I’ve noticed how often my friends at university tell me they’re tired lately. Not the kind of tiredness that comes from falling asleep in a 9am lecture after clubbing the night before. It’s something closer to exhaustion.The student struggle – budgeting for meal preps, racing to finish thousand-word essays before midnight deadlines – is nothing new. But the pressures of becoming a young adult follow you home from lectures and into your part-time shift, and then back again.
This non-stop cycle is stressful. But try to tell older people you’re burnt out, and the response is unsympathetic: we Gen Zs are “lazy”, “unmotivated” or “ungrateful”. I hear this first-hand at family gatherings. When older relatives ask my cousins how university is going, for instance, my cousins avoid mentioning any form of stress. They know they will end up being told they are exaggerating tiny issues.
But young people are not just a bit stressed. They really are burning out. According to Mental Health UK’s latest Burnout Report, young adults aged 18 to 24 are facing pressures “both inside and outside of work”, with 39 per cent saying they had taken time off due to poor mental health linked to stress in the past year.
Let me give you an example of what that pressure looks like. Last year I went on holiday to Spain with one of my closest friends. We arrived at the hotel and were told we needed to pay our room cost upfront. She had budgeted spending money for the trip but forgot we were yet to pay the room costs: £200 each. My friend tried to pay with her credit card but it was declined a few times. She looked stressed. I’ve been there too. So I paid for the both of us, knowing she’d pay me back.
What I thought might take a couple of days to resolve turned into months. My polite reminders slowly became awkward follow-ups. Memories of our fun girls’ trip were clouded by this unpaid bill. Eventually, she explained that she was moving into her second-year university house but was already behind on rent because her student loan didn’t stretch far enough. She told me how embarrassed she was to finally admit it. She wasn’t avoiding me, but choosing between repaying me and covering her rent.Despite graduating with tens of thousands of pounds of debt, many students find that their maintenance loans still don’t fully cover their living costs. Rent, especially in university cities, eats into the bulk of it. According to the 2025 National Student Accommodation Survey, the average monthly rent among students surveyed was £563 nationally, rising to £812 in London. Food, travel, course materials and the occasional attempt at having a normal twenty-something social life come afterwards – if there is anything left at all.It is no surprise, then, that burnout is creeping into conversations among young people. When visiting my friends at university, they tell me how their sleep patterns are getting worse. They go weeks without attending lectures to work shifts during the day, then at night they catch up on missed course material and type up rushed essays they should have had weeks to complete in a couple of hours.
Money is at the centre of it all. Research suggests that the average student now needs to work around 20 hours a week on top of their studies just to get by. Among my friends, those hours are clocked in hospitality shifts that stretch past midnight, freelance gigs squeezed in between lectures, and tutoring sessions slotted into what should be revision time. Retail and bar work may once have been “Saturday jobs”; now they are survival strategies.
Burnout as a young person does not look like a dramatic collapse. It is persistent tiredness, a feeling that you can’t balance all of the pressures at once. During my A-levels, I worked two part-time retail jobs, each with an hour-long commute. There was a constant guilt that came with clocking in when coursework deadlines were looming. You are physically present at work, but mentally calculating how many paragraphs you still need to write.The problem is not simply needing to work. It is needing to work while trying to perform academically and knowing you are heading into an increasingly competitive job market. Graduate jobs plunged by 19.1 per cent between January and February, falling below 10,000 vacancies for the first time since job website Adzuna began tracking them 10 years ago. At the same time, about 900,000 graduates enter the job market each year.
Students are told that a strong degree is no longer enough. They need internships, portfolios and networking experience. Term breaks that are supposed to offer recovery are now used to increase shift hours and rebuild bank balances drained by term-time expenses. There is no true pause.Even graduation does not necessarily offer relief. More than 700,000 university graduates are currently out of work and claiming benefits, according to research by the Centre for Social Justice. Younger workers report worries about money, isolation and job security more than any other age group. The promise that hard work at university guarantees stability afterwards feels shakier than it did a generation ago. And yet, there remains a common response: how can you be burnt out when you are so young? Older generations point out – sometimes kindly, sometimes dismissively – that young people do not have mortgages to pay off or children to provide for. There are fewer “adult” responsibilities, they argue. So, what exactly are we exhausted from?But burnout is not a competition of who has the most dependents. It is not measured in mortgage debt or childcare fees. It is about chronic stress without sufficient recovery. It is about feeling that no matter how many hours you work or how carefully you budget, you are still one unexpected bill away from panic. Young people are navigating financial independence, academic pressure and early-career anxiety simultaneously, often for the first time, without the coping mechanisms that experience might later provide. Of course, some stress is normal. University is meant to stretch you. Early adulthood has always involved uncertainty. But when nearly two in five young workers are taking time off because of stress-related mental health issues, this begins to look less like individual weakness and more like a structural problem.Young people are not too young to be burnt out. If anything, the question is why are so many reaching that point so early – and why are we still surprised when they say they are exhausted?
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