How To Deal with Study Burnout

By dave goldstein

Pretty much everyone who’s ever studied for the GMAT for more than a few months has complained about study burnout at some point. It’s a real thing that we often help students navigate, but one that’s also widely misunderstood. The conventional wisdom is that you have a certain amount of mental reserve that gets drained over time. Eventually it hits zero and burnout sets in, as if it’s a tank that can simply be emptied.

This is a compelling and plausible-sounding narrative. It’s also totally wrong.

Think about it this way: when was the last time you felt burnout from, say, speaking? Or engaging in some sort of recreation, like a weekly basketball game? Or doing some kind of daily routine, like brushing your teeth?

That notion, of course, is absurd. The question then is: why don’t these other daily tasks burn us out? The complexity and actual energy required to do any of these tasks is often greater than that required to do 20 quant questions.

So if we’re not depleting some finite store of mental energy, then what on earth is actually happening? The feeling of burnout is powerful and unpleasant. It’s not something we’re imagining. The causes are simply harder to pinpoint.

So, here’s my theory.

When we say that we’re burned out, here’s what we’re actually saying:

I am emotionally exhausted and want to spare myself additional psychological discomfort.

Put another way, we’re tired of sacrificing enjoyable aspects of our lives—time with loved ones and time doing fun activities—so that we can do an activity that isn’t giving us the results we want.

And while this is very understandable and fundamentally human, it’s also relatively easy to address. The answer isn’t to summon some newfound reserves so we can keep plodding through an agonizing process. It’s to make the process less agonizing.

Here’s how.

1. Don’t Sacrifice Your Well-Being to Study

This is a cardinal rule when it comes to standardized exams to help keep study burnout at bay. If you’re giving up sleep, socializing, or exercise, you’re going about this all wrong. All of the things that make life worth living are also beneficial to performance on exams.

So prioritize taking care of yourself. Study time is not allowed to cut into self-care time. Period.

2. Replace the Things That Don’t Make You Happy with Study Time

How much of your day is spent online, doomscrolling through content that makes you anxious?

If you’re like most adults, a lot.

That’s what you want to replace with study time. Now you can go to the gym, hang out with friends, get enough sleep, and study, all without steeping yourself in the digital stew that naturally burns us out.

3. Do Shorter Study Sessions

Concise, consistent sessions are more effective and beneficial than marathons. The student who crams in 15 hours each weekend is going to make less progress—and be far more miserable—than the student who does short, productive sessions throughout the week.

You don’t need to study more than two hours per day, ideally broken into two sessions. Hopefully, you don’t have to give up any important part of your life to do that.

4. Don’t Let Perfection Be the Enemy of the Good

Don’t have two hours a day? It’s still better to do 30 minutes a few times a week than nothing. Just make those sessions high-impact.

Here are some exercises I recommend to my students who are really pressed for time:

• Click through old practice exams. Rather than solving the questions, think about how you’d set up each question and what tools might be most effective in a given situation. The idea is to hone pattern recognition without straining yourself.
• Take out a blank sheet of paper and jot down the most useful takeaways you can think of. They can be reminders about how to solve certain kinds of questions or strategic considerations about timing.
• Pick two topics and do three to four questions in each; rotate the topics so that you cover every topic within a two-week period.

All of these exercises are high-impact. None take more than 5–10 minutes.

5. Change Your Study Location

Multiple studies have confirmed that when we study in multiple locations, we retain more. Anecdotally, I find that students who vary where they work tend to feel more refreshed than students who slog away in a single place.

So if you’re feeling burned out, shorten those sessions and alter where you do them.

6. Reward Yourself

When you start studying, short-term motivation is easy. If I do well, I can get into a good MBA program and unlock a new life and career!

Once you’ve been working for a few months, those longer-term goals can feel more abstract, so find a motivation that’s more concrete to help combat that study burnout.

Researcher Katy Milkman recommends a technique called “temptation bundling.” The concept is simple: you reward yourself for completing an activity you’re not looking forward to so that your brain connects the action with the reward.

Right now, there is a homemade brownie at the edge of my desk. When I finish this essay, I’m going to eat it. I’ve been doing this for a few days. Tomorrow, when I sit down to edit, my silly reptilian brain is going to think, “Essay = brownie. Huzzah!”

Instant motivation!

7. Make Adjustments

When we study and see improvement, it’s easy to keep going and create a virtuous cycle of progress and motivation. Success leads to motivation, which leads to more success, which leads to even more motivation.

When we stop seeing improvement, that’s when we’re likely to associate our work time with unpleasant emotions and feel tempted to stop.

So if you hit a plateau, don’t keep doing the same thing.

Maybe it means tweaking your timing strategy on practice exams. Maybe it means rededicating yourself to mastering a few topics that throw you for a loop.

Finally, maybe it means considering another exam. Every major MBA program accepts both the GRE and the GMAT, and many are willing to accept the Executive Assessment. Sometimes, when a student is burned out on one exam, switching to another gets them right back on track.

Last thoughts on study burnout

If you’re feeling burned out, your study reserves haven’t been depleted; you’re simply tired of an unpleasant regimen.

The best way to address that is to change it up. Use some, or all, of the tips just mentioned to make your regimen a more pleasant, sustainable one.