Learning to Apply Skills to Eliminate Burnout
By: Autumn Gravett-Arnold
Tags: Burnout

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Executive Summary

Most of us have experienced burnout at some point in our lives. For the recent research project I undertook for my class Analytics for Design, I chose to look at the effect burnout and stress have on college students and began to look into the various areas of student life that might have an impact on stress and be part of what is causing burnout. Stress is a huge problem and can cause many issues for people on a mental, physical, and emotional scale. This study is aimed at finding ways to help people manage their stress levels before it becomes unmanageable.

Context

As a college student myself, I see the effects of stress and burnout everyday. People would be hard pressed to find someone who wasn’t feeling stress to some degree. That is what makes this such a serious issue as stress levels might be getting higher with everything going on in the world today. My work began with talking to teachers and students and using their feedback to design a survey that I was then able to distribute to more students to get their feedback. My questions related to a variety of topics relating to stressors, time management, schooling types, and work loads. A quote I found said:

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“Stress is the person who looks a little crazy when they turn up for an after-work get together at the end of the week, strung out and frazzled; the burned-out person is the one who didn’t even bother to show up.”

-Dr. Sharmila Dissanaike

This is a very broad topic that has lots of pieces that are connected to each other. As such, in trying to address this problem, there isn’t a one size fits all solution. However, with each new way we look at this problem, we will find new ways to do things better that will help ease the burden overall until stress and burnout are better regulated and more easily managed by most people.

Semester Stress Survey

Survey Raw Data

The Cause

Many students treat stress as a status symbol, a source of pride that they get to wear in the pursuit of being a productive member of society, but this mindset is dangerous and can cause many problems for people if they allow the trend to continue over prolonged periods of time unchecked. Burnout has many negative consequences, this is a short list of possible effects from continuous stress and burnout:

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Demotivation and detachment from work

Depleted energy levels

Detachment in personal relationships

Lower productivity

Lower resistance to illness

Pessimistic outlook on work or life

Physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion

Time away from work

This short list was provided by thisiscalmer.com, but there are many sites that list these and more effects of burnout. Most articles I found didn’t relate burnout to an education setting and only focused on a workplace setting. Burnout can happen in any area of life though and it is important to have a conversation about it and what can be done to lessen the effects. There are some great videos on YouTube that talk about this topic and include ideas on how to lessen burnout.

Some great resources relating to this topic that I looked up and took notes from:

“The Closest Feeling to Death that isn’t Death” by Jaiden Animations

“5 Stages of Burnout” by thisiscalmer.com

“Burnout Syndrome Recovery” by rescuetime.com

The Findings

I looked at my data and compared responses to different questions to determine whether people had higher or lower skill in time or stress managment. Ultimately, it seems like both are large stressors, but the skills that are most lacking are stress management.

On this scale, 1=No stress at all and 10=Extremely stressed

Overall, it most students seem to be struggling with their stress levels. Many students are feeling the extreme pressures of having to juggle so many things, but seem to believe that it is just what is expected of them as college students. For us to start to break this down we need to know what areas are causing students stress and how they are dealing with these feelings.

Beyond knowing some of the effects it is also important to know what areas in our lives cause stress. In the survey I conducted, the majority of students had struggles in six main areas:

School/Homework (86.9%/59.5%)

Work (63.1%)

Home Life (39.3%)

Time Management (60.7%)

Social (21.4%)

Finances (40.5%)

This lead me into looking at how we manage time since we have to track so many different aspects of our lives and seeing how people are managing their stress. What was interesting was when answering questions related to how they think they handle things versus how they’re actually using the skill in their day to day lives, they score themselves more highly on belief instead of action. This shows how people might have the skills or be aware of them, but are struggling in a practical application.

This is the belief individuals have in their skill

Comparing the graph above with the two below, we can see the pattern start to emerge.

On this scale, 1=Not enough time and 10=Plenty of time

On this scale, 1=Overwhelming and 5=Easily managed

These three graphs together show how people are struggling to balance their work with these skills and how this worsens the effects of burnout. Since stress is something that compounds the more we burden ourselves with unfinished tasks, not knowing a practical way to use these skills is detrimental to people’s overall health and increases the risks of burnout.

The Solution Design

The question then is how do we go about fixing the problem? The solution I am proposing is working to develop an app that is able to help people by teaching them good habits and showing them when and where they could use them to lessen the stress. There are many different apps that may focus on a single area of what is causing stress, but don’t hit all, or even multiple points. A further problem currently is many of these apps have a greater majority of their features hidden behind a pay wall and don’t work in tandem with other apps that focus on other areas. So in order to cover the full range of the problem, a person might have to download 3–5 apps and pay to use each one. That’s not an efficient way to handle the problem and in some ways might make it worse.

The app I want to design would cover more areas in a single app and not have any sort of paywall since mental health is something that people should be passionate about since it affects everyone. There are many apps that have great qualities that when combined could form something new and greater than the sum of any of it’s parts.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

A visual of the app:

Spark of Life App

Conclusions

Burnout is a problem that we as a society need to work to improve. It impacts not only the individual but can cause problems for everyone. However, it is something that we can fix when we have the right resources in place and a desire to improve. Learning how to take care of ourselves is only the first step. It is through putting those learned skills into practice that we can truly begin to improve our mental and emotional states. As more people and services become involved in working to resolve this issue, we will see a change on a far greater scale. It only begins with taking one step forward. Will you become an advocate in working to fight back against burnout?

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

This data is being open-sourced and can be used by anyone. The class this project was undertaken with was Analytics for Design in the College of Innovation and Design at Boise State University.

My survey and data:

Semester Stress Survey

Survey Raw Data

Additional Sources:

https://www.thisiscalmer.com/blog/does-technology-cause-stress