How do you avoid burnout?
To give some background, I’m a 2nd year, pre med student who is currently dealing lots of stress. I’m kinda of an oddball because I’m not a procrastinator; I do well in my classes, usually 2 standard deviations above the mean for all of my classes. I work hard every day and I plan each day, every day with everything I want to accomplish. I also do research 12 hours a week and working on my first publication.
But, I am so damn tired of working hard every day. I don’t take breaks; I don’t go out. I do have a great support system with my family and my roommates are amazing. But, I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and I have a feeling that it this continues I may just crash and burn.
I really just need some advice.
P.S. I would love to go out to take breaks but I just can’t. I feel guilty about it the entire time and all I can think about when I’m out is what I could have accomplished with the time I wasted.
Take breaks. Go out. If you don’t have a close family, develop friendships and give the kind of support you wish to receive. Exercise. You need to find a balance in your life. As a premed student, do some research on the health risks of stress.
Baby steps. Schedule in small breaks and then build on that once you see that things won’t fall apart for you. Put it on your “to do” list along with everything else. If you are going to be a doctor someday, you’ll likely be giving your own patients the advice to not work to hard and to reduce stress and take care of themselves. Don’t you deserve the same for your physical and mental health?
Is there maybe a light hobby that you enjoy doing or would enjoy taking up? That way you’re taking a break from school and the premed life without feeling like you’re “doing nothing”. For myself, I was pretty intensely involved with piano and drawing before college, and now that I’m in college and majoring in the sciences, sometimes I’ll take an hour or so out of the week to leisurely play some piano or draw. And even though it’s not related to my schoolwork, I get a sense of accomplishment along with happiness from doing my hobbies (plus I don’t go crazy!).
I know a fair amount of students who take up knitting in college. Exercise is also a good stress reliever, and you probably wouldn’t need to do more than 30 min a day.
This is the key here. The other posters addressed this well, I just want to highlight this as the thing to address and second their posts.