At the start of the school year, you’re breezing by the school year and performing well in school, but now, as it nears its end,  you find that you have no motivation to do anything, your grades are dropping, you’re getting less sleep, and you’re just done with all of the school stuff.  That’s called burnout, and research from the article Student Burnout Statistics: Causes, Prevalence, and Impact, states that 30% to 40% of students experience burnout. Burnouts are normal and inevitable for students in high school, especially those with rigorous classes, but there are ways to prevent them from happening.

The best way to tackle burnout is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Burnout happens when a person experiences too much stress to the point of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion. For students, this can be caused by the pile of work or activities that they need to complete. To prevent this, you need to stop procrastinating. Don’t get me wrong–as a student, I procrastinate all the time, but sometimes it has its consequences. When you procrastinate, you push that work aside to do later, and you do this over and over again with different assignments. Next thing you know, it’s the night before all your assignments are due, and you’re racing against the clock to ensure that you maintain your grade in your class. The huge pile of homework that is pushed aside causes burnout because the more work a person has, the more stressed they will be, causing mental exhaustion.

To prevent procrastination, great time management is essential to ensure that all your assignments are completed on time. You can do this by creating planners, schedules, or to-do lists that can aid you in organizing your work into sections so that you can prioritize assignments and complete them. If these don’t work, you can even use psychological tactics to your advantage. You can use the reward system and reward yourself each time you complete a task, reinforcing that behavior of doing the task, or you can do the complete opposite and have consequences for not doing your tasks, such as having your car keys taken away. By doing these, it ensures that you can complete the tasks and prevent them from piling up.

Finding the study technique that works for you the best ensures that you can learn information and understand it, so you can keep up with your classes. If you are just breezing through classes and not putting much effort into learning, taking tests, or doing assignments, it might become too difficult because there’s little to no understanding of the classes. There are multiple study techniques out there, such as the Pomodoro technique, flashcards, and my personal favorite, the Recall Method, which can aid you in understanding the material.

Last but not least, you need to take care of yourself! When a person is burned out, they feel sad and unmotivated to do anything, and this can affect their mental health significantly. You can take care of yourself by making sure you eat, drink, and get a good night’s sleep. Sleep is so essential to the performance of a performance, so make sure to get at least 7-8 hours of sleep.