Too much, yet never enough: Is burnout real? 

Burnout is a word I have heard one too many times at Oxford. Once you have heard something enough, it becomes just a senseless humming in your ear – a buzzword that loses all significance. The mere existence of such a term validates an experience previously dismissed, and thus can only add kindling to this frenzied obsession. Once named, burnout becomes an inescapable reality. The medal that comes after having worked ‘hard enough’ is complete and paralysing exhaustion, watching your tea grow cold while intentions swirl aimlessly on its surface.

There have always been moments when I have taken myself too seriously, but, amid the deluge of essay crises and reading lists, it can at times feel impossible not to. In Oxford, life can so easily slip away into a to-do list, a time-blocked schedule perfectly coloured in your Google Calendar. Yet even in those line breaks, every conversation becomes a self-assessment against a productivity scale, achievement measurable in hours studied, marks received, and flashcards reviewed. The weeks of term being so few in number only serves to further contribute to the need to be constantly in motion, constantly productive. A society event, that one night out: everything becomes pressurised, everything has a deadline. 

Tiredness is one consequence, but one distinct from the inherent exhaustion of burnout. Perhaps this is what leads to the disillusionment which some feel towards the phrase. You can hear it in every library after dark, in every coffee shop dotting the High Street. There is hardly a moment in which it isn’t breathed, from welfare emails to the depths of the mid-afternoon doomscroll, when even the fluorescent carousel of Reels begins to push you towards a clear and convenient answer. In its proliferation, ‘burnout’ can lose its potency. It becomes an excuse, a mask that is worn by laziness, paraded about by a culture of self-improvement. 

It is easy to denounce burnout as a masquerade if you have never watched a candle burn itself out. Every wick has an end, and it is quite satisfying to see the flame eat away at it, the wax dripping and melting, reforming in a puddle on the table below. It is a mess to be admired, a sculpted proof that you used everything you had – that is, until you try to light the candle again, and there is nothing left to burn. Melted wax seals and stays. It is this stasis that defines burnout: a sense of complete exhaustion and detachment, against which every best effort to resist is insufficient. 

However, despite intimate knowledge of this, I am often fooled by the scepticism towards this costume. Perhaps it is impossible not to be. The World Health Organisation labels burnout as solely an ‘occupational phenomenon’, not applicable to other areas of life. This definition neglects the academic, social, and emotional contexts: those especially pertinent to students. It is this pattern – one that rejects the reality of overwhelm – that encourages us to dismiss burnout as a fiction, a self-pitying justification for poor discipline. 

When we contribute to this dismissal of burnout as defeat,  an excuse to avoid responsibility, we only feed the destructive culture in which we live. Modern values tell us that success equates to productivity, busyness is equivalent to happiness, and entirely disavows difficulty. So it remains an obligation to continue to show up, to meet deadlines. Obligation, though, comes to engulf every facet of existence. Waking up in the morning (if only after the ninth alarm), attending any social event (if only to sit in silence, unhearing), becomes as burdensome as the original stressor, completely overrun by apathy.

In the self-contained environment of university life, which preoccupies itself with productivity and attendance, admitting to this exhaustion seems synonymous with defeat. Comparison is oppressive and wholly inescapable. All those around you become a measure of what you should be doing. Anything else is not enough. Yet, when it is simultaneously too much, how can we accept that we just have less capacity to work than those around us, writing the same essays, sitting in the same classes?

This is perhaps where I concede, because I cannot pretend to have these answers. I am always the first to revert to blaming my own ‘laziness’, to see exhaustion as merely a product of sufficient work. It is a cynical tendency to roll my eyes at the usual chain of uniform advice – “take a walk, take a break, just get it done” – but one that I maintain all the same. It is easier to lie in bed, to listen to the alarm ring, than to face it. Accepting this wake-up call, the necessity to change, is a daunting prospect. It involves acknowledging that our limits are not boundless, that our attention is finite, and that rest should never be a luxury. Burnout cannot be resolved not by forcing down the brakes, but by fixing patterns, remoulding the wax, and guarding the flame more steadily this time.

It may not be possible to deny that our perception of burnout has been intensely coloured by its ubiquity, but this does nothing to undermine its reality. Burnout is not a convenient excuse, a means of slacking. You may believe it to be, for all I care. But there is no shame in naming your struggle. There is no need to ask for permission to rest.