Sometimes people have nothing left. They’ve been trying to keep going for years, and then it’s like they run out of juice. They don’t have any energy or spark. Resting doesn’t help, and nor does just carrying on as normal.
This is sometimes called burnout. Burnout results from chronic stress, often in a workplace. When defined by the World Health Organisation, it has three main parts. Exhaustion, feelings of negativity or cynicism, and reduced efficacy. Burnout is not a medical problem, it’s an occupational one. It happens when a person is under chronic stress for too long.
A growing number of teenagers and children seem to be burnout by life. They stop being able to function, they often retreat to their bedrooms, and everything seems too much. It’s hard for their parents to know what to do. Burnout was traditionally thought of as the result of work – but these young people seem to be burnt out by school.
Autistic people may be particularly prone to burnout due to how stressful they find daily life, but burnout itself can be experienced by anyone. The process of recovery is similar whether you or your child are autistic or not. There is no evidence that autistic burnout is distinctly different to burnout.
Things have gone wrong at school for your teenager, and now it’s like they have nothing left. They have lost their sense of what made life worth living. You don’t know how to help, and sometimes it seems like whatever you do makes things worse. Naomi will explain how burnout happens and what the process of recovery looks like.
Your child isn’t happy at school. They are protesting in the mornings, or having meltdowns in the afternoons. They tell you that they don’t want to go, and you feel torn between them and the school. School are telling you that the answer is to keep pushing, as you don’t want to reinforce avoidance or behaviour. It’s starting to dominate everything about your family life, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
This mini-course is for teenagers to watch themselves. It explains burnout, why our bodies go into burnout, what that process looks like and how we can recover. It is broken down into small sections and has subtitles. Featuring Chloe from Me Just Me.
What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time. We make them spend several years learning things that they often have no interest in, that they have not chosen and that they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important. Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them.
Today I heard from a parent that their son was terribly upset when he got covid, because it would ruin his 100% attendance record. At the end of the year, those with 100% get book tokens & certificates in assembly. She mentioned it in passing, she obviously didn’t think it was a big deal. It was just how school worked, and last year her son had got the award.