Teen Burnout:
When The
High-Achieving
Runs Out Of Steam
Most teens complain about school, but many young folks feel their lives revolve around work in a way that doesn’t feel suited to what are supposed to be the “best years of their lives.” In fact, teen burnout can be a silent killer, because it comes at a time when teens are developing more independence and autonomy, and may be less likely to share their desperation with their families.
I should not have been surprised when my training as a volunteer crisis counselor at a National Suicide Lifeline call center included a module on teen burnout. I knew my experience of it as a teen was tough, but it was only then that I realized how widespread it was, and how many teens felt pushed over the edge by it.
There’s so much spoken and unspoken academic pressure on teens to perform, and those making the demands can seem to be bought into a workaholic culture teens didn’t choose to opt into but are caught in if they desire success. It can feel like the pace is unsustainable yet there’s no end in sight.
What Is Teen Burnout?
Teen burnout is exhausting. You might also call it a version of workaholism.
Teen burnout is buying into the idea that you have to do All Of The Things and do them well, without anyone seeing you sweat. It is often rewarded with praise, awards, and good grades; thus, it is self-reinforcing. You can begin to not know who you would be or what your life would look like if you weren’t grinding all the time. Things you enjoy seem to drop away for the sake of completing schoolwork; or, weirdly, fun things just seem like they are another task to complete and add to your stress. What are you supposed to do when fun has turned into work? And forget about basic needs – it’s easy to forget meals when you’re engrossed in work, and all-nighters seem a rite of passage at institutes of higher learning.
It’s a habit that is really hard to break, but change is possible with therapy for teens and college students.
Teen Burnout vs. Stress (and Depression)
Everyone has stress, you might tell yourself. But stress comes and goes with deadlines. Burnout is when the stress seemingly never ends. Even after a deadline passes, you find yourself dreading the next one – you can already see it on the horizon. It can look like staying a week ahead of your work so you can handle potential future setbacks, and feeling anxious until you’ve done it. It can manifest physically as headaches or stomachaches, with your body forcing you to rest (which, of course, only causes more stress because then you need to catch up). It feels like no matter how hard you work, nothing is enough, there is no way to tick every item off your list. It may eventually feel like a tug of war between having no motivation to do anything anymore, then scrambling to finish work, and then collapsing again. It’s time to consider professional help when you’re asking what the point is of all of this if nothing feels authentically engaging anymore.
Signs of Burnout in Teens
Burnout can look different for everyone, but often it comes with the feeling that you don’t have a choice but to continue working so hard, even if you want to relax and know your pace is unsustainable.
Some folks carry on until their body crashes, developing headaches, stomachaches, or chronic pain or illness that wipes them out, and demands that they rest. Sometimes it presents as an academic burnout, with grades slipping because of fatigue and lack of motivation, with what seems like a sudden inability to care enough about doing work. Sometimes there’s a sort of internal rebellion of parts that are sick of being worked so hard. Those parts can take over and sheltering from the demands of the world with TV, video games, and comfort food feels like all you’re capable of.
Often, though, there is no visible crash, just the low grade ever present grind. It’s somewhat like the (gross) metaphor of the frog in the pot not realizing it’s being boiled alive slowly as the temperature’s turned up. You may awake one day to feel like you’ve lost your enthusiasm for things you once loved, even if you’re going through the motions.
Common signs of teen burnout include:
Why High-Achieving Teens
Burn Out
High achievers may be most at risk for burnout. They can come from families of high achievers, or be a star in their family, with everyone’s hopes piled upon their shoulders. There is more pressure than is often acknowledged in school: the expectation to meet or exceed the achievements of your own successful family members, or to ensure you succeed so as not to let down others in your family who have invested in you.
Overscheduled kids may have a hard time speaking up or even discerning when their jam packed free time has become overwhelming, especially if it’s been that way since a young age. Of course parents want to provide the best experience they can for their children, though it can be hard to see when it’s overdone if the child seems to be enjoying all of the activities. In high school, things get amped up even more, as their academic career becomes professionalized or curated for acceptance to prestigious universities. Competition among peers is rampant.
It can also be hard to sit still when you’ve been running for so long. Being busy certainly isn’t the worst way of coping, though if there’s deeper emotional turmoil underneath it, busyness makes it hard to know how you’re really doing. And as the saying goes, “what you resist persists”: it’s going to keep coming up until you look it in the eyes.
Many high achieving kids actually have undiagnosed neurodivergence, masking their cognitive differences by working twice as hard to excel, while quietly drowning.
Perfectionism in Teens
Perfectionism on the surface isn’t such a bad thing. Who doesn’t want to do their best? Aren’t we all trying to do our best all the time? After a lifetime of striving, however, it can be hard to tell if there is a true desire to do well or if you just keep doing it because some part of you feels like you have to.
It may even be that no one in your life is upset over small mistakes or bumps in the road, but, internally, a voice in your head is assaulting you, asking how you could have missed a certain thing. This voice may also make it impossible to finish projects, endlessly editing things late into the night, making things take way longer than they need to. The persistence of perfectionism can make you feel like an underachiever when you are actually an overachiever, resulting in low self-esteem or irritability.
Youth Sports Burnout &
Early Specialization
The latest research in sports psychology has led to the US Olympic Committee recommending that kids wait until after puberty to specialize in a particular sport (meaning, training in a sport year-round). One impact of early sport specialization is burnout. The USOC encourages sampling a number of sports in childhood, with an emphasis on fun and physical literacy through diverse types of movement. This is definitely not in accordance with the culture of certain sports, particularly individual sports, like tennis and figure skating. While in the short term, kids might gain an advantage by devoting all of their time to one sport early on, this results in higher risk of injury and dropout.
Young athletes can eventually run into difficulty with intrinsic motivation – motivation that stems from their genuine enjoyment of the sport, rather than doing something just because it’s scheduled or to avoid being reminded by a parent. It can be hard for teens struggling with athlete burnout to tell when something they loved turned into something they felt obligated to keep doing, to not “give up on.” Later in life, when elite level sports are over, many former athletes feel destabilized by the loss of identity. They devoted so much of their life for one thing, and even if they find great success, figuring out who they are outside of sports can be a process. This is something young athletes and creatives have in common.
College Burnout: When the Pace Follows Them to Campus
Getting into college can feel like such a relief to many students. Like they can finally relax now that they know where they’re going to school. But the truth is, the same pressure they felt to get into college often follows them there – the goalposts have just been moved. Students who go to school away from home can feel the lack of family support in their new environment, even if they have been dying to get out of the house for years. Even if their school schedule is packed, there’s less built-in structure than living with your parents. While some students find it hard to motivate to do the piles of homework that’s expected of them, others overcompensate and spend all of their free time studying, realizing that the rat race continues into graduate school, doctoral programs, and the workplace.
How Parents Can Help A Burned-Out Teen
It may feel like an impossible task to approach your teen when you are worried they’re struggling with student burnout. You might worry that if you mention your concerns, they may feel even more pressure to perform, or be defensive or embarrassed that they can’t “handle” things on their own. It’s a fine line to tread between offering support when it seems they are struggling and not wanting to butt in if what’s going on with them is something they want to keep to themselves.
One strategy would be to mention what you’ve noticed has changed in observational terms that could be recorded by a videocamera. Avoid stating an opinion or saying something interpretative, such as, “you seem burnt out,” which has an air of judgment and could be easily denied. For example, if you notice your child is staying up later than they used to doing work when they never did before, you can mention you’ve noticed this behavior shift, and ask what’s changed. If they’re reluctant to let you in, you can mention what you suspect might be happening by framing it as a hypothetical you’d be open to hearing about if it ever does happen. For instance, you could say that you know school can be intense, and would be open to hearing about it if it ever becomes overwhelming. Kids don’t have a ton of control over their lives, and it may not even occur to them that you could help by speaking to their school counselor, teachers, or administrators about a more flexible deadlines or shifting their schedule to make things more sustainable.
Modeling behaviors that prioritize rest, like implementing a family-wide “secular Sabbath” where everyone unplugs and exists in an analog world for a weekend day or whatever timeframe makes sense. If your teen participates in lots of activities, get curious about what keeps them so involved, see which activities are their favorites, and, if it feels appropriate, perhaps suggest that “less is more,” and gently floating the idea that they could always change tack and focus more deeply on fewer interests.
How Therapy Helps Teens With Burnout
Having a nonjudgmental adult outside of the family and social sphere to bounce things off of can be invaluable to a burnt out teen. Teens who tend towards workaholism are often disconnected from their bodies. After all, to do well in school, we need to learn to control our physical urges and are rewarded for doing so. Teenagedom is also a great time to introduce tools, such as mindfulness and somatic awareness, to help teens become better aware of their body’s ways of signaling it’s time to rest. IFS offers teens a way to conceptualize and integrate their conflicting needs – the part of them that wants to excel and the part of them that wants to chill out.
Sometimes it can be hard for teens to slow down, not only because they want so badly to achieve their goals, but because if they slow down, something uncomfortable might be lurking in the shadows. Together, we can peel back the layers to find out what’s beneath their drivenness while respecting how determinated they are. Parts work can help teens regulate the anxiety that may be running them into the ground. Often, a hardworking kid will bounce between being extremely driven and focused to crashing out; getting to know both of these parts and developing more of a relationship with them can reduce extreme alarming swings.
It’s definitely worth seeking a therapist for your teen if you see burnout lasting more than a few weeks. If your child expresses hopelessness, or not knowing if they can “do this anymore,” this could be coded language for suicidality, which warrants further investigation and potentially seeking the help of a professional.
Frequently Asked Questions About
Teen Burnout
How long does it take a teen to recover from burnout?
It really depends on the specific circumstances of the situation. Burnt out teens need to rest to get back to their baseline, as well as adjust their lifestyle, schedule, and workload to lay the supports for a more sustainable pace. Moving beyond crisis response band-aid strategies, it’s also important for teens to invest time in getting to the bottom of what drove them to such extremes to avoid the same thing happening again in the future.
Is burnout the same as depression?
Burnout can lead to depression, and depression symptoms often overlap with burnout, though they aren’t exactly the same thing.
Exhaustion is a symptom of both depression and burnout, and deeper feelings of worthlessness can often be covered up by overachieving. It can be hard to concentrate and to motivate oneself to do even simple life tasks when you’re burnt out, which can look like depression. And sleep is often sacrificed to keep powering through.
If after the stressors pass and your teen still seems burnt out after a period of rest, it might point to a deeper problem.
At the end of the day, diagnoses aside, if your teen seems to be struggling, support is a good idea. Therapy does not have to be sought only when there is a problem; it can be considered a proactive practice to help teens develop the skills to better cope with the ups and downs of life.
Should my teen quit their sport or activity?
Not necessarily, though if it’s feeling more like an obligation or a burden to your teen, it’s definitely something to consider.
It might be worth having an exploratory conversation about how it is for them that this sport or activity is such a huge part of their life, and what they might see themselves doing if it weren’t. You might ask them how they would be able to tell if their energy is drying up, and you could try modeling good habits for them by mentioning the signals that tell you you are getting burnt out and what you do to recoup.
When should a teen with burnout see a therapist?
If there are signs of hopelessness or suicidality, definitely seek professional help. When symptoms of burnout (such as exhaustion, irritability, or withdrawal) start interfering with teens’ family and social relationships, or their academic performance declines, that’s a good time to consider it as well.
However, with high-performing teens, the signs might be more subtle than that as they can often seem mostly “fine” on the outside. Again, offering the support of therapy at the first signs of burnout can’t hurt. It will only help your child to devote time to developing better emotion regulation, which is a skill they will carry throughout their lives into every domain.
If a teen talks about not wanting to be alive,
CALL OR TEXT 988
(the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)
