Are You Feeling Exhausted Lately? You Are Probably Experiencing Burnout

Reading Time: 7 minutes

A growing number of people are suffering from burnout due to the pandemic. The education sector is no exception. Teachers, administrators, students, and families are struggling to deal with burnout.

Are You Feeling Exhausted Lately? You Are Probably Experiencing Burnout
Photo by: JelenaAloskina.
Reading time 7 minutes
Reading Time: 7 minutes

A growing number of people are suffering from burnout due to the pandemic. The education sector is no exception. Teachers, administrators, students, and families are struggling to deal with burnout.

Anne Helen Petersen, the writer, journalist, and author of the book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, describes “burnout” as something beyond physical or psychological exhaustion. It is the feeling of being exhausted from life and, despite that exhaustion, having to keep going without rest.

One of the characteristics of burnout  (also known as “occupational burnout”) is to have no sense of accomplishment after finishing something stressful such as a final exam or significant work project. It is to be continually seeking that feeling of action without having it due to anxiety, workload, or distractions. Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, describes it as follows: “You feel burnout when you have exhausted all your internal resources, but you cannot free yourself from the nervous compulsion to keep going.”

The effects that often accompany this syndrome are anxiety, insomnia, interpersonal conflicts, poor job performance, less creativity, resignations, and illnesses. According to Petersen, “part of the reason that people work all the time is that they’re terrified of what would happen if they didn’t. And what they’re terrified of is precarity—not having any sort of backstop or any sort of safety net.”

Although burnout is considered a condition that mainly affects the Millennial generation, the syndrome is not new. Burnout was first diagnosed in 1974 by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who defined this syndrome as a case of physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress. Although its literal translation is “exhaustion,” burnout has a deeper meaning, as it is means to feel exhausted but not stopping, to keep going while handling it, even for years.

Teacher burnout: the problem of being always present

Teaching during a pandemic, with schools closed indefinitely, has been no easy task. Not only did teachers have to adapt to emergency remote learning at the start of the epidemic, but with the prolonging of lockdowns all over the world, they must now be flexible and always available online.

An example is Chrissy Romano Arrabito, a second-grade teacher in New Jersey in the United States. Her day begins early in the morning with sending “good morning videos” to all her students, and she finishes the workday at ten o’clock at night, when she starts to answer calls from parents who work during the day. (Many of them are essential workers who cannot contact her to ask questions until that time.) While being available throughout the day is admirable, teachers do need to take the time to care for themselves.

What happens is that being at home all day because of quarantine makes many parents and administrators expect that the teachers, also being at home, have no reason not to help them or students at any time. Another critical point is that teachers are expected to become experts in distance education overnight due to the pandemic. This pressure affects their mental health. Unlike other professions, teachers often act as caregivers, especially those who work in preschool, primary, and secondary education. This results in physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion as there may be students they worry about because of their socioeconomic or family situations, and they want to care for them.

“The most exhausting part of the job is that I feel like I am putting in all this effort without really knowing if it is worth it.”

Because of the pandemic, teachers are now distant from their students, which can unleash anxiety because they do not know how the students are, and they feel helpless. That is the reason why many teachers try to compensate for this absence by always been available, answering emails, or calls late at night, as Chrissy Romano does.

Although closeness and emotions are essential for supporting the students’ academic performance, these attitudes, feelings, and activities of the educators provoke burnout or chronic stress, resulting in less motivated and less engaged teachers. In the worst scenario, the burnout can lead them to leave the profession.

How to avoid teacher burnout?

The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, along with colleagues from the Collaborative for Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning, known as CASEL, detected two possible factors that help protect teachers’ emotional well-being and prevent them from suffering from burnout or anxiety.

First, teachers need to be more open with their emotions. They often report higher job satisfaction and less anxiety or exhaustion than they truly feel, so their leaders do not detect any problems and give them the support they need. Learning to name and express their emotions precisely, according to CASEL, helps teachers understand the causes and consequences of the emotions they feel, which allows them to self-regulate effectively.

Second, having a leader or administrator with developed emotional skills helps improve the teacher-student relationship, facilitating a more significant commitment to learning. That is why it is essential to focus on the mental health of the educators and their administrators so that they are psychologically prepared to return to school.

Burnout in higher education: lessons for university leaders 

Academia and higher education are incredibly prone to trigger burnout because it fosters a culture where teaching and research are treated as passions that must be followed at any cost. Due to the pandemic, teachers lost their structure and had to adapt to online classes. Many teachers had not had the experience of teaching an online course. They were frustrated and exhausted while adapting to online platforms, work that can make teachers more prone to burnout.

Even the summertime, when teachers and administrators usually take advantage of disconnecting and resting, has been different because of the pandemic. Many teachers and administrators have interrupted their holidays to attend meetings and committees to talk about the next school year’s landscape. Will it be face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online? What would each of these panoramas entail?

Such was the case of a female administrator (who did not want to share her name, for fear of harming her institution) who confessed how exhausting the experience had been. “The most exhausting p
art of the job is that I feel like I am putting in all this effort without really knowing if it is worth it.” She also mentioned that it is essential to consider burnout when planning the next school year since it could harm teachers physically and emotionally. Moreover, ignoring the issue can lead to a high turnover of staff who leave the institution for another that is more concerned about their employees’ mental health.

There is still much work to be done concerning this issue. The importance of mental health in educational institutions is already beginning to be recognized. According to a survey of the American Council on Education, the university leaders they interviewed put both staff and students’ mental health as one of the five most urgent concerns of the pandemic needing to be translated into actions.

Solutions that education leaders can take to avoid burnout at schools

Make the work environment feel more human

Many of the triggers behind burnout are systemic and complicated for any manager to solve. However, talking about the topic openly and making clear expectations for the next school year will help them know what is expected of them to avoid more stress. It is also essential for leaders to share their struggles. Sharing their experiences would help them build meaningful connections with staff and increase trust.

Simplify and reduce the workload

Administrators should prioritize essential tasks and put on hold those that are not as important. It is a time of change and uncertainty. It is time to take the previous months’ experience and assess what deserves to remain and what does not.

Be more flexible

It is essential to determine what teachers need to do their jobs but not pressure them to break records. Make them understand how important health is and move on. To do this, administrators must recognize each teacher’s strengths and help them create personalized teaching plans.

Parents also suffer from burnout

The quarantine has made a lot of families confront many challenges. To begin with, not only did they have to learn to work from home, but at the same time, they have become teacher assistants of their children. As the pandemic spread and the end of types approached, many parents felt terrified, but at the same time, the idea of going on vacation excited them. It meant getting away from online classes to focus more on their work or other activities, but they also had to think about how to keep their children busy while they would work.

Now they face a new challenge as many companies are beginning to ask employees to return to their offices. Gradually, more parents have to return to the office, but the schools are still closed until further notice in many countries, as is Mexico’s case.

The second volume of the survey Stress in the Time of COVID-19, conducted by the American Psychology Association, revealed that 69% of parents were eagerly awaiting the end of the school year. However, when asked about their plans, 60% said they “have no idea how they will keep their child busy all summer.” This type of situation, coupled with the worry about contracting the disease or losing their jobs, brings parents to burnout. The first volume of the survey found that 46% of parents with children under the age of 18 responded that their stress level was high, compared to only 28% of adults without children who responded to the same question.

Another factor that leads parents to burnout is a concern for their children’s mental health. Robin G. Nelson, professor at Santa Clara University, said that at first, she was not concerned about the emotional impact that the pandemic was going to leave on her eight-year-old son. However, now, months after it started it, she confesses that “it’s hard to keep him happy, motivated, and well since school ended because he can no longer see his friends and teachers regularly during vacation, even virtually.”

study published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science divides parental burnout into three categories: exhaustion, detachment, and inefficiency.

Parental burnout

  1. Exhaustion. This category refers to families exhausted by the natural and constant demands of motherhood and fatherhood, especially during the pandemic that puts many people in survival mode, causing fatigue and stress, which disrupts their sleep and leaves them even more exhausted. Moreover, the parents repeatedly postpone going to sleep as a desperate attempt to become tired and use exhaustion as anesthesia for sleeping. Exhaustion can provoke feelings of guilt or stress in parents, which hurts sleep even more.

  2. Detachment. When parents suffer from burnout, they may feel they are operating on “autopilot,” so they cannot enjoy everyday interactions with their children. This results in their feeling distant from them and believing they are not good parents. The dangerous thing is that this could become a vicious cycle.

  3. Inefficiency. Finally, both mothers and fathers can feel ineffective in scenarios like becoming more involved in their children’s education, making sure they take classes online, or any situation that, to them, feels like there is no solution. They think that their intervention will only end in failure, which leaves them frustrated and feeling ineffective and inadequate.

Of these three factors, the one that can be the most dangerous to children’s mental health is the detachment that the parents feel. However, these three categories can be treated with professional support and help from their employers.

Schools must pay attention not only to burnout in students but also to that of the academic and administrative staff and consider that this syndrome can affect families, who are also part of the educational community. Creating support groups, not only for students who have been affected by this syndrome but also for families and teachers, will be crucial in these uncertain times that we are experiencing.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.

Paulette Delgado

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0