The Phenomenon of 'Gifted Kid Burnout' | Alena Qin | TEDxYouth@RHHS

[AsmitaSethi]

All my life, I've always got straight A's after only studying during exam days. But now, I seem to have been going through this thing... I failed 3/4 of my mid-term exams. I have anxiety, depression, chronic allergy and eczema causing me to isolate myself for last 4 months. And by isolation, I mean that I haven't attended school, tuition classes and avoided basically all human interactions. I feel too much until numb....

[srphm_]

Gifted kids must be taught by gifted professors. I strongly believe that those who are alike has a better understanding of one another thus result in a healthier system for developing their special needs to cope and adjust to the world's systems

[dnbnme]

I managed to avoid this before finishing school, but the weight of expectations doesn’t just go away after graduation unfortunately

[SamirCCat]

I've always been intelligent and have very easy to learn. We don't have gifted programmes in my country, but I believe I am gifted. When I was 16 I had a lot of burnout symptoms from school, due to extreme pressure from myself. "If I can get the highest marks, anything less is a failure". I locked myself in the bathroom in school and had my first panic attack when I got the second highest mark.
At 16 I started a new school, but I was too ill at that point. I had developed anorexia and had to stop school. 20 years later and I'm stuck with many chronic mental disorders, unable to study, work or live a normal life.
Still I feel like I chickened out. Took the easy way. To develop anorexia and severe self-harm was EASIER than to live up to my own expectations. I embraced the label of mentally ill to have an excuse to not be perfect and achieving everything. If I was to write a book it had to be the level of a Noble Prize winner. Speaking English? It had to sound like a native, 0% foreign accent. I had so many plans/prisons I installed for my future, and I couldn't live up to it. My "dream" had become a tortyre, and for me it was easier to starve myself to the point of hospitalisation and tube-feeding, or to cut so deep into my leg I damaged my muscle and could hardly walk. It was still easier and better than trying and FAILING the unrealistically high expectations I had for myself.
My "inner critic" is something my therapists often have talked about. They don't understand it at all. It's not just me having high expectations, it's the fact that I have high POTENTIAL. If I CAN achieve miracles, why would I NOT? I feel I owe it to the world to share my talents, I have so many great things to contribute with. If I knew I sucked at creative writing it would've been much easier to write a book. Because then it CAN'T be a good book. But with my talents I have the potential of writing something extraordinary, so I can't write a single page. I'm blocking and judging myself so much because the text in my head is the best in the world, and what comes out is not.
I honestly wish I was less talented. It's not a diagnosis to be "gifted", but it sure feels like a very big burden. I handle my ADD better, I've learnt to treat myself kind for that. But my giftedness makes anything that's less than sheer perfection such an embarrassing failure I don't even know if I want to live through it. 
If I end up killing myself in the future it would be because I never published a book and therefore didn't deserve to live. My life would have been nothing but unfulfilled potential and a waste of space.

[victoriab]

We didn't have a gifted kid program in our country. But still, I very much relate to the burnt out gifted kid stories. I've always been one of the top students, getting straight A's without even trying, going to all kinds of academic competitions, etc. Biology used to be one of my favourite subjects, so I decided I want to do something in the medical field.
Now I'm a third year student in university, studying to become a dentist. But things aren't going well at all. Ever since I started private lessons to prepare myself for the entrance exams, I started feeling unmotivated and overwhelmed. It has only gotten worse over the course of the last few years. Now I'm one of the worst performing students, having failed 3 exams and struggling with my practice tasks. I'm so far behind in one of my classes that it is likely I won't even be let to attend the final exam. I dread going to those classes because of my fear of failure. I have nearly no motivation to study or get things better, I just do the bare minimum. If I don't pass all my exams I will have to repeat the year. I'm seriously thinking about quitting.

On top of that I've struggled with anxiety, both general and social, ever since I was little. And it only makes everything harder.

I don't know what to do with my life at this point. I hope I can figure things out, but at this point I'm feeling extremely stressed and confused. At the very least, I can be grateful to have very understanding and supportive parents.

[adaral]

Just had a breakdown/attack over my peer critique partners having better papers than me. Because I couldn’t bring myself to write the paper due to everything not being perfectly formed in my head.

[bubnic_gutzz]

i decided early on to (instead of letting my mindset settle to a fixed one) decided to rush growth in the places i was excelling even more than my class of gifted kids already was, which in my case was math and arts. i ended up pushing myself too hard and now im taking algebra 1 in the seventh grade and i feel like i have rammed my head into a wall seventy two times and then walked out of the room all smiling and happy though wanting to continue to hit my head into the wall because thats the only thing that gives me comfort- so f*cking great huh. Now my grades and self image are suffering and im slowly drowning in overdue assignments

[AAirways]

And it's even more painful when one has a form of autism... and I experienced gifted kid burnout in a PhD program, at a later stage of education than a lot of people who experience it. So while I didn't necessarily feel the need to perform perfectly all the time, I still had a lot of expectations placed on me.

However, before I actually got to the burnout, I was thrown into increasingly concentrated academic environments (first, a magnet program in high school, then studying physics as an undergraduate, and as an upperclassman, I was made to feel like a lot of people around me were just as good as I).

At one point, I was made to feel like the only way I could get better in a certain academic area that I didn't already try would have required me to date someone better in that one area than I myself was, especially knowing where that area fit into my future in the field, and then I viewed what girlfriend I could have as some sort of dual-purpose lifeline: she would have filled my romantic void as well as an academic one.

Yes, growth mindsets can help, but growth mindsets have their limits; you must be mindful of what your own limits are as well. This is where knowing when to give up will help you most.

[MilkIsTheDrink]

I used to be the top of my class for 10 years (all of elementary school, 8 years in my country, and the first 2 years of high school). Then I got teachers I hated and my grades dropped severely. I lost all my motivation to do anything. I find myself average in everything, I don't excell in anything anymore. My whole world came crushing down where my final exam grades were so bad, I didn’t get l accepted in the uni I wanted to go to so I chose another. I quite like this one too, but I just find myself skipping classes and not caring about nothing anymore. I just can't get it together. I feel like I'll fail even my first semester.

[Zamzami-wg]

It was so helpful now i figured out the what's wrong with me is actually my fixed mindset& its not my ability that are useless tysm

[bealaurangela]

Currently watching this from the PH. As a teacher, I'm doing a future study on Gifted Students and Academic Burnout in our campus. I'm using this Tedx speech as a reference. Thank you for sharing your story with us, Alena :)

[NegativeAccelerate]

Literally went from straight A's, highest IQ in schools history represented my country in numerous maths competitions to failing high school maths.

I dont know what went wrong. I feel like im still trying rly hard but I just lost all of my intelligence.

[ashleyching]

Thank you, Alena!
You are so worthy no matter what!!!

[chim]

idk until 5th grade, i was the best at everything. i had friends, helped people in studies, overall likeable and super active as a child but i had one of the most important pass away the same year. my grandad. ive never been the same. my grades went downhill, i was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and ive been suffering academically and emotionally ever since so im not really sure if this is considered as a gifted kid burnout but yeah

[MikeFuller-okok]

I have a supervised Mensa IQ in the 'High Average' range but I just couldn't cope with Secondary School education so I was put in remedial sets.

[kawaii_princess_castle]

To mask your intensity or pace is exhausting! You have to go superslow when you are with neurotipicals!

[Jana-kxfv]

What you describe is not being a gifted child, but a child with too high expectations on its shoulders. The difference is that gifted children excel at almost everything without any struggle. You describe children that are pressured to excel and they do so, but it doesn't come natural to them and they have to work a lot for their success, nature didn't, ,gift" them the ability excel without work.

[jasonkrick]

From my life’s journey. Pretty much every child I’ve known labeled ‘gifted’ from an early age has grown up angry, unhappy and achieving well below average success.

How and why? First. ‘Gifted’ is usually in one thing. But people like to. Low it up to be gifted in everything. Ever see a gifted kid get hit in the face with a baseball? It hurts btw. My friend got scouted at 9 to be in the MLB. And he won a World Series. So, in this aspect, I would considered him ‘gifted’. I know way way more unemployed ‘gifted’ people with phd’s, sitting in srtarbucks stealing free wifi than I do athletes who won the big prize.

Anyway, I digress. The overwhelming. And I mean ‘overwhelming’ majority of the ‘gifted’ people I know are unemployed, extremely unhappy, extremely angry and extremely unaccomplished. Meaning they don’t contribute much of anything to society.

Want an example of a ‘gifted’ individual that provided nothing to society when he was alive? Leonardo da Vinci. Look into his life. And tell me how he benefited society when he was alive. Spoiler alert. He didn’t.

[Hibakarbali]

Does anyone know how to get my gift back ? How do i get good grades again ? Please im barely passing my college exams

[TiffanyNg]

Tbh, we need an entire year google calendar and learn how to plan 😅