Other people have found ways to fight the burnout before it strikes.

Brown crafted her "back to basics" philosophy the week before Thanksgiving.

"I had a realization that I was miserable. I had overextended myself," she says.

So she figured out what was important to her and went ahead with her "three-pronged attack on life," which focuses on classes, relaxation and one important activity. As long as additional time-consumers don't get in the way of these three items, she can do them.

Brown says the plan is her method of keeping burnout out of her life and enjoying her time at Harvard.

"A lot of my friends, especially with their academics, get so overwhelmed they can't break out of it," she says. "I've seen people that have done one activity for a very long time, leave and then have nothing to fall back on."

Firestarter

A difficult class or just one intense activity won't usually break a student. But when numerous different sources draw heavily on students' time, problems arise.

Ducey and the other psychologists at the Bureau of Study Counsel have studied patterns of burnout among students.

Burnout happens, Ducey writes, when what students have to do overwhelms the resources they have to deal with them.

"These resources help us to make decisions about what we want or need to do, solve problems, plan for the future, and so on," Ducey writes.

He adds that some pressure is stimulating, but when they face too much, students sometimes just give up. Some students' tendency to just sleep or drop out of activities when they are burned out is symptomatic of another cause of burnout: long-term inability to adapt to rising challenges.

"Burnout basically means surrendering in the face of defeat, giving up on even continuing to try," Ducey writes.

Other sources of stress come from below the surface.

"These remote causes often involve a sense of feeling emotionally neglected or abused or mistreated in childhood and/or in current life, in ways that may still be unconscious to the student," Ducey adds.

'Tis the Season

Every member of the Bureau of Study Counsel staff has been booked solid for the past few weeks, and Ducey says they will continue to be busy for the duration of the semester.