This essay was originally published in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter on November 14, 2024.
Around this time of year, we get busy. When we get busy, we get tired. And when the busyness doesn’t stop, we work through our exhaustion — then comes burnout, the beast of burden. This sad sequence feels like such an accepted series of events that I initially didn’t even want to write about it. In my hesitation, I swung between two thoughts: the first, that everything intensifies and nothing can be done about it; the second, its opposite, sprung from doubt, that I was the only one not taking it all in graceful stride.
This afternoon, my friend and I studied at a cafe with a garden. The hilly green with its scattered picnic benches and lawn chairs was separated from the street by a tight metal fence. After a few hours of work, an inscrutable figure stopped on the sidewalk right outside. “It’s, like, this time of year,” the stranger said, “where things just go and go and go and they just don’t stop.” Fact though it may be, it felt good to hear this shared exhaustion voiced. Listening to that voice in the garden made me realize that I was, justifiably, drained to the dregs. Then came two follow-up questions: why, exactly, was this so? And was there anything I could do about it?
If you were to print a calendar and ask me to shade in the days where I felt that my energy was funneled into something I’d go to bat for, you’d find clusters of shaded blocks in early September, and an exponential decrease as we approached the present.
At some point in a semester, my work seems to slip into habit rather than action. Instead of planning out my day, there comes a point where I reenact it — a series of events as they should take place, rather than how I want them to. This is effective for pushing through the days where energy doesn’t suffice as motivation. But this habitual churn is harmful in the long run. Soon, not only has my work melted into an automatic response, but my rest has as well. Time drained scrolling on my phone is not time that I walk away from feeling refreshed, but a habitual attempt to find pockets of unfulfilling rest. Intention is what gets lost as I lose the energy to care equally about all that I have to do.
So, I’ve been asking myself how I might bring meaning back into the way I work, to carry myself out from habit-driven action and back into intention. While finding this intentional practice might be additional work in itself, my hope is that, in caring more about what I do and how I do it, I will figure out a lifestyle that is both fulfilling and sustainable.
I’ve made it a point to pause several times in my day to ask myself what it is I’d actually like to do in that exact moment. The answer has often, unsurprisingly, been to rest. Taking that extra hour of sleep away from a late night, or spending time cooking or watching a show has helped me come back to my academics with more presence. Even slowing my pace, indulging in more than the intended number of yap sessions with my friends on a café hopping “study day,” has helped me calibrate my way of working into something more sustainable.
There is no universal fix to burnout, much less an instantaneous one. I’m learning every day, by trial-and-error, what an optimal balance of my energy and my time might look like. Some days, the answer seems contradictory; getting less sleep might mean gaining more time in the morning to make myself a hearty breakfast that takes me through the day. Other times, sleep makes the biggest difference.
On occasion, I think back to my freshman self. Though I change my note-taking style every semester, sometimes I go back to the way that she did it, back to the same typeface and document style. I sit in the same way she did, and remember how much she cared about every inch of her work, even when her energy flagged. I think about where that intent came from.
I haven’t yet met anyone on this campus who hasn’t been exhausted, at some point, by the time November rolls around. Still, every other day I trick myself into thinking that burnout is an isolated experience. The more I remember that it isn’t, the more that I’m willing to make changes that shape my work style into a more sustainable practice, the more motivated I am to listen to my own energy and attention as it fluctuates. Those blank unshaded days of burnout should be the exception in my calendar, not the norm.
Kaitlin Tan is a junior from Manila, Philippines, studying Writing Seminars and Cognitive Science. She is a Magazine Editor for The News-Letter.