How To Prevent Burnout While Working On Your Master’s Degree

Here’s how to stay well.

Researched, written by Amber & The Team
Updated on May 19, 2023

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Student life is filled with discovery and adventure, but it’s also scary and quite challenging for your mental health and general well-being. Plus, if you’re the ambitious type, who likes to take more on your plate, you may suffer from burnout.

The tricky part with burnout is that it disguises itself as procrastination or lack of focus until it’s too late to look for mild solutions. So, if you are working on your master’s degree but can’t seem to pull yourself together enough to write two words on your paper, you may be heading down the wrong path.

However, there are a few personal development tips and tricks you can use to pull yourself out of this situation and grow into a more well-adjusted person. Plus, these tricks will come in handy every time you feel burnout creeping back into your life.

Be Compassionate Towards Yourself

Would you ever speak to a friend or even an acquaintance the way you speak to yourself? In most cases, the answer is “God, no!”.

We tend to be extremely negative and aggressive even when we talk to ourselves (whether we realize it or not). For instance, if you don’t manage to do the amount of work you want during the day, you may feel disappointed in yourself and even say, “I was way too lazy today! This won’t do; starting tomorrow, you have to pull your weight around here!”

You may even go as far as punishing yourself by cutting out rewards (“No sweets for you! or No breaks until you finish this!”).

All these actions bring negativity into your life and bring down your morale. On the other hand, if you show a bit of compassion and cut yourself some slack, you’ll start to see improvements. Furthermore, you may discover that motivation comes and goes, and sometimes you may have to use tricks to bring it back. And that’s OK.

Set Clear, Achievable Goals

You probably hear this all the time, to the point where it gets frustrating. And yet, you’re always behind goals, or you ditch them all together once you realize just how unrealistic they are. If this is the case, it’s time to polish your skills on how to set achievable goals. It takes a bit of learning and some data gathering, but you’ll be happy you took the time.

Here’s how it would look in real life:

Let’s say you want to complete your online master’s degree in emergency & security studies in three months.
Go through your checklist and see if this is an achievable goal considering your other daily and weekly engagements.
Make sure to leave some room for yourself to avoid getting burnt out.
Follow your checklist and adjust it if needed.

Identify and Eliminate Bad Habits

We all have one or two habits we’d like to part with, but they always seem to find their way back into our lives. Most often than not, this happens because we don’t take the time to understand why we have that habit.

For instance, if you often find yourself putting off big projects, it may be because you don’t like feeling overwhelmed. So, you procrastinate instead. Once you realize this, it’s easy to come up with a solution that will help with your personal and professional growth down the line.

Of course, things are never easy when it comes to habits, so you have to be compassionate towards yourself and set achievable goals when it comes to building new habits.

Wrap Up

Your master’s degree journey is unique and challenging, but you can decide what, when, and where. If you decide you want to achieve your master’s degree in a specified time interval, it is up to you to see this goal through. Just like it’s up to you to take care of your emotional health while you’re on this journey. Stay well!