Gifted Kid Burnout: Feeling Your Cognition Come Grinding to a Halt

There isn’t much question about it at this point in time: gifted kid burnout is a real epidemic affecting the youth of today. Not to name names, but I happen to know some people extremely close to me who can feel the burnout taking them by the shoulders and winding up to swing them into the sun—more or less.

What is gifted kid burnout? There is some debate about the topic. Most people assume that gifted kids are just too pressured to put in effort and begin to feel like they can’t live up to expectations. While, yes, that’s part of it, let me explain further:

Gifted kid burnout is being in third grade but reading at a college level. But once you’re in college, you can’t seem to sit and focus on any form of writing. The words on the pages begin to bleed together and create an alphabet soup of mismatched letters and symbols. Your new Stephen King novel lies on your desk, collecting dust. The books you pulled from your shelves at home now sit on your nightstand, waiting for you to give them the attention you promised them back in August. Your assigned readings pile up on Canvas and flash harsh red text across your screen. They keep multiplying and you can’t even decide where to begin.

Gifted kid burnout is completing those sheets of math questions in elementary school faster than everyone else but being unable to solve any kind of equation without counting along on your fingers when you’re in your twenties. You once were able to put numbers together in any way, shape, or form that was thrown at you, and now they swarm around your head, biting at your ears and clawing at your hair. You try to block out the noise so you can simply add two figures together, but there’s too much information in your head and not enough room and you can’t even move your arms without accidentally triggering memories of all the times you cried over math problems before.

Gifted kid burnout is participating all class period, every class period when you’re young, but struggling to find the energy to raise your hand when you’re older. You know the answer—it was written on page 368 of volume three of your favorite book series from when you were younger, yet there’s no motivation to raise your hand and inform others of the fact. You let someone else speak in class because the idea of opening your mouth to say two words to a room full of your peers is horrifying. You start to wonder when that version of you—the one who raised their hand and called out answers, loud and proud—disappeared and never looked back.

Gifted kid burnout is helping other students all through elementary school but being unable to ask for help in higher education. It isn’t so much that you’re embarrassed—who hasn’t needed to ask for help before?—but more so that you don’t know how to ask. And thinking about it now, there’s a lot that you don’t know how to do.

Because simply put, being a gifted kid is being presented with the idea that your intelligence sets you apart and makes things easier. And this may be true. You may have coasted through school simply by relying on your raw wit and intelligence. You may have been the smartest student in every class you had in high school.

But what happens when groups of gifted kids go to the same school and realize that they were all told that their intelligence makes them different? That they all were set apart from the rest of their peers, and that they were the smartest person in a room?

Gifted. Kid. Burnout.

And so it goes. You look around at what your peers are doing in college, and you realize how far you’ve fallen back. Your social skills are stunted, thanks to your brainy personality growing up. Your studying processes are nonexistent—the noise in your head is always too distracting from the fact that you need to take in new information.

That’s the biggest bitch of it all. You are physically unable to take in anything else; whatever kind of sponge your brain used to resemble, it’s calcified into a lump inside your skull that simply adds to the pressure that already beats against your temples.

You do your best. You go to class, try to act like you’ve got it together. You do your assignments and get good grades. Yet you still feel like there’s something wrong with yourself. You feel like there’s something you’re just not getting; like everyone else is in on some big secret and you get ostracized every time.

But again. You can feel it. That burnt-out, clawing-your-way-across-the-desert-sands-in-search-of-water desperate kind of feeling. It’s still distant, still standing far away, watching menacingly. But it’s there, and you know it’s there.

What can do you to combat it? There isn’t much. You can only hope that the motivation will come to you, but the only motivation is the fear that you could backslide so far that you drop out of college and owe thousands of dollars in debt.

Fear has never been an amazing motivator—look at the Catholic Church. It only leads to more fear. When a gifted kid fears repercussions in their academic career, it only leads to fear of repercussions in their professional career. And, honestly, what employer is looking for a person who crumbles at the idea of a deadline and cowers at the thought of standing at the front of a room?

Yes, gifted kids have been spoiled their entire lives by being told that they are worth more than those around them. They’ve been spoiled by being forced into a superiority complex that, no matter how much they try to break out of it, they always think their work can be better. They think they can create something that blows everything else out of the water. They think they can pick the world up and balance it on their shoulders without breaking a sweat.

But come on. Every gifted kid read Percy Jackson. We know the weight of the world is too heavy for anyone’s shoulders. But we pick ourselves up and create what we can anyway.