You start off as the kid who always has the highest score, the best comments, the “we’re so proud of you” speeches at every family gathering. The teachers use your work as the example. Your relatives introduce you like a walking report card. After a while, it stops feeling like praise and starts feeling like your role. You’re the smart one. That’s who you are.

But once that label sticks, the pressure changes. It’s not about doing well anymore, it’s about living up to what you’ve done. You’re not trying to beat other people; you’re trying to beat your past self. The 98 you got before becomes the minimum. And the “wow” slowly becomes “of course.” So you become a perfectionist, not because you love perfect, but because anything less feels like slipping. You start chasing the same level again and again, just so no one’s disappointed.

It’s really easy from there to slide into a burnout cycle: you push harder, stack on more work, and say yes to every opportunity, all in the name of keeping that overachiever reputation alive. You feel guilty whenever you’re not productive. Rest starts to feel like falling behind. You tell yourself you just need to “work through it” because that’s what you’ve always done. You want to overachieve so badly that you ignore the fact your brain and body are giving you warning signs.

The problem is, you cannot bully yourself into greatness. There’s a limit. When the pressure you put on yourself never switches off, everything becomes a threat: every test, every grade, every deadline. But to thrive, you actually have to survive. You cannot be “top 1” running on five hours of sleep, zero joy, and constant anxiety. Burnout doesn’t just make you tired; it makes you worse at the very thing you’re obsessing over. The more you push past your limits, the further you get from the version of yourself you’re trying to protect.

A big part of growing out of that mindset is accepting that conditions around you are changing. Maybe the classes are harder, or maybe everyone around you is also “top 1” from somewhere else. Or maybe your life outside of school is more complicated now. You don’t control all that. All you can honestly do is put in effort that’s sustainable. And the scary thought a lot of gifted kids have-“If I’m not the best anymore, people will stop being proud of me”-usually isn’t real. The people who truly care aren’t going to walk away because your rank changed or your grades dip for a while. Healing from gifted kid burnout isn’t some magical moment where you suddenly stop caring about achievement. It’s messier and slower than that. It looks like learning to rest without hating yourself for it. It looks like getting a result that isn’t perfect and not spiralling for a week. It looks like letting yourself be average at new things, having hobbies that don’t go on your CV, and asking for help instead of pretending you’re fine. Sometimes it even means accepting that you won’t always be “top 1” in every room-and realising that this doesn’t make you less worthy, less intelligent, or less lovable, it just makes you human.

Isaure Pajot

thebyf.project