Story by Abby Zimmardi
Over the span of six days in March 2021, Caitlin Lane, 23, felt a distant and dull ache in her right side grow into a constant and sharp sensation soon followed by nausea and nights spent in pain. On the sixth day, March 4, Lane spent her day juggling teaching eighth-grade English and trying to cope with the intense pain that began to culminate. Once school ended at 4:00 p.m., she drove from Woodland Junior High where she is a student teacher, to MedExpress and began to feel panic set in as the doctor was almost certain she had appendicitis and referred her to the ER.
Caitlin Lane, 23, works on her laptop at Woodland Junior High School where she is a student teacher April 14, 2020. Photo courtesy of Caitlin Lane.
While at the ER, the doctors administered tests and found out that Lane did not have appendicitis, but she had a stress-induced ovarian cyst and surgery would not be necessary. She was discharged at midnight, given no medication, and was told that her pain would subside in a few days, which it did. After having a traumatic night, Lane woke up at 8 a.m. the next morning and taught her students as if nothing had happened.
“I beat myself up over it now because I’m like, ‘That was so stupid of me,’” Lane said. “I went to school the next day after getting blood drawn and a CT scan and all that stuff – I went to school the next day to teach.”
Lane, who is getting her Master’s of Education at the University of Arkansas, had been putting her eighth-grade students, the university, and anything but herself before her own needs since she started graduate school in June 2020. The way she prioritized her life led to her being overworked and feeling burned out, which caused her to have a physical ailment.
“I was realizing that I just had been putting my own self as the least priority on a list that felt like it was so long that I was drowning in it and all of these responsibilities,” Lane said.
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What Lane experienced through her school and work-related stress, is exactly how Peggy Kelly, the chief clinical officer of Youth Home, a non-profit organization that provides mental health treatment, defined burnout: “Burnout occurs when a person experiences an abundance of stress and they are not attending to their self-care,” Kelly said.
Lane’s blue hospital band from when she was admitted to the ER for her ovarian cyst that was due to stress, March 4, 2021. Photo courtesy of Caitlin Lane.
The term “burnout” was first used in the 1970s to only describe the stress people faced in “helping professions” such as doctors and nurses. Now the term, coined by an American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, is used to describe the stress that any individual in any profession and in any stage of life faces, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Because research in burnout is fairly new, the malady has been difficult to study and has left a potentially significant number of people untreated. Generally, burnout and the research behind it can be enigmatic, but the signs of burnout are the most agreed-upon aspect between researchers. The signs of burnout are as follows: exhaustion, alienation from activities, and reduced performance, according to the NCBI.
“This has been such a difficult year because [you have] all the stress we’ve experienced at work, then you go home, and you can’t do anything,” Kelly said. “So it [the pandemic] really is making it worse.”
A March 2021 survey of 1,500 U.S. workers through Indeed, a website to help people search for jobs, found that the number of people who reported experiencing work-related burnout increased 9% between 2020 to 2021. Before the pandemic, 43% of workers felt burnout and during the pandemic, 52% of the respondents reported experiencing burnout.
These percentages are not uniform among different age groups. The largest increases in feeling burnout from 2020-2021 are in Gen X, with a 14% increase, and Gen Z, with an 11% increase.
From January 2020 to February 2021, an increased number of people experienced feeling burnout across four different age groups, according to an Indeed survey of 1,500 U.S. workers during March 2021. Millennials showed the smallest increase of a number of people experiencing burnout at a 6% increase, and Gen X showed the largest increase with 14%. Graphic courtesy of Indeed.
Gen Z includes people born between 1997-2012, according to the Pew Research Center. This group includes myself as I was born in 1999, and I can agree with this statistic that I have felt more burnout than ever before during the course of the pandemic.
The pandemic has exacerbated stress because along with not being able to escape work due to working from home, the general atmosphere of the year has caused anxiety, fear, turmoil, heartbreak, and exhaustion for all people, but has shown even more in my age group.
Not being able to escape your work is something that I have always struggled with, but have felt it tenfold for the past year because as a journalism student who wants to progress, be involved and do my duty as a journalist, and share stories and information, I have had not a single break to take care of myself – and it’s my own fault.
Working two jobs on top of being a full-time student was demanding in-person, but manageable. Working three jobs (yes, I added another position after the pandemic began) on top of being a full-time student online is demanding and not at all manageable.
I work at three jobs through the university: the multimedia editor at the student newspaper, the Arkansas Traveler, a metadata organizer for The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, and a data reporter for the student-run online news and data website ArkansasCovid.com. Once I got the courage to explain that I was feeling overwhelmed, unmotivated, exhausted, and depressed to my professors and bosses, they were extremely accommodating and understanding, but because I set too high of expectations for myself, I did not give myself any respite, which left me feeling like I was gasping for air and failing at it for months. This, as it turns out, is typical.
“There’s just so many hours in the day and when you’re trying to accomplish unrealistic goals or too many unrealistic goals, you’re going to not pay attention to the self-care as much as you need to, and you’re not probably going to have good boundaries,” Kelly said. “If you figured that out in adolescence, man, the rest of your life is going to be a breeze.”
Luckily for me, I’m still a young 21 years of age and have learned that boundaries are indeed necessary, but, of course, only after I had been feeling burnout and the negative effects of it for around five months at the end of 2020.
If my burnout were to continue for more than six months, it would have resulted in long-term health effects such as increased blood pressure, digestive issues, and declining cardiovascular health, Kelly said.
“Most people are not going to be able to sustain burnout for six months, a year, and if they are, they’re probably going to really suffer from long-term health effects,” Kelly said.
These long-term effects are the reason it is so important to prioritize your own mental health over pushing yourself until you literally have a physical medical condition like Lane did. The pandemic has exacerbated burnout especially in students, and Kelly has advised people to set strict boundaries with themselves. Turn your computer off at a certain time each day, try to do physical activities for 20 minutes a day, and seek additional help outside of yourself, Kelly said.
While these tips are something I strived STROVE to do, I, unfortunately, struggle with having unrealistically high expectations for myself and thinking that I let everyone down when I don’t do what I deem as my best work, leading me to never give myself a break. Of course, this resulted in me, like Lane, feeling absolutely overworked and burned out.
Although my burnout did not culminate in an ovarian cyst, it did significantly impact my mental health. When the Fall 2020 semester began in August, two of my grandparents died within weeks of each other, and I wasn’t able to be home with my family or even hug my own mother until months later during winter break in December. I was hurt, I could see my family was hurt, too, but I couldn’t do anything about it because of distance and the pandemic, so I put my emotions aside and went full speed ahead into my school work and jobs.
For two weeks, I was doing well with all of my work, feeling committed but starting to fear the inevitable period when my emotions would catch up to me. I was in the “honeymoon phase” of burnout, which is the first of five phases as reported by two Winona State University education professors.
I, along with Lane, felt this elated sense of passion when I first started my new job and when Lane began student teaching.
“It was kind of like I was on a high when I first started because I had been really reinvigorated with my new direction in teaching,” Lane said.
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The second phase of burnout is the “balancing act,” where you begin to feel fatigued, dissatisfied in your job, maybe have trouble sleeping and you may start to take up escapist activities such as eating, drinking, and even zoning out.
In my burnout, which peaked in October and November, I had never been balancing so many jobs and tasks in my life. I began feeling more tired than usual, which led me to suffer from insomnia, and for the first time, I was slacking on my school work and I was feeling extremely unmotivated. I was so exhausted trying to keep up with everything, that I couldn’t even hold a proper conversation with my roommates. I felt like a foreigner in my own body.
“There was a time where I just, one, I didn’t have time to do homework and two when I could, I just felt so mentally just not myself, and just foggy,” Lane said. “I couldn’t think straight, because I just had been going, going, going for so long, that when the burnout happened, it was like I just crashed into a brick wall and there was like nothing left. And so I would sit there and try for hours to work on my homework, and I just couldn’t. So I didn’t turn in anything for like a month.”
At this point in burnout, Kelly would advise her patients on ways that may help them to cope with their burnout. One example she gave me was to set strict boundaries and only allow yourself to work overtime for two nights a week and only for two extra hours. If you work on school work from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., try to only work to 8:30 p.m. on two nights of the week. But, of course, as a student there are days where you have papers and essays that you need to stay up all night working on, so this method is not always feasible, Kelly said.
The additional ways of managing stress such as seeing friends in person is now not an option due to the pandemic, so now we have had to learn how to cope with our stress and burnout differently.
“As a professional, I would say, you have to learn new ways, or, you know, you try to learn new ways to deal with it [burnout],” Kelly said. “Maybe you’ve never done mindfulness or meditation before, but instead of going to church you can visit with friends through zoom or by phone. So it’s hard if you’ve [become used to coping] a certain way, and learning new ways to do that has made it much more challenging.”
It took Lane months to find ways to cope with her burnout, and she didn’t succeed until she went through all five stages of burnout and received a wake-up call to take better care of herself. One of the healthy coping mechanisms that she took was going on walks and runs to clear the “burnout fog” she suffered from. But before taking up exercise, she experienced the last three stages of burnout: “chronic symptoms” which includes depression, exhaustion or physical illness, “crisis” which includes more intense physical symptoms, such as Lane’s ovarian cyst, obsessing about work frustrations, pessimism and developing an escapist mentality, and lastly “enmeshment” which is when the symptoms of burnout are meshed into your daily life.
Because it is difficult to diagnose burnout, I don’t know if either Lane or I was experiencing burnout, depression, anxiety or a mix of everything. We both had symptoms of all of these and went through the stages of burnout. Eventually, we learned how to cope with it after months of feeling as if being locked in too small of a room with the lights off and every line of help was on the other side of the door, which is how Lane explains it.
For Lane, her burnout served as a wake-up call to really prioritize herself first. Now, she has been able to cope with her stress in more healthy ways, and it was because after she went to the ER, she took up running and reached out to her loved ones for help – and ultimately checked in with her own mental health more often.
“Once I figured out how to make that all stop and put myself first, I was able to finally open that door and be with the people that really wanted to help me,” Lane said.
For me, my burnout resolved when I was finally able to go back home to Texas for the holidays in December, which was the respite that I needed so desperately. Along with that, I sought help from a therapist and found running to be an additional outlet to temporarily relieve my stress.
I am still not feeling completely like myself, but I am much closer and I’ve learned how to cope with my burnout better. Although improving, my burnout has now mixed with senioritis creating the most deadly combination!