Staying Involved in Causes That You Care About Without Feeling Burned Out
- Tyler Pham
- Jul 10, 2025
- 4 min read
Introduction
It’s a given that managing your time can be challenging when you’re juggling five different activities simultaneously. Typically, you will not be able to meet the expectations that you’d hoped during your initial commitment to these groups; that’s just a part of being in something you care about, and that’s okay. This is a natural part of growing up—you need to be able to prioritize and sacrifice some other parts that you were initially fired up to be with. However, not all hope is lost; you are still able to help contribute to the causes you care about through various methods that are not that strenuous for you. To reach this goal of self-efficacy, I believe that there are two common methods of approaching the wall that is burnout. By becoming cognizant of these methods, I hope that it will become easier to decide how you want to either prevent or recover from burnout.
No Pain, No Gain
This is typically the first choice that many go through when dealing with burnout; the push through it mentality. Unfortunately, this is a very successful strategy—but only in the immediate short term, usually furthering the progression of burnout. The main methods for remedying burnout after this stage deal with realizing that there are other methods to contribute to your interests and to cater to your mental health, rather than overworking yourself. Ultimately, this method is not one that should be used regularly. Instead, other options for contribution are readily available and vary throughout different organizations, such as social media support, in-person support and fundraisers, or something as simple as writing a blog post. Your skills are expansive, but if they are too expansive, you might risk doing things not up to standard or spreading misinformation. Therefore, you should stick with what you are good at, specializing in a certain field of the cause that you care about, then mastering it to ensure that you can have the most amount of change in one thing you care about rather than small amounts of change in topics that you aren’t so passionate about. Even if the change that you bring to the table is small, these changes still matter. Realize that any progress is progress and that you are contributing, even if it isn’t as much as you had initially hoped. What I typically see with activists who are just pushing through their work is that they don’t realize that breaks are okay. Most of these problems are universal and will still be there in, let’s say, a day, maybe even a month or two, if you step back.
Jack of All Trades, Master of None
The most important thing when joining causes that you care about is to realize that you are not facing the world by yourself. Expectations are a recurring topic when facing global issues (and even small issues); you may expect yourself to change the world by yourself. This is simply not sustainable. Most organizations are expansive in their topics, and these topics do not have a simple, cut-and-dry solution to them; otherwise, they wouldn’t exist. This, then, leads participants to attempt to become the big driving force that solves everything in the organization. To put it simply, a jack of all trades. With all the possibilities and problems at the fingertips of these people, it’s no wonder that they’d get overwhelmed with the work that they bring upon themselves. Are they really able to devote their full attention to the cosmos one day, then give that same attention to protecting wildlife the next? I wouldn’t believe so. It’s easy to think that ‘I have to do everything,’ without thinking that you would need to maintain this same level of passion for the projects that you’ve undertaken. Once again, it’s okay not to be the driving force behind the group. I’d like to believe that passion is like sprinting. Are you able to maintain top speed for the entirety of a race? Instead of thinking about what you should be doing, it is much better to think about what you want to do. Not every battle can be done by yourself, but that should not drain your passion for these projects in the slightest.
Conclusion
Hope is a thing that is brought up a lot in these types of discussions about burnout, tying back to the idea of expectations put upon these young activists. Activism is typically seen as something that is taxing and grueling to the activists, and that’s typically set by the monumental achievements of those such as Martin Luther King or Malala Yousafzai. Activism should not be something that needs to be harmful to the activist. They should not feel like they need to push through or do everything just so they can express their passion for these projects—it’s harmful to both the cause and its members. So, do what you love. Contribute what you can, even if what you do contribute doesn’t revolutionize the world.
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