Open Letter for Kindness Relating to Burnout: An Op-Ed
Dear UMD students,
As students, it’s easy to relate to the feeling of being overwhelmed with the daily demands of everyday life. It’s the end of the semester and finals week is approaching fast. Maybe you’re graduating this spring and scrambling to get everything finalized. Whatever your situation may be, we understand that you might be stressed, overwhelmed, and feeling burnt out. With this in mind, we wish to bring attention to how your mental health can affect productivity in the workplace and how to overcome burnout that may occur in a school setting.
As fellow UMD students, we fully understand these stressful times and feelings during this time of your lives. We hope to shed a little bit of light on taking care of your mental health and being kind to not only others but yourselves. Our exploration of the relationship between self-compassion and burnout effects aims to explain how personal stressors can contribute to burnout. Within this topic, we will go more in-depth on how you can integrate self-compassion into your and others’ lives, how burnout affects your mental, emotional, and physical health, how to combat burnout and the importance of self-care.
Combating Burnout
There are many advantages to learning about mental health concerning burnout, whether in the workplace or an academic setting. We can all empathize with the struggles of juggling various aspects of life. With work, school, and social pressures, it can be easy to fall into burnout. Learning how to deal with burnout now is vital to our success in our professional lives and careers.
According to How To Avoid Academic Burnout In College, an example of what burnout can look like is exhaustion, decreased interest in schoolwork, a decline in performance, and increased irritability, anger, anxiety, physical fatigue, headaches, and stomach aches. Job burnout: How to spot it and take action - Mayo Clinic says that burnout can come from many factors, including those outside of work or school. These factors could be depression or preexisting illness, family life, or personality traits. The long-term effects of poor mental, physical, and emotional health due to burnout include substance abuse, Type 2 Diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and a lowered immune system.
Self Compassion
How to Cultivate Self-Compassion and Why it's So Important explains some ways we can combat burnout using self-compassion techniques: positive affirmations, developing mindfulness, treating yourself the way you treat your friends, allowing room for mistakes and writing to yourself. One way we can use kindness toward others to combat burnout is by showing those we work with that we care, according to How To Battle Workplace Burnout from Forbes.
The Mental Health Benefits of Simple Acts of Kindness states that acts of kindness increase the strength and intensity of social relationships and connections. People who receive acts of kindness from others are more likely to be generous and happier throughout their life. The most effective way to raise awareness is to provide and encourage mental health training in the workplace, supporting daily physical activities such as walks and providing mental health resources to all, according to Forbes.
Solutions
Our goal is to help you find positive ways to improve your daily life by integrating self-compassion into your routine. You can raise awareness by practicing mindfulness and self-compassion and sharing this information with others! You can avoid burnout in the workplace and school while supporting others embarking on the same journey by spreading kindness.