Article
Authors: Klarisa Mullameti (University of Salford) , Jamie Gillman (University of Salford)
This study explored how undergraduate students experience academic burnout within a culture of continuous self-improvement. While burnout is often examined through quantitative models of workload and stress, less is known about how students subjectively interpret these pressures and their psychological impact. A qualitative design was employed using reflexive thematic analysis within a contextualist epistemology. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight female undergraduate students aged between 19–22 years from the University of Salford. Three themes were created: Living in Constant Academic Overload, When Achievement Becomes Self-Worth, and Coping with Burnout in Unequal Ways. Findings indicated that burnout was experienced through the interaction of structural overload, internalised perfectionistic standards, and unequal access to support. Academic pressure extended beyond workload, becoming closely tied to identity, self-worth, and difficulties disengaging from productivity. Coping was shaped not only by individual strategies but also by institutional responsiveness and relational support. The study contributes to psychology and counselling literature by addressing a gap in qualitative understanding of undergraduate burnout within self-improvement culture. The findings suggest universities should adopt more systemic wellbeing strategies, including balanced assessment structures and psychologically informed support systems, to reduce student distress and prevent burnout.
Keywords: academic burnout, undergraduate students, thematic analysis, student wellbeing, counselling psychology
How to Cite: Mullameti, K. & Gillman, J. (2026) “A Thematic Analysis of Academic Burnout Among Undergraduates in a Culture of Continuous Self-Improvement”, SalfordPsych: The Salford Open Journal of Psychology. 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.57898/SalfordPsych.436
In recent decades, the psychological wellbeing of university students has become an increasingly prominent concern within higher education and mental health research. While university has traditionally been regarded as a period of intellectual development, identity exploration, and personal growth, contemporary evidence suggests it is also characterised by heightened stress, academic pressure, and emotional strain, with rising levels of anxiety, depression, and stress-related difficulties reported among students (Keles et al., 2020; Yusufov et al., 2019). Within this context, academic burnout has emerged as a significant construct reflecting the cumulative psychological impact of prolonged academic demands and characterised by emotional exhaustion, cynicism towards study, and reduced academic efficacy (Schaufeli et al., 2002).
Academic burnout is typically conceptualised as a multidimensional syndrome comprising emotional exhaustion, cynicism, or detachment from academic work, and reduced academic efficacy (Schaufeli et al., 2002). These dimensions contribute to declines in academic performance and psychological wellbeing (May et al., 2015). However, this conceptualisation has been criticised for oversimplifying burnout by reducing it to measurable symptoms, potentially obscuring the subjective and contextual nature of students’ experiences (Mufarrih et al., 2024; Prentice et al., 2023).
Academic burnout does not occur in isolation but is embedded within broader sociocultural contexts that shape how students perceive and respond to academic demands (Jacobs & Dodd, 2003). Contemporary cultural discourses emphasise self-improvement and individual responsibility (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019; Gill & Orgad, 2018). Furthermore, educational competition and market-based expectations surrounding skill and talent may shape how achievement and success are understood (Brown & Tannock, 2009). Such expectations may encourage individuals to interpret difficulties as personal shortcomings rather than recognise wider structural pressures (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019; Gill & Orgad, 2018). In this context, these cultural pressures provide a broader framework for understanding how undergraduate students experience academic demands and burnout (Aguayo et al., 2019; Jacobs & Dodd, 2003).
While such narratives may encourage ambition, they can also intensify self-surveillance, fear of failure, and internalised pressure (Foucault, 1977; Gill & Orgad, 2018). Perfectionism provides insight into this phenomenon and is characterised by excessively high standards and critical self-evaluation when those standards are not met (Frost et al., 1990; Hewitt & Flett, 1991). Evidence suggests that socially prescribed and self-oriented perfectionism has increased among younger generations (Curran & Hill, 2019), reflecting broader shifts towards competitive individualism and high-performance standards (Brown & Tannock, 2009; Han, 2017). From this perspective, burnout may reflect not only excessive workload but also internalised expectations regarding success, productivity, and self-worth (Maslach et al., 2001; Schaufeli et al., 2002). Understanding burnout therefore requires consideration of both structural demands and the cultural meanings attached to achievement (Maslach & Leiter, 2016).
Burnout also has practical relevance given ongoing concerns regarding student mental health. While universities increasingly recognise the importance of supporting wellbeing, interventions often focus on individual strategies such as stress management and resilience-building. Although beneficial, such approaches may overlook broader cultural and structural contributors to distress (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019; Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009; Gill & Orgad, 2018). Research on self-compassion suggests that a more compassionate relationship with oneself may buffer against stress and burnout (Neff, 2011), yet such strategies may have limited impact within environments that emphasise constant achievement and self-optimisation. By exploring how students experience and interpret these pressures, the present study aims to develop a more comprehensive understanding of burnout that integrates both individual and contextual perspectives.
Existing research consistently identifies academic burnout as a significant concern among undergraduates, linking it to lower engagement, poorer attainment, and diminished psychological wellbeing (May et al., 2015; Schaufeli et al., 2002). However, the literature remains divided in how burnout is conceptualised. While psychometric approaches have strengthened reliability by operationalising burnout through exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy, critics argue that this framing risks individualising what may be a socially and culturally produced form of distress (Maslach & Leiter, 2016; Prentice et al., 2023). Undergraduate burnout may therefore reflect not only academic strain but also broader expectations surrounding success, worth, and self-management.
A key structural explanation is offered through the Study Demands–Resources (SD-R) model, adapted from the Job Demands–Resources framework (Demerouti et al., 2001). Research consistently demonstrates that excessive workload, deadline intensity, and performance pressure predict emotional exhaustion, while institutional support, autonomy, and academic self-efficacy function as protective resources (Jagodics & Szabó, 2023). However, the model is less effective in explaining why similar demands are experienced differently across students, suggesting the need to consider subjective interpretations of academic demands rather than demands as objective features alone.
The perfectionism literature extends this structural account of burnout. Studies consistently show that maladaptive perfectionistic concerns, particularly fear of mistakes, self-criticism, and socially prescribed standards, are more strongly associated with burnout than adaptive striving dimensions (Curran & Hill, 2019; Zhang et al., 2007). For example, Garratt-Reed et al. (2018) found that repetitive negative thinking partially mediated the relationship between perfectionistic concerns and burnout, suggesting that the psychological processing of demands may be as significant as the demands themselves. Internalized standards may therefore function as demand amplifiers, transforming manageable expectations into chronic emotional burden.
While perfectionism research offers a stronger account of internal pressure, much of it still locates burnout within individual personality processes. Sociocultural studies complicate this view by arguing that perfectionistic tendencies are shaped by wider cultural conditions. To illustrate, Gill and Orgad (2018) suggest that neoliberal cultures position individuals as responsible for perpetual self-optimisation, while Han (2017) argues that achievement societies encourage individuals to become both the labourer and overseer of the self. Evidence of rising perfectionism among younger generations suggests that burnout may reflect the internalisation of intensified cultural expectations around performance, employability, and visible productivity (Curran & Hill, 2019).
This sociocultural framing is particularly relevant within undergraduate settings, where academic success is increasingly intertwined with employability narratives, extracurricular performance, and digital comparison cultures (Aguayo et al., 2019; Brown & Tannock, 2009). While SD-R literature conceptualises demands primarily as workload-based, this broader perspective suggests students may experience pressure through expectations of continuous self-maximisation. In this sense, the demand is not simply the assignment deadline itself, but what it symbolises in relation to future success, identity, and social comparison.
Qualitative studies provide further support for this interpretation. Students often describe burnout through cycles of compulsive overwork, guilt during rest, withdrawal, and self-blame, indicating that productivity becomes tied to identity and self-worth (Jacobs & Dodd, 2003; Prentice et al., 2023). Unlike survey-based research, these studies reveal how burnout may be experienced as a failure of the self rather than simply a consequence of excessive workload. However, although academic burnout has been widely investigated, much of the literature centres on medicine, nursing, and other professional degree programmes, leaving a relative lack of qualitative research exploring how cultures of continuous self-improvement influence burnout experiences across the general undergraduate population (Mufarrih et al., 2024; Curran & Hill, 2019; Gill & Orgad, 2018).
Despite extensive research on academic burnout, there remains a lack of qualitative studies exploring undergraduate experiences within the context of continuous self-improvement culture. Existing literature has largely focused on predictors and outcomes through quantitative methodologies, potentially overlooking the subjective meanings and sociocultural influences that shape these experiences (Maslach & Leiter, 2017; Willig, 2013). Furthermore, much of the available qualitative research focuses on high-pressure populations such as medical students, limiting its relevance to the wider undergraduate population (Dyrbye et al., 2006; Sverdlik et al., 2018).
Therefore, this study addresses this gap through a qualitative approach using thematic analysis to explore undergraduate students lived experiences of burnout. By prioritising participants’ voices and meaning-making processes, the research aims to generate contextually grounded insights into how burnout is experienced and understood. Such insights may contribute to psychology and inform more nuanced approaches to supporting student wellbeing in higher education. By bringing SD-R, perfectionism, and sociocultural achievement literature into dialogue, this study offers a more integrated account of undergraduate burnout (Curran & Hill, 2019; Demerouti et al., 2001; Gill & Orgad, 2018). It may also help universities reconsider interventions focused solely on resilience and time management by highlighting how institutional cultures can reproduce the very pressures they seek to alleviate (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019; Ecclestone & Hayes, 2009).
Taken together, the overarching aim of this study is to explore how undergraduate students experience academic burnout within a culture of continuous self-improvement. This aim is addressed through the following research questions:
How do undergraduate students interpret and experience pressures to continuously improve and achieve?
In what ways do these pressures contribute to experiences of academic burnout?
How do students describe the emotional and psychological impact of burnout?
What meanings do students attach to their experiences of coping and support?
These questions are intended to facilitate an in-depth exploration of subjective experiences, allowing themes to be developed inductively from the data. In doing so, the study aims to contribute to both theoretical and applied understandings of academic burnout and support the development of more balanced approaches to student wellbeing.
The present study adopted a qualitative research design to explore undergraduate students’ experiences of academic burnout within a culture of continuous self-improvement. A qualitative approach was considered most appropriate because the study sought to examine subjective experiences, meaning-making processes, and the influence of sociocultural context. Unlike quantitative methodologies, which prioritise measurement and generalisability, qualitative research facilitates an in-depth exploration of how individuals interpret and construct meaning around their experiences (Willig, 2013). This aligns with the study’s aim of understanding how students make sense of academic pressure and burnout rather than measuring prevalence or identifying causal relationships.
The study was underpinned by a contextualist epistemological stance (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2021). Contextualism acknowledges both the reality of participants’ experiences and the influence of broader social and cultural contexts in shaping them. This position was relevant given the study’s focus on burnout as both an individual psychological experience and a phenomenon situated within wider cultural narratives of productivity, achievement, and continuous self-improvement.
Reflexive thematic analysis (TA), as outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006, 2021), was employed as the method of data analysis. TA is a theoretically flexible approach that enables the identification and interpretation of patterns of shared meaning across a dataset while remaining compatible with a range of epistemological positions. Its flexibility allowed exploration of participants’ experiences alongside the contextual influences shaping them.
TA was selected because it supports the exploration of shared patterns across participants while retaining sensitivity to individual meaning-making. In contrast, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) focuses on detailed idiographic exploration of individual lived experience and typically employs smaller, highly homogeneous samples (Smith et al., 2021). Although IPA may have generated deeper insight into individual cases, it would have limited broader pattern identification across the dataset.
Discourse analysis (DA) was also considered. While DA offers valuable insight into how language constructs social reality, it is less concerned with participants’ experiential and emotional realities (Willig, 2013). As the present study prioritised subjective experience and psychological meaning, TA was considered the most appropriate methodological approach.
Consistent with Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2021) framework, themes were understood as actively created through the researcher’s engagement with the data rather than passively emerging from it. This emphasis on reflexivity acknowledges the researcher’s role in knowledge production and aligns closely with the interpretative aims of the study. Although TA has been criticised for its flexibility and potential lack of methodological coherence if applied inconsistently, it remains particularly well suited to generating rich and nuanced accounts of complex psychological experiences when conducted rigorously (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
Eight undergraduate students participated in the study. All participants were female and aged between 19 and 22 years. Participants were enrolled at the University based in the North West of the UK and recruited from a range of undergraduate programmes, although specific degree programmes are not reported to preserve anonymity. Opportunity and snowball sampling strategies were employed. Initial participants were recruited through the researcher’s personal and academic networks and were subsequently invited to recommend others who may have been interested in taking part (Noy, 2008).
Inclusion criteria required participants to be undergraduate students aged 18 years or over, currently enrolled at university, and sufficiently proficient in English to participate in an in-depth interview. A sample of eight participants was considered appropriate for qualitative research prioritising depth and richness of data over statistical representation (Braun & Clarke, 2021).
Data were collected by the first author through semi-structured one-to-one interviews. This method was chosen for its flexibility, allowing participants to discuss their experiences in their own words while ensuring that topics relevant to the research questions were explored (Kallio et al., 2016). Interview questions were informed by literature on burnout, wellbeing, perfectionism, and continuous self-improvement. Questions were open-ended and designed to encourage detailed reflection on participants’ experiences. Interviews were conducted either in person or online according to participant preference. In-person interviews took place in private rooms within the Allerton Building at the University of Salford, while online interviews were conducted via Microsoft Teams. Interviews lasted approximately 30–40 minutes and were audio-recorded with consent.
Recordings were transcribed by the first author using Microsoft Word’s transcription function and manually checked against the original recordings to ensure accuracy. Transcripts were produced verbatim to preserve participants’ language and maintain the richness of the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
Ethical approval was obtained through the University of Salford Institutional ethics panel before data collection (Ref: 2025-10326-12254). Individuals received study information, provided informed consent, and were informed of their right to withdraw during the interview or within one week afterwards without penalty.
Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2021) six-phase framework. The first author first familiarised themselves with the data through repeated reading and note-taking. Initial codes were then created through systematic manual coding of meaningful segments of text. An inductive approach was adopted, allowing codes to be developed from the data rather than imposed from pre-existing theoretical frameworks.
Codes were subsequently organised into potential themes, which were reviewed and refined to ensure coherence and consistency across the dataset. Themes were then defined and integrated into the final report alongside illustrative extracts and relevant literature. Throughout the analytical process, a reflexive stance was maintained, acknowledging the researcher’s role in shaping interpretation and theme development. The second author who was not involved in the original data collection or analysis took the role as a “critical friend”. In this capacity, the second author who holds a PhD and has expertise in qualitative research provided ongoing critical feedback throughout the data analysis by reviewing codes, the themes created, and the interpretations made from the data. The second author acted as an impartial sounding board and this process aimed to mitigate individual researcher bias.
The researcher held a personal interest in academic burnout and shared a similar educational context to the participants. While this positioning may have facilitated rapport, it also introduced the possibility of assumptions influencing interpretation. To address this, the researcher engaged in ongoing reflexive practice throughout the study. A reflective journal was maintained to document assumptions, reactions, and developing interpretations during both data collection and analysis. This process encouraged reflection on how personal experiences and values may shape the research process. Particular attention was paid to assumptions regarding productivity, achievement, and continuous self-improvement due to their relevance to the research topic. Maintaining a reflexive stance throughout the study helped enhance the credibility, transparency, and rigour of the analysis (Finlay, 2002). Finally, the role of the second author allowed for researcher triangulation to ensure quality of the data by helping to mitigate any potential biases in the first authors data analysis.
Three overarching themes were created from the reflexive thematic analysis that captured shared patterns of meaning across the eight undergraduate participants’ accounts of academic burnout within a culture of continuous self-improvement. These themes were: (1) Living in Constant Academic Overload, (2) When Achievement Becomes Self-Worth, and (3) Coping with Burnout in Unequal Ways. Collectively, these themes address how students interpreted pressures to continuously achieve, how such pressures contributed to burnout, the wider emotional and psychological consequences of these experiences, and the meanings participants attached to coping and support.
Figure 1
Thematic Map of Academic Burnout in a Culture of Continuous Self-Improvement.
The first theme captured how burnout was rooted in students’ experience of persistent academic saturation, where university demands were experienced not as isolated stressors but as a continuous and escalating cycle. Across participants, academic pressure was primarily understood through deadline compression and temporal pressure, work–study conflict and continuous cognitive load, and an institutional culture that normalised sustained overload and contributed to motivational fatigue and disengagement.
A dominant feature across the participants was the repeated experience of multiple deadlines occurring within the same narrow period, often described as overwhelming and difficult to manage. Participants consistently referred to assessments “all due in the same week” (Participant 4), “too many deadlines to meet” (Participant 8), or assignments and exams occurring “on the same day” (Participant 1). This temporal compression was experienced as more than poor scheduling; analytically, it represented a structural condition through which burnout was intensified.
The shared meaning underpinning these accounts was the sense that time itself became hostile, with students experiencing university as a succession of crisis points rather than a paced learning process. Several participants explicitly linked this structure to emotional exhaustion, describing the workload as follows:
Tremendously high… you feel like you can never get through it all before it keeps piling on top of you, and it can feel very suffocating… even if you have an organised plan, it can fall apart because you also have a personal life and work. (Participant 5)
Similarly, another participant reflected on the intensity of clustered deadlines, stating that “there was so many assignments due in the same month… it was just so much to do… because it was back-to-back, I had to do it back-to-back… and that’s where I got overwhelmed” (Participant 3).These accounts suggest that burnout was not solely produced by the volume of work, but by how academic time was institutionally organised. This directly addresses research questions 1 and 2, demonstrating how students interpreted pressure as embedded within university structures and how this organisation of time contributed to burnout experiences.
For many participants, academic overload was intensified by competing external roles, particularly employment, commuting, caregiving, and placement demands. Several students described managing part-time or full-time work alongside study, with one participant explaining that balancing both was:
Quite hard, especially when you have assignments due, and you also have work at the same time… I would be doing my assignment at work, I’ll literally be doing it in my brain kind of thing, so it distracts me from work as well. (Participant 8)
Another participant similarly described feeling overwhelmed, noting that because they:
Balance out work and other parts of my life, it’s hard to keep up with everything… I had to do revision and the assignment at the same time, so my brain couldn’t focus on two things at once, and I was up all night with no sleep. (Participant 1)
Importantly, these demands extended beyond practical time constraints into continuous cognitive occupation. Burnout emerged through the inability to mentally disengage, with academic tasks remaining psychologically present even during periods designated for rest. Participant 2 captured this by stating that even while relaxing with family, they felt they:
Shouldn’t be because I’m like, oh, I need to be doing something with my assignments or academically… I tend to withdraw from going out with my friends or seeing my family because I’m like, no, I should be sitting at home revising or doing something more productive . (Participant 2)
Suggesting that rest itself became psychologically contaminated by academic obligation. The significance of this pattern lies in the way burnout appeared as a collapse of boundaries between productivity and personal life. Rather than pressure being limited to formal study hours, participants described a totalising experience in which university permeated everyday life, reducing opportunities for recovery.
A further dimension of overload concerned the gradual shift from effort to motivational depletion. Participant 4 described long-form assignments as:
Very boring and monotonous and you just feel you need to push yourself the whole way because it’s difficult to motivate yourself… it gets very tiring having to do the same thing all day every day when it’s not overly exciting, it’s quite boring. (Participant 4)
Highlighting how repetition and lack of stimulation reduced sustained engagement. The analytic importance of this lies in how burnout was experienced not only as exhaustion, but as a progressive erosion of meaningful engagement with learning. Rather than simple “lack of motivation,” these accounts suggest a broader disengagement from the academic role itself. This aligns strongly with the study’s focus on burnout as a lived experience, illustrating how sustained overload altered participants’ relationship with study from one of aspiration to one of endurance.
The second theme captures how academic burnout was intensified through the internalisation of achievement as a measure of personal worth. Across the dataset, pressure was rarely framed as purely external, instead participants described a deep fusion between grades, identity, family expectation, and self-evaluation.
A striking cross-participant pattern was the expectation that success must be consistently exceptional. Participant 1 explicitly described “I need a first in every assignment “while describing a strong fear of imperfection, explaining “I have a need to be perfect for everything… I have a fear of being a failure because I feel like I have to be the best at everything.” Similarly, Participant 2 emphasised grade attainment over minimal achievement, noting: “I don’t want to just pass, I want to get a first… it’s just that thing of knowing that the hard work’s kind of paid off.” In the same words, Participant 6 reinforced this ‘culture’ of high performance, explaining that “they drill it into your head that success is what's needed and what's wanted… they speak about getting firsts or two ones, which is the highest grades,” and further linking achievement to identity by stating that success “will define my whole uni experience and how much work I’ve actually put in.”
The underlying meaning across these extracts was not simply ambition, but a belief that anything short of excellence represented inadequacy. Analytically, perfectionism functioned as a self-surveillant mechanism, through which students reproduced the wider culture of continuous self-improvement at an internal level. The pressure to improve was no longer solely imposed by university structures, it had become embedded within how participants monitored and judged themselves. This theme strongly answers Research Questions 1, 2, and 3, demonstrating how students interpreted achievement pressure, how it intensified burnout, and how it shaped emotional responses to academic performance.
For several participants, self-pressure was reinforced through family comparison, cultural prestige, and intergenerational expectations. This was especially visible in extracts describing pressure to “make my parents proud and avoid shame to the family” (Participant 3), alongside expectations to “be a doctor… because if I don’t, it’s like I’m failing them and not meeting that expectation” (Participant 1). Together, these accounts illustrate how cultural and familial expectations become internalised as achievement-based self-worth, reinforcing continuous pressure to perform.
What is analytically significant here is that achievement pressure was often relational rather than individualistic. Success was imbued with meanings extending beyond personal fulfilment, becoming tied to belonging, family pride, and cultural legitimacy. This widened the stakes of academic performance, rendering low achievement emotionally and socially threatening. This deepens the study’s exploration of continuous self-improvement culture by showing how such narratives are sustained not only by university environments, but by wider familial and sociocultural systems.
Perhaps the strongest cross-participant pattern was the repeated linking of academic outcomes with personal value. Participants described feeling that grades directly shaped their self-worth, with academic success and failure carrying significant emotional weight. This was reflected in statements such as feeling that:
I feel quite inferior… it makes me feel like my self-worth is only driven by my success right now… all of my self-worth is placed on being a university student and that’s all I’m kind of attaching it to at this moment in time. (Participant 2)
Alongside descriptions of fluctuating identity depending on performance, where:
If I do good in uni, I feel like I can do anything… I feel proud of myself… but when I do not well, I feel like I can’t, I’m not worthy for things… my self-worth is very low… university predicts that a lot, it goes up and down. (Participant 3)
This was further reinforced by expressions of emotional dependence on grades, including “I don’t want to just pass, I want to get a first… even though it’s just a number, it doesn’t feel like that when I get the mark back” (Participant 2), highlighting the extent to which academic results were internalised as measures of personal worth rather than purely academic performance.
The critical analytic point here is that burnout emerged not merely from doing too much, but from the existential consequences of perceived underperformance. Academic setbacks threatened identity coherence, producing emotional responses disproportionate to the grade itself because the grade symbolised the self. This transformed burnout from an academic issue into a broader crisis of self-evaluation. In this way, continuous self-improvement culture became psychologically harmful because it rendered the self permanently contingent upon measurable success.
The final theme explores how participants responded to burnout and the uneven ways in which support, coping, and recovery were made available or inaccessible. This theme most directly addresses research questions 3 and 4, focusing on emotional impact and the meanings attached to coping and support.
A common response to burnout involved avoidance-based coping strategies, including sleep, scrolling, emotional withdrawal, and isolation. Participants described sleeping as a coping mechanism, explaining that they “use sleep as a way to escape from reality… when I sleep, I’m at peace and I don’t have to stress” (Participant 1), withdrawing from others by stating “I’ll just lock myself in my room for quite some time until I feel ready to get out” (Participant 3), or engaging in social media use despite recognising that “scrolling… doesn’t give you that mental break… I realise that doesn’t help, but it’s just a bad habit” (Participant 2).
These strategies can be analytically understood not as irrational, but as short-term psychological protection against overwhelming demand. Avoidance served a regulatory function, temporarily reducing distress when participants lacked the cognitive or emotional capacity to continue. However, participants’ own reflections often revealed awareness that these strategies perpetuated burnout cycles, particularly when avoidance increased deadline pressure and guilt.
Alongside avoidance, several participants described adaptive restorative strategies, including walking, family conversations, movement, scheduling, creative hobbies, and intentional rest. For example, participants described coping strategies such as “probably take a walk, maybe buy like a sweet treat so that I’ve got motivation to continue doing work” (Participant 4), “writing a list, like my schedule, it kind of gets me organised… this is what I’m doing today and this is what I’m doing tomorrow” (Participant 3), or spending time with others, such as “I like to spend time with family and friends… I just say to my mum, ‘do you fancy going here or do you fancy going there?’” (Participant 6), to help relieve stress and manage feelings of burnout. The shared meaning here was that recovery was most effective when it re-established a sense of psychological distance from academic performance. Rather than merely pausing work, these strategies restored emotional regulation, cognitive clarity, and a sense of self outside academic identity.
A particularly critical finding concerned the unequal accessibility and usefulness of support systems. While some participants described highly effective family or supervisor support, others experienced embarrassment, dismissal, or unclear academic guidance. Participant 5’s reflection that asking for help made them feel “stupid” was especially revealing:
I feel there is quite demanding. There’s like, when you ask for help, it makes you feel like you’re stupid. You’re like, well, it’s on Blackboard. And it’s like, yeah, but it’s not been explained properly. Like, it’s not been explained in detail that I need. And you feel kind of stupid and you feel like you’re kind of dumb for asking for help in order to decrease burnout. (Participant 5)
Analytically, this suggests that coping was not simply an individual skill but was shaped by institutional responsiveness, social confidence, and structural inclusivity. Overall, the analysis suggests that burnout was not simply identified as “too much work,” but a lived experience where academic success became tied to identity, rest felt difficult to justify, and coping depended on meaningful support. Additionally, the following section discusses these findings in relation to existing literature and theoretical frameworks.
The present study explored how undergraduate students experience academic burnout within a culture of continuous self-improvement. Across the interviews, three interrelated themes were developed: Living in Constant Academic Overload, When Achievement Becomes Self-Worth, and Coping with Burnout in Unequal Ways. Taken together, these findings suggest that academic burnout was not experienced merely as an excessive workload, but as a psychologically and culturally embedded condition produced through the intersection of structural academic pressures, internalised standards of achievement, and uneven access to restorative support. In this sense, the findings extend dominant psychological understandings of burnout by demonstrating that students’ distress emerged not only from the quantity of academic demands, but from the meanings attached to achievement, productivity, and self-value.
The findings addressed the research questions by providing students personal experiences of academic burnout. First, students interpreted continuous pressure as both institutionally structured and internally reproduced through perfectionistic self-monitoring. Second, these pressures contributed to burnout by collapsing boundaries between study and rest, reducing motivation, and intensifying emotional exhaustion. Third, burnout was described as having significant psychological consequences, including guilt, worthlessness, and disengagement. Finally, participants attached highly relational and structural meanings to coping, highlighting that recovery was shaped by social support, institutional inclusivity, and access to psychologically safe spaces. Importantly, these findings support the study’s central proposition that academic burnout among undergraduates must be understood within the wider sociocultural context of continuous self-improvement. Rather than simply confirming existing workload-based models, the present analysis demonstrates how broader cultural narratives of optimisation, comparison, and self-surveillance become internalised within students’ academic identities.
The first theme, ‘Living in Constant Academic Overload’, strongly aligns with existing literature demonstrating the relationship between excessive demands and burnout (Demerouti et al., 2001; Salmela-Aro & Read, 2017). In particular, the findings resonate with the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model, which proposes that sustained demands without sufficient recovery resources lead to exhaustion and disengagement (Demerouti et al., 2001). Participants’ repeated descriptions of deadline clustering, competing commitments, and continuous cognitive occupation provide qualitative support for this theoretical framework. However, the present study extends this literature in two important ways. First, whereas much of the JD-R literature conceptualises demands in relatively abstract or measurable terms, the present findings reveal how demands are subjectively experienced through temporal compression. Students did not simply describe “high workload” rather, they experienced time itself as hostile, with university life organised around recurring crisis points. This adds experiential depth to quantitative findings by demonstrating how structural features of assessment design may actively shape the phenomenology of burnout.
Second, the findings challenge overly individualised interpretations of stress. Existing quantitative studies often frame burnout as a failure of coping, resilience, or time management (May et al., 2015). By contrast, the present data suggest that institutional scheduling practices may themselves produce unsustainable cognitive conditions. This is a critical contribution because it shifts attention from student deficits towards systemic design issues within higher education. A particularly significant finding concerned the collapse of boundaries between academic and personal life. Participants’ difficulty disengaging psychologically from study even during rest periods reflects broader concerns within counselling psychology regarding recovery deprivation and chronic anticipatory stress (Meijman & Mulder, 2013; Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). This finding supports previous work suggesting that prolonged academic strain contributes to declining motivation over time. Wang et al. (2015) develops this further by showing how rest itself became morally contaminated by productivity expectations. These findings also resonate with qualitative research exploring the wider undergraduate experience. For example, Denovan and Macaskill (2013) found that students experience of stress and coping were shaped by academic expectations and the support available to them. Similarly, Upsher et al. (2023) highlighted the relevance of curriculum demands, assessment, academic support, and social connection to student wellbeing. The present study extends this work by illustrating how continuous academic demands may occupy students personal time and restrict opportunities for psychological recovery.
The second theme, ‘When Achievement Becomes Self-Worth’, arguably represents the study’s most original contribution to the literature. While previous research has linked perfectionism to academic burnout (Curran & Hill, 2019; Zhang et al., 2007), the present findings suggest that perfectionism functioned not simply as a personality trait, but as a culturally mediated psychological process through which students reproduced external achievement norms internally. This is particularly important in relation to the study’s focus on continuous self-improvement culture. Participants’ accounts of needing consistently exceptional grades, fearing “just passing,” and equating imperfection with inadequacy illustrate how neoliberal narratives of endless optimisation may become embedded within self-evaluation processes (Foucault, 1977; Rose, 1999; Han, 2017). In this sense, the findings move beyond traditional psychological models by demonstrating how sociocultural values are translated into lived emotional realities.
Critically, this challenges burnout literature that views perfectionism as an internal personal trait, existing independently of the surrounding environment. Although studies such as Zhang et al. (2007) effectively identify associations between perfectionism and burnout, they risk reducing the phenomenon to an individual difference variable. The present qualitative findings suggest instead that perfectionistic striving may be better understood as socially produced and culturally reinforced, particularly within contemporary university environments that reward hyper-performance, employability, and constant self-development. The finding that grades became symbolic markers of selfhood is especially significant for counselling psychology. Participants did not merely report disappointment following lower performance, they described feelings of worthlessness, shame, and identity destabilisation. This suggests that burnout may function as a crisis of self-coherence rather than simply an academic stress response. These findings extend Schaufeli et al. (2002) multidimensional model by highlighting that academic outcomes are not only linked to exhaustion and workload but are also tied to how students interpret their performance in relation to identity and self-worth. This interpretation is consistent with qualitative research by Tan (2022), in which university students described perfectionism as connected to feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness when academic expectations were not met. Similarly, Farmer et al. (2017) demonstrated how perfectionism and academic success could shape individuals’ life narratives and sense of identity. These studies support the present finding that achievement may become closely connected to personal worth, while the current study further situates this experience within a culture of continuous self-improvement.
Furthermore, the role of family and cultural expectations extends the literature beyond individualistic Western models of achievement. For several participants, success carried relational meanings tied to family pride, legitimacy, and belonging. This supports contextualist interpretations by demonstrating that burnout emerges through multiple systems of pressure, including intergenerational and sociocultural narratives. Existing literature has often underexplored this relational dimension, and the present study therefore helps fill an important gap concerning how undergraduate burnout is sustained across both academic and familial domains.
The third theme, ‘Coping with Burnout in Unequal Ways’, challenges resilience-focused university wellbeing approaches that emphasise individual strategies such as mindfulness and self-compassion (Neff, 2011). Additionally, findings indicate that coping is structurally unequal, with students using both restorative and avoidant strategies. Although avoidance behaviours such as sleep, isolation, social media use may appear maladaptive, they can function as short-term protective responses when emotional or social resources are limited (Holahan et al., 2005; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Recovery was strongly shaped by access to relational support and institutional responsiveness. Students with supportive relationships and adjustments reported better outcomes, while those facing inaccessible systems experienced greater distress. This highlight coping as context-dependent rather than purely individual.
These accounts suggest that coping strategies could provide temporary relief without necessarily addressing the academic pressures underlying participants’ distress. In contrast, restorative activities and supportive relationships offered opportunities to reconnect with life beyond academic performance. Recovery therefore involved not only reducing distress but also creating psychological distance from achievement expectations. This distinction highlights the importance of considering how students experience and access recovery, rather than evaluating coping strategies solely as adaptive or maladaptive. This interpretation is consistent with Denovan and Macaskill (2013) qualitative exploration of undergraduate stress and coping, which highlighted the relevance of support networks to students’ experiences. The present findings further suggest that the availability of support does not necessarily mean that students feel able to access it. Feelings of shame or fear of judgement may make academic assistance difficult to seek, whereas supportive relationships can provide reassurance and opportunities for recovery. Coping may therefore be understood as relational and context-dependent, shaped by both students’ responses and the academic environments in which they study.
The present study contributes to the current literature by addressing the relative lack of qualitative research exploring undergraduate burnout within the specific context of continuous self-improvement culture. While prior studies have established the prevalence and predictors of burnout, fewer have explored how students make sense of these experiences within broader narratives of productivity, self-optimisation, and identity. The study therefore fills a conceptual gap by demonstrating that burnout is not only a response to workload, but also a consequence of internalised cultural ideals of worth-through-performance. This adds an important sociocultural layer to the literature and aligns with counselling psychology's emphasis on contextually grounded understandings of psychological distress (Tribe & Bell, 2018). In particular, the findings challenge the assumption that student wellbeing interventions should focus exclusively on individual coping enhancement. Instead, they suggest that academic burnout must be understood as an interaction between institutional structures, cultural narratives, and identity processes.
The practical implications of these findings are highly relevant for universities, counselling services, and student support teams. First, the findings suggest that universities should critically review assessment scheduling practices, particularly deadline clustering, which participants consistently identified as a key driver of overload. Second, student wellbeing policies may benefit from moving beyond resilience rhetoric towards structural prevention approaches. This could include clearer workload pacing, protected recovery periods, accessible extension systems, and proactive supervisor check-ins during peak assessment periods. Third, counselling and psychological support services should explicitly address the fusion of achievement and self-worth identified in the findings. Interventions grounded in self-compassion, identity flexibility, and values-based work may help students disentangle academic outcomes from personal worth (Gilbert, 2009; Hayes et al., 1999; Neff, 2003). More broadly, the findings may help universities develop policies aimed at reducing academic burnout and associated wellbeing difficulties, thereby potentially improving retention, engagement, and long-term student mental health outcomes.
A key strength of the present study lies in its use of reflexive thematic analysis within a contextualist framework, allowing both experiential depth and sociocultural interpretation. The qualitative design was particularly well suited to capturing the emotional and identity-based dimensions of burnout that may be obscured in quantitative research. A further strength is the study’s integrative framework, which brought together psychological, structural, and sociocultural accounts of burnout. This enabled a coherent and holistic interpretation of how workload, perfectionism, self-worth, and coping interact in shaping student’s burnout experience.
However, several limitations should be acknowledged. First, the sample was relatively homogenous, comprising eight female undergraduate students from one higher education institution in the UK. While this supported depth and contextual coherence, it may limit transferability across gender identities, institutions, and cultural contexts. Future research should therefore recruit more diverse samples, including male, international, commuter, and neurodivergent students to capture a broader range of experiences. Secondly, opportunity and snowball sampling via shared academic networks may have resulted in participants with similar academic pressures and achievement orientations. Future studies could address this by using purposive sampling to enhance variation in lived experience. Thirdly, the use of both online and in-person interviews may have influenced disclosure and rapport, as interview modality can shape researcher–participant interaction and communication dynamics (Lobe et al., 2022). Future research could adopt a consistent interview mode or explicitly compare modality effects on qualitative depth and emotional expression.
The current study explored how undergraduate students experience academic burnout within a culture of continuous self-improvement. Using reflexive thematic analysis, burnout emerged as a complex psychological and sociocultural phenomenon shaped by academic demands, internalised pressure, and unequal access to support. Across the themes, burnout extended beyond workload, reflecting a lived experience where time pressure, identity, and wellbeing were closely intertwined.
Participants described pressure to improve as both externally imposed and internally maintained. Institutional demands, such as compressed deadlines and competing responsibilities, created sustained overload that limited rest. These pressures were intensified by perfectionism and the internalisation of achievement as personal worth, particularly through links between grades, self-esteem, and identity. Burnout therefore reflects a broader university culture that prioritises productivity and normalises self-sacrifice.
This research contributes to burnout literature by exploring how students interpret pressures through self-optimisation narratives, challenging individualised explanations. The findings suggest that reducing burnout requires both systemic change, such as balanced assessments and accessible support, and psychological interventions addressing perfectionism and self-worth. Overall, supporting student wellbeing requires more relational, systemic, and culturally informed approaches.
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