Covid-19 and Burnout

Hi, this is Dr. Jameca Cooper, and today we're going to talk about burnout during the pandemic. Many of my patients suffer from extreme burnout in the past 12 months, and it's directly a result of COVID-19 or social distance, and restrictions placed on us just to keep us all safe. So let's talk about some of the areas where parents are experiencing burnout. Many of them are now working from home, so they're sitting in front of their computer, laptop, tablet, phone for hours at a time. Sometimes 6 hours, sometimes 8 hours, sometimes 10 hours a day from meeting to meeting in addition to doing their other work. So parents are stressed out just based on those virtual meetings and the new factor of watching all of your co-workers and seeing their face on your screen all day. I'm guessing that you're required to show your face and have your screens on, so if that's the case, that could be quite stressful and it could contribute to burnout because now you can feel like the pressure is on you, all eyes are on you. So parents are stressed as a result of the Zoom meetings and the virtual work environments. Parents are also stressed because they are now managing the schedules and virtual learning of their children. This can be very stressful if you have children in the K-12 age range, but if you have school-aged children under middle school, it can be extremely difficult because now, in addition to having the role of a parent, you have become their homeschool teacher. For the past 12 months and maybe even going forward for some of you over the next few months. So let's just imagine that you have a second grader and now the second grader comes to you and says, "Oh, I need help doing this type of math." Um, if you're like me, then you learned that math so many years ago you don't even recall how to do it, but now you're being tasked with the responsibility of having to help your child figure out their math problems in addition to, and maybe simultaneously with, doing your own work from home. So these can be things that are really adding to the stress levels of parents and making them feel even more burned out. One of the other areas that has caused concern for parents during the pandemic is the lack of social interaction for parents, individuals working from home. So pre-COVID, you would get in your car, go to work, and interact with your co-workers. Maybe some in the morning before you start working, maybe some during your coffee break and lunchtime, and maybe some as the day goes on. But now you simply go to your desk or your office in your home, log in. That's how you begin work. You don't really have any opportunity to interact with your co-workers because you are directly into a meeting and directly off the meeting. There's no virtual way to build in a coffee break for most people, so that has definitely also contributed to the levels of burnout for many working individuals or those who are working from home. When I think about students who are also experiencing burnout, I'm really focusing on the K-12 students because I think college students have a different level of burnout for different reasons. But the K-12 students are suffering burnout because all of the screen time that they now have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. So pre-COVID, they were in schools face-to-face, looking at their peers in the rooms with them and the teacher, also maybe going outside for recess, also interacting with their peers maybe on a bus ride to school or coming and going from school. But now They're sitting in front of the screens for hours at a time, 6 to 8 hours a day. They don't have any built-in virtual time to interact with their peers, and that can be very difficult for them. If you think back on your own lives when you were growing up, elementary school, middle school, a big part of why you were excited about going to school was being able to interact with your peers. And so students for the past 12 months have not had that opportunity, and that has really impacted their mental health. Many of those students complain about feeling more depressed. They've also complained about feeling more anxious. And for some of them, you see some behaviors such as acting out, being more oppositional, getting in trouble more, not following rules. And maybe you could also see things like their grades slipping. The pandemic has been really difficult for students, and not having interaction with their peers has directly contributed to how they feel and their motivation for, for school and for overall learning. One of the other areas that has contributed to burnout for students has been the lack of sunlight, because if you're in your home all day and on the screen 6 to 8 hours a day, then you're also not going outside and getting physical activity. So the, the lack of sunlight would contribute to having less vitamin D, and less vitamin D could impact your sleep as well as your mood. So students could have their mood impacted by simply not getting enough sunlight. Um, this directly ties into students not also getting enough physical activity because pre-COVID they were in schools and maybe having a physical education class, and now they don't have it in the same ways. And even if they do have physical education classes virtually, it's very different, and the expectation of physical activity would be very different. So many students are not able to get the activity by walking, running, jumping, and interacting with their peers that they would have had pre-COVID. So all of these things would directly contribute to the burnout that students will feel during the pandemic. So today, let's review some of the areas that we've covered. We've talked about why parents are experiencing burnout during the pandemic, and we've also talked a little bit about why students are experiencing burnout during the pandemic. If you're interested in more tips about the pandemic and burnout, please tune in and please subscribe to this channel.