Illustration: Eva van Schijndel
‘I had just started on the Master’s in Nutrition and Health when I noticed I was less and less motivated to study. I wasn’t too surprised at first as I had been working on my Bachelor’s thesis all summer. Altogether I had been studying and working with very few breaks for two years. So it is not so strange if you feel you’ve had enough for a while. But at one point I was sitting in a lecture and all I could think was: what am I doing here?
I hardly touched my books until exam time came. Suddenly I was terrified of failing. I sat studying from eight thirty in the morning till ten thirty at night, and I wanted to know everything down to the last detail. But if you study for 12 hours a day you stop taking anything in. At some point I started to cry because I realized I wasn’t going to make it. It was so important to me to have everything under control, and that wasn’t the case now.
One evening, just before Christmas, it all went wrong. I started to shake uncontrollably, I was nauseous and I thought I was going to throw up. That night the palpitations kept me awake. It was as if all the fuses in my body had blown. I had a horrible Christmas holiday. I just lay on the sofa like a sack of potatoes, I was irritable and oversensitive to light and sounds. I was hungry but I couldn’t swallow anything. It was clear to me that it wasn’t the flu; I felt ill in a different way than that.
‘Don’t ignore stress’
Wageningen student psychologists got 30 percent more requests for help in 2014 than in 2013. The increasing number of students with study-related problems such as stress was particularly striking. Continuous stress can lead to a burnout, says student psychologist Ineke Leenders. ‘If you ignore stress, the fuses can suddenly blow.’ Students with a burnout are often out of the running for a while. A handful of students in Wageningen have been advised to drop out for a while. The student psychologists help the students find out what lies behind their behaviour, and how they can break the hold of patterns.
The doctor said I had a burnout. I thought: I am only 23, surely I can work and study normally? It was good to get the diagnosis but I didn’t want to sit around at home for long. So after the Christmas holiday I carried on with my courses, cautiously and in consultation with the doctor and the dean. I assumed it wouldn’t take me long to recover, as long as I took things gently. That went well in period 3 but in period 4 I started to feel panicky if I looked at the timetable. Then I stayed at home again for a couple of weeks, although instead of taking it easy I started planning my internship and my thesis. Because of that things went wrong again in period 5. I couldn’t concentrate and I had attacks of trembling again. Then I made an appointment with the psychologist. It was all too much for me, and I couldn’t cope. With the psychologist I analysed the patterns in my thinking which make me believe I am not allowed to make any mistakes. I needed to learn to let go when things didn’t go the way I wanted them to. The psychologist asked me, what can go wrong? It’s not the end of the world if you fail an exam.
That was challenging for me. I had an ideal scenario in mind in which I was going to get my degree as fast as possible, and now I am a year behind. But I have learned to accept that. After all, what is one extra year in a whole life? The burnout was a very good life lesson for me. I am now 24 and I have already learned things about myself which will benefit me the rest of my life. I hope my story can help save other students from falling into the same trap. You don’t have to do everything at once, and it doesn’t all have to be perfect. You are at university to learn. About yourself above all.’