ducey adds.

'Tis the Season

Every member of the Bureau of Study Counsel staff has been booked solid for the past few weeks, and Ducey says they will continue to be busy for the duration of the semester.

"Most students begin the fall semester with a sense of hope and enthusiasm," Ducey adds. "It is around the time of 'hourlies' or midterms that students may begin to experience the uneasy sense that things are going badly wrong."

Winter holidays follow soon after this period, but these festivities are not the time of rest they are billed as.

"By the time of Thanksgiving, when students often face the sometimes less-than-desirable prospect of going home for the holidays, the phenomena of burnout begin to become manifest," Ducey says. "The weeks between Thanksgiving and the winter holidays are often the most critical period for students' recognition that their fall semester feels dangerously out of control."

Ducey writes that just the time when students feel the most pressure to buckle down, they are also most prone to give up.

Burnout cases are less prevalent in the spring semester according to Ducey.

"Perhaps the burnout casualties of the fall semester remove a significant proportion of potential burnout victims from the spring semester," he writes. "Yet the rhythms of the spring are similar to those of the fall: sticking one's head in the sand early leads to the disaster of the experience of burnout later in the semester."

Ducey writes that the single most important method of preventing burnout is self-awareness.

"The difficulty is that in college one is often only beginning to define oneself for the first time, separate from family, friends, teachers, etc., and a student is not yet clear what matters to him or her as a unique individual," Ducey writes.

Students need to draw a fine line between seeking parental and peer guidance, and being overwhelmed by their influence. According to Ducey, it is as simple as coming to know themselves better.

But while some people find it within themselves to solve their problems, others have no choice but to obtain professional help.

Failure in the process of self-definition--which is central to the college experience--makes burnout inevitable and indicates that the process has failed.

Help Me Harvard

Like with virtually any mental or emotional problem students could suffer, Harvard offers a variety of options for treatment.

Ducey even suggests that students use the Bureau of Study Counsel when they first begin to feel symptoms of burnout so that it never reaches its full-blown stage. The Bureau, he says, can help them with the process of self-definition.

As preventative measures, the Bureau's peer tutoring, the Course in Reading and Study Strategies, the time management workshops and other programs can also help students keep academics in perspective and handle their workload.

In terms of directly dealing with mental wellness, the Bureau offers personal counseling and individual psychotherapy.

Ducey also recommends the Mental Health Service of University Health Services (MHS) as a resource to help students deal with crises and ongoing stresses in their lives.

"It is the act of seeking and receiving help, whether from the Bureau or MHS, that counteracts the development of burnout in students," Ducey writes.