As a student who is currently living off of two to five hours of sleep each night, burnout is absolutely real. This desire to accomplish everything in such minimal time literally makes one feel like a zombie–dead.
Society has unleashed a tight idea of what success looks like: accomplishing any and everything in the smallest time frame possible. This is quite literally the death of us all. Generation after generation, the mindset of normalizing burnout has become more instilled into American culture.
Burnout is essentially suffering–getting to a point where you face a mental and/or physical collapse–and yet when we get to this point in our lives, we still try to keep going.
Culturally, Americans take pride in indulging in impractical amounts of work and are beginning to structure it in a way that determines success in a workplace, education and even in day-to-day life.
It’s strange to realize that no one will tell you that overworking yourself is a bad thing. In fact, people believe that if you aren’t overworking then you simply aren’t doing enough. This is how I perceived success my entire life up until recently.
Since middle school, I have always joined multiple clubs. As soon as I was old enough, I started working. No matter what field it was, I was actively seeking to reach the top and now (what I deemed as my biggest achievement), I’m enrolled in college.
How much more successful could I be? Well, frankly, a year ago, I could have given you a multitude of ways to be more successful.
However, as I’m getting older and more exhausted, I’m realizing that success actually looks a lot different than what our society perceives it to be.
Success is not defined by numbers but by life experiences and purpose. Trust me, your purpose on this earth is not to have the most cords at graduation or the highest paying job, but to achieve fulfillment and joy and to find your calling. Not that these things can’t happen in your life, but they don’t determine your value as a human being, and honestly, that’s how seriously we’re taking the aspect of work.
Living this type of lifestyle has forced us to dress up in stress and anxiety as if we were wearing a badge of honor, and without it, we feel like nothing. Since coming to college, I’ve realized that this badge is actually a burden, a heavy weight I carry with me daily.
We’ve misunderstood rest for laziness. The idea of disciplining our work ethic outweighed the notion of taking care of ourselves.
Night after night, I stayed up doing homework because I spent my day keeping up with people, attending meetings, going to class and showing up to organizational events.
What I thought were all things that would make me happy and fulfill me ended up draining me, producing a numbness within me.
Last year was when I realized I was spending my life chasing after exhaustion, and that resulted in me inviting in tension and suffering. Being absolutely miserable, I vowed never to let myself experience such distress again. Unfortunately, here I am today in my second year of college, finding myself exhibiting the same traits.
Though it is not as bad this year, it is confusing why I keep circling back to bad habits. I think it’s because I have normalized this as a way of life. In hopes of not facing such a trial as this again, I have to advocate for all of us to wake up.
We’ve been programmed to keep going, even when we can’t anymore and as the next generation, we have to put an end to this normalization. Burnout cannot continue to consume us; we need to be able to center our values on the notion that rest is productive and that there is strength in knowing our limits.
I’ll admit, it’s a hard thing to realize in the moment, and some of us will never see it until we collapse. It’s pride that convinces us that doing too much is “thriving” when your body is actually just struggling to survive.
Allow yourself to seek help, to face humility and accept your limits, to enjoy rest. If not, we as a society will fumble harder than where we are now, and then there will be no going back. We must change our way of life before we catch ourselves living with the walking dead.