Burnout

Oh, end of semester.  How I love you.  <insert sarcastic snicker here>  Seriously, it's the end of the school year for me, and for my kids, and I am feeling it.  Oh, how I'm feeling it.

A lot of people ask me how I manage to balance school, and work, and parenting.  The secret is:  I don't.  Every semester, at the end of the semester, I die. And then, I'm reborn again.  Like a phoenix.  Or a vampire.

It's easy to experience burnout whether you have a full time job, or you're a parent, or you're going to school.  What I see in my own life is that a lot of little things pile up.  By the end of the semester, my thoughts are scattered, I'm tired, and I don't really want to do anything. Not wanting to do anything equals procratination, which means things fall through the cracks.  Things falling through the cracks means feeling stressed, which means irritability, which equals feeling tired and sorry for myself...(if you give a mom a cookie...)  You get the idea.

How do you avoid it, or control it?  The best thing to do is to understand, first of all, that it is going to happen.  Expect it.  Then understand that you have to nip it in the bud before it blooms into a veritable garden of cortisol and epinephrine.  Take some quiet time to pray, or meditate, and think about what is truly important to you.  When you've decided what those things are, then understand that those things (or people) are what deserve your time and attention.  After those things are taken care of, then other things can be taken care of.

And now I'm going to go work on a paper.  *sigh*  Hang in there, fellow students and parents of students.  We're almost through.