(U-WIRE) BERKELEY, Calif. - The life of a college student - juggling work, school and a social life - can be stressful. For freshman Audrey Yong, that stress accumulated and turned into depression.
She felt physically and mentally "out of wack."
"Things were going downhill, like I couldn't get any better and I couldn't do anything to get out," said Yong. "I was frustrated with school and I didn't see any rewards when I was working hard. People bugged me. I was getting intolerant of certain people and I went off alone a lot."
Yong's story is common among UC Berkeley students. For a semester,
freshman Nick Livingston said he suffered from what he considered burnout.
"I felt like all the work I had been doing was pointless," said Livingston. "A lot of times, I felt like I had been cheated by the classes and the school."
But according to experts, burnout is sometimes a catch phrase for what might just be stress.
At the Tang Center, counseling psychologist Rick Low said he and his colleagues do not diagnose what is called "burnout" as burnout.
"Burnout is not an official label (for feeling overworked)," said Low. "(Students) may say, 'I'm stressed, I feel burned out,' but it's more of just a word we use to describe how students feel when they're overwhelmed."
Christina Maslach, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and author of the recently published book, "The Truth About Burnout," said sometimes burnout "is used as a synonym for stress."
"Burnout is a popular term and it's easy to apply to just having stress," said Maslach. "But burnout is actually something a lot more serious than people just being stressed from school." It is not simply a heavy workload that makes people feel burned out. Some people can work hours on end and be perfectly happy because they enjoy their job, explained Maslach. Actual burnout is a combination of exhaustion, depression and negative feelings about oneself. These symptoms are triggered by a "mismatch with the person and the social environment of the workplace," Maslach said.
This mismatch occurs more often in workplaces, where burnout takes a toll on worker morale and productivity, than at school.
"For example, one corporate lawyer may be unhappy with his work and experience burnout because his morals conflict with those of his company," said Maslach. "But another lawyer might work fine in that environment. It's not the fault of the company or the lawyer - it's just a mismatch."
However, students are also prone to many of the same pressures that trap burnout sufferers.
The lack of benefits despite putting in a lot of effort, such as what Yong and Livingston described, is just one cause of burnout. When people do not feel appreciated or receive rewards for hard work, they can become frustrated and this feeling, in combination with other "mismatches" in everyday life, can escalate into burnout.
"We probably can translate burnout to the student experience, but we have to see what the differences are also," said Maslach.
People who study burnout, Maslach said, are identifying a pattern of job stress that occurs primarily in people-oriented jobs, such as health-care, social service and certain aspects of the criminal justice system.
"With burnout, what we identify is a subcategory of stress," said Maslach. "It's unclear that kind of phenomenon is the same in students as in the workplace."
Rather than as the actual cause of a problem, Low described burnout as a symptom of many factors.
"Burnout can signal an imbalance in social life - too much school, being in too many courses, or not being challenged, like if a student is in the wrong major," said Low.
Although Low said signs of what may be considered burnout vary with each individual, they typically include fatigue, anxiety, loss of motivation, withdrawal from people, a sense of powerlessness and the feeling of being overwhelmed.
That is how Yong described her bout with stress and depression.
"Everything was out of control," said Yong.
Livingston also experienced total lack of motivation.
"I was unmotivated to go to school, to class. I felt like I was going through the motions, but the efforts weren't there anymore," said Livingston.
Low advises students to take note between feeling stressed and feeling burned out.
"Stress is fairly normal," said Low. "It's when we don't deal with stress effectively - when we don't have campus resources (or) friends to help us, when we get depleted, when our energy gets depleted - is when we feel burned out."
Since burnout is considered a catch phrase for stress, the Tang Center keeps no records of how many students come in complaining of symptoms that they think may be attributed to burnout.
Although burnout research started in the mid-'70s, said Maslach, there has been very little study about the possibility of student burnout.
"Student stress has been looked at (from) many different perspectives," said Maslach. "Just not student and burnout together."