Ah, academic validation: The bane of my existence yet somehow an integral part of my mental landscape. It’s an especially odd phenomenon of this generation as it’s become increasingly evident that how we perform in primary schooling has little effects on our chances in the job market.
Yet despite this, parents and adults in the education industry place an immense amount of pressure on any child who shows a glimmer of potential. No one warned us that believing everything they said would lead to a cliff-like slope of mental breakdowns and hopelessness. Let’s unpack that, shall we?
Gifted Children
If you’re reading this, chances are you were a “gifted child.” Adults gloated about you, praised you when you got another hundred, and admired how you actually enjoyed school. Unbeknownst to you, they trained your brain to associate your academic performance with your self worth, sometimes even with your ability to be loved. It was quiet literally taught to us that the live we were receiving was, in fact, conditional.
In elementary school, when this association tends to form, a child’s future is almost completely decided by their environment. This can be seen by a study conducted by NASA found that out of 1600 children, 98% of them were categorized as geniuses by their ability to think divergently or creatively. When these children were out in grade school, it dropped to a shocking 30%, and then to 12% by the end of high school. The school system taught these children to think inside the box, essentially killing the parts of their brains that were useful to society as a whole. Which, of course, is an entirely separate rant, so let’s connect this back to the subject at hand.
I saw it over and over again as I grew up, and I’m sure anyone who has seen an elementary campus in action has also witnessed the same phenomenon. A child’s actions, especially in a school setting, is highly based upon the expectation set upon them by the adults in their life. When excellence is expected from a child, typically that child will try to excel. However when looked down upon, a child will often exhibit the undesired behaviors expected from them.
And thus is the beginning of the cycle, the training of the mind in one way or the other. Of course, once again, I have to remind myself to refocus on the path of this discussion: the academic excellence slope.
Grades and Self Worth
As the gifted child grows up, say, moving into middle school, we see a inflation of previous ideals instilled. Especially those tied to self worth. We can start to see a lot of self isolation, physically and mentally. They might enjoy partaking in solitary activities, especially any that they get praised for. Any time that the gifted is in company of others, they tend to not be completely present. Often, they are stuck in their mind, stressed out. Typically, when participating in something “non-productive” they will worry they are losing progress, or, in some cases, that they will be reprimanded for participating in “worthless” recreation.
Essentially, all the gifted’s mind is focused on is grades. After all, grades equal worth right? Who doesn’t want to be worth something?
The problem is, grades don’t equal worth. If you have no skills besides academic, there are very few career fields you will excel in. If your personality is nothing but numbers, then in what world will you be able to make connections within your field?
All of this grades that mattered so much from kindergarten to 8th grade will never be seen by a college. Your highschool transcript won’t even be glanced at by a potential employer. So why are we sacrificing our lives for this? Why do we have mental breakdowns the first time we receive a “B” on a report card?
The answer isn’t simple. It’s a cesspool of all the reasons I’ve listed before and even more that I haven’t. Each person affected by this mindset has different experiences leading to these moments, but let’s talk a little more broadly. The essential process that leads to these moments is what I’ve unceremoniously dubbed as the academic dopamine loop.
The Academic Dopamine Loop
The academic dopamine loop is a toxic cycle created by the academic validation mindset. It follows the normal cue-routine-reward of most habit cycles. The cue is academic situations of all kinds, the routine is the toxic ways you achieve those grades whether by lacking sleep or water or general recreation, and the reward is the validation you receive from those around you. This validation causes an instant release of dopamine. Your brain starts to cling to this dopamine release and seek it out whenever possible, especially since in a lot of cases academic validation will be one of the limited situations in which the gifted will experience a dopamine release like this.
It begins an addiction-like cycle that the gotten begins to chase like their on a hamster wheel. Unfortunately, if the hamster doesn’t get off, it will eventually faint.
Burnout. We hear about it a lot, how horrible it is, and how to avoid it. The difference between academic burnout and most other kinds is the length and impact of it. The gifted can survive the toxic cycle of academic pressure their entire primary schooling experience, and crash the moment they get on a college campus. Some crash in high school or even earlier, but they were still on the hamster wheel for years before hand. Most burnouts are from a significantly lesser time period of overworking yourself, and holding yourself together for that long only created a worse downfall. Burnouts resulting from academic pressure can last year’s and completely turn around your life. Acting similar to a mid-life crisis, the gifted often start to question what they’ve even done with their life and are they really worthless now that they aren’t succeeding in schooling.
It’s a horrific period, often leading to depression and/or anxiety, that leaves you feeling like the squirrel from Ice Age: chasing something seemingly unattainable while the world works against you and the floor is tilting. Not a great place to be, trust me.
And when it’s all over, there’s a sense of grieving. Grieving the life you missed to chase academic achievements, grieving the person you were before, and even grieving the sense of accomplishment. Even more, you grieve over the fact that your parents could have stopped it, if only they realized how toxic it really was.
But you start to rebuild yourself. The gifted starts to become something more than their achievements. And that’s more important.
All of this to say be kind to yourself. Your grades aren’t you. And you’re worth so much just by standing there.