Published: August 29, 2011
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s if heavy course loads, on-campus activities and busy social calendars weren’t enough for college students to juggle, they also now carry the weight of a stagnant job market, record job insecurity and a high unemployment rate.
The pressure for peak performance and an on-call-24/7 mentality in the professional world continue to increase. Two-thirds of Americans have admitted to sleeping with their cell phones right next to their beds.
So, how can today’s college students prepare for the expectations of tomorrow’s workforce without burning out before earning their Bachelors’ degrees?
Counselors and career advisors at
Wake Forest University have teamed up to develop the following tips to help students deal with job-related stress before their admirable work ethic becomes an unhealthy work obsession.
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Published: February 23, 2011
Your blood and the level of a hormone in your spit could reveal if you’re on the point of burnout, according to research undertaken by Dr. Sonia Lupien and Robert-Paul Juster of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital and the University of Montreal. In addition to professional and personal suffering, burnout puts distressed workers at further risk of physical and psychological problems if ignored. This is significant, as burnout, clinical depression, or anxiety related to the workplace affects at least 10% of North Americans and Europeans, according to estimates prepared by the International Labor Organization. [continue reading…]
The New York Times asks whether there was ever a more apt description than “nervous breakdown”
Decades ago modern medicine all but stamped out the nervous breakdown, hitting it with a combination of new diagnoses, new psychiatric drugs and a strong dose of professional scorn. The phrase was overused and near meaningless, a self-serving term from an era unwilling to talk about mental distress openly.
But like a stubborn virus, the phrase has mutated.
In recent years, psychiatrists in Europe have been diagnosing what they call “burnout syndrome,” the signs of which include “vital exhaustion.” A paper published last year defined three types: “frenetic,” “underchallenged,” and “worn out” (“exasperated” and “bitter” did not make the cut). continue
reading
Source: New York Times
Published: January 20, 2010
Recent research indicates that school burnout among adolescents is shared with parental work burnout. Children of parents suffering from burnout are more likely than others to experience school burnout. Funding from the Academy of Finland has supported the first ever scientific study into the associations between adolescents’ and parents’ burnout. School burnout is a chronic school-related stress syndrome that is manifested in fatigue, experiences of cynicism about school and a sense of inadequacy as a student.
For this study estimates of school burnout were obtained from 515 ninth-grade schoolchildren aged 15. Estimates of work burnout were obtained from 595 parents of these adolescents. The results showed that experiences of burnout were shared in families. “Experiences of burnout were shared most particularly between adolescents and parents of the same gender, i.e. between daughters and mothers and between sons and fathers. [continue reading…]
