Burnout is “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress”. Our culture is quite aware of and fairly vigilant against burnout, most likely as a reaction to how busy modern life can naturally become.

In college, I had advised a friend on getting his first internship. An internship would have been a valuable opportunity to launchpad a future career. Resume revisions, LinkedIn outreach, soul-searching, interview prep – I helped him with it all. So naturally, I was surprised to hear that though he had received an internship offer, he had rejected it for a perplexing reason: the fear of burnout.

I’m not saying that burnout doesn’t exist – it does. However, our modern society tends to view burnout as something that can and should be avoided. I don’t really agree.

In my junior year of college, I had an opportunity to intern at a well-known marketing agency. The position was very hands-on and the environment fast-paced, neither of which I had experienced before. Despite reservations about simultaneously having a full course load, a handful of extracurriculars, and my own personal life to balance, I accepted the internship, recognizing it as a valuable opportunity to learn and to advance my fledgling career.

But come midterm season, I was blindsided by every student’s worst fear: burnout. Headaches and fatigue plagued me nonstop. My motivation tanked and I felt absolutely overwhelmed by a frightening cloud of obligations and deadlines looming overhead.

However, being that it was midterm season and that interns don’t technically have PTO, I had no choice but to push through the week. Despite how I felt, I forced myself to carry on.

The week passed and my burnout eventually did too.

In my senior year of college, I again received another internship offer at an advertising company. Much like last year’s stint at the agency, this position would be hands-on and fast-paced, delving deep into marketing platforms and campaigns. Additionally, my extracurricular responsibilities had swelled and my course load was to be the hardest yet, filled with high-level capstone seminars and the kind of professors that assigned work on the weekends. This was a recipe for burnout – but to my surprise, I was more than willing to face the challenge.

As the semester progressed, it was as busy as I had anticipated. Early morning train rides to the Midtown office, ten-hour days on campus, and late nights reading 10-K reports became the norm. But I remember having a peculiar thought. It was late at night – midterms were just completed and I was finishing a paper, and thought to myself, “I should be burnt out right now… but I’m not.”

The semester finished and I was quite satisfied – I had done well in all my classes, my social life was surprisingly busy, and I had not only learned a lot at my internship, but also befriended someone I now consider a mentor-figure in my life.

As I was taking in these successes, I thought more about burnout and about that thought I had.

Burnout is inevitable if you are capitalizing on new opportunities and challenges. If you want to avoid burnout, simply never do anything new or challenging. You may be stagnant, but never exhausted. Within reason, we all strive to grow and improve, and the only way to do this is to push ourselves to do what is difficult. This means that burnout is inevitable.

Burnout is our body responding to a prolonged stimulus that is too difficult and unfamiliar. But if we endure, we’ll be stronger and more capable afterwards. Burnout is an opportunity to learn lessons unlearnable in comfortable or familiar situations: dealing with stress, time management, and emotional resilience. Don’t see burnout as an enemy and let it control your decisions – do what is best for your growth, and embrace burnout as an opportunity to strengthen yourself and to do greater things in the future.