Camp provides a full range of activities where you can laugh, cry, think, be amazed, or try something new. While most experiences are positive and fun, the responsibility of leading campers can sometimes cause persistent stress — which, if left unchecked, can be detrimental to your emotional well-being. While truly gratifying, camp’s long hours and rigorous schedules can be very demanding, and that can wear on you after a while. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, lost emotionally, or even questioning why you are at camp, you may be experiencing early signs of a phenomenon known as burnout.

The ability to sustain a high-functioning level of leadership can be an issue whether you are new to working at summer camp or an experienced staff member. Over time, increased anxiety levels can lead to a progression of fatigue, headaches, frequent mood swings, and eventually decreased productivity. Realities such as group drama and time constraints can leave you feeling detached from camp life. In simple terms, “Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress” (Psychology Today, 2026).

Camp works because you and your fellow staff members each contribute to a larger, more complex process known as collaboration or synergy. The expectations are simple. Do the best you can, cooperate, ask questions, and be open to the idea of trying new things. Some tasks are easy, and others are more challenging, but actively working together makes the schedule come alive for campers. With the exception of designated time off, your camp expects you to be with your campers and help when needed, not just part of the time, but all the time. When you don’t contribute, someone else must step in and do your job.

Being involved is a good start, but to be effective you must participate in activities even if they challenge your normal comfort levels. You can help yourself by determining what your safe space looks like, and then categorize your experiences in one of three comfort zones:

• Familiar. Daily tasks are in the familiar zone and can be completed with relative ease.
• Challenging. Situations that go beyond familiar parameters but stay within the boundaries of perceived ability will be challenging but doable.
• Panic. When stress from a daunting task becomes too high, you go into the panic zone, which is a fight-or-flight mindset where no learning takes place.

Activities that you put in the familiar and challenging categories should be manageable without the fear of personal vulnerability. But if you find yourself panicking, the goal is to not remain in the panic zone for too long. Ask for help if you believe you have reached your tolerance limit.

If you are feeling burned out and fail to address it, you may open yourself up to a related phenomenon known as quiet cracking. In this state of mind, you may appear to those around you to be calm on the outside even though internally you could be headed for an emotional breakdown. Again, this is why it’s important to communicate how you are doing. Suffering in silence will only result in the likelihood that you will:

• Increasingly withdraw from interactions with your co-counselors or other teammates
• Decline in productivity
• Make more mistakes than usual
• Lose your enthusiasm or ability to take initiative
• Become emotionally exhausted (180 Engineering, 2025)

Stress vs. Burnout

It is also important that you can distinguish the difference between regular stress and burnout. To help manage yourself and your campers properly, be aware of the differing symptoms shown in the following comparison chart (Cassidy, 2020; Dike, 2017).

Stress	Burnout
You put in too much effort	It's hard to put in any effort
You feel emotions more srongly	Your emotions feel blunted
You feel hyperactive and anxious	You feel drained and helpless
You have less energy	You have less motivation
It takes a physical toll	It takes an emotional toll

 

This chart shows the progression from stress to burnout. You may see the physical and emotional changes in yourself or a fellow staff member who is heading toward exhaustion or becoming lethargic. You (or a colleague) may start out full of energy during activities and then find yourself growing a little tired, then feeling overwhelmed, and finally experiencing a sense of helplessness. Keep in mind, this progression does not have a timetable, and everyone has a different capacity for stress tolerance.

Minimizing and Mitigating Burnout

To minimize burnout, you must be able to operate on two different proficiency levels. The first is personal. You come to camp with a personal story of who you are, which is made up of many things like background, education, personality, and experience. These traits are uniquely yours and will form the basis of how you interpret your job. The second is professional. This is a set of standards, ethical decisions, judgment calls, and behavior choices that define why you do things.

Understanding your levels of proficiency and the reasons why you act and react the way you do will help close the gap between knowing the steps to achieve your goals (motivation) and deciding not to take action (panic zone). This is known as the knowing-doing gap (Pfeffer, 1999), which can be caused by several factors, including risk aversion, competition, policies, or cultural barriers.

To further diminish or reverse the effects of burnout, you’ll likely need to address the two main causes — the camp environment and your thought processes. To keep it simple, view the camp environment as the format by which things happen and yourself as the way it happens. If you recognize that you are struggling, here are a number of strategies you can try to get into a better headspace:

• Change work patterns. Get permission to change up your routines, take breaks, or delegate age-appropriate tasks to campers.
• Practice self-care. Get more sleep. Eat nutritious meals that offer sufficient proteins, fat, and fiber to stabilize your mood and energy (Varma, 2025). Stay hydrated, and wear comfortable shoes.
• Work on mindfulness. Try meditation or yoga to relax your body. Start a journal to get worries off your mind and process stress (Varma, 2025).
• Pay attention to your energy and motivation levels. Try to assess and discuss stress levels prior to any big camp project, and plan how you will share responsibilities with coworkers.
• Improve interpersonal skills. Make sure your communication is clear and kind, practice timely conflict resolution, and use nonconfrontational body language.
• Seek answers. Whether it’s the camp director, a mentor, or someone in the health center, find the key staff who can help you if you need additional direction or assistance with your anxiety and stress.

Use these strategies to help flip the burnout paradigm. If certain parts of camp life are stressing you out, proactively work to fix the issues. Instead of giving up or allowing your mental exhaustion to worsen, think about what you do well and build on that success. If going on a high element on the ropes course terrifies you, learn how to belay, spot, or coach. It is a great way to stay connected while working on your own abilities.

Processing Tip

If you want to be valued but don’t have a lot of confidence in your skill set, ask this question: “What can I do to be more helpful?” Help yourself and focus on what you can do. Here are some ideas:

• Join a camp committee.
• Plan an event.
• Volunteer outside your area.
• Encourage a younger camper with some extra help.
• Communicate your desire to be of service, and ask a supervisor for ideas.

Burnout is a psychological syndrome brought on by chronic interpersonal stressors (Leiter, 2016). If you can relieve the stress, you should be able to reverse course and reset. Try taking a two-step approach to resolving stress. Discuss your situation with someone you trust, and see if the pressure point has an obvious fix or can be ironed out through a workable intervention. Then find something you are interested in doing and spend a little extra time in that area. Nature, horses, sports, crafts, and drama are great areas for individual participation. Focusing on an area that you find relaxing or stimulating in a positive way can help you to develop some mental stability and reduce anxiety, which, in turn, can make your routine tasks feel less rigorous.

One fascinating thing about burnout is that some people know how to avoid it altogether. Think about singers who sing the same songs at every concert or teachers who always show understanding — or fellow camp staff who have extraordinary patience. What are they doing that withstands the pressure of stress? I asked this exact question to camp staff over the past two summers, and three strong patterns emerged from their answers to my informal survey:

• Emotional intelligence can be applied to avoid stress. Using your emotional intelligence, you can recognize, understand, and manage emotions that guide your behavior.
• It is important to know how to set boundaries by communicating your limits. You can see this in relationships, time management, and personal choices.
• Your value system and individual principles can help to guide you on judgment calls and other potentially time-consuming decisions.

In short, using your cognitive abilities to limit excess drama frees a lot of energy for positive alternatives and helps to maintain a clear perspective.

The dangers of not addressing burnout can be catastrophic. Loss of productivity, a negative summer experience, compromised camper relationships, and lingering self-esteem issues are just a few of the possibilities. Burnout, if unchecked, can lead to substandard programming, performance issues, and staff turnover — all of which have a very real cost for your camp.

If you start seeing signs of burnout in yourself or one of your colleagues, make sure you don’t ignore them. If left uncontrolled, burnout can drain your energy and motivation as well as compromise both your experience and that of your campers. Summer at camp can be long, hot, and yes, stressful at times — but it’s well worth the effort. Take advantage of the resources your camp has to offer if you become overwhelmed or your confidence starts to slide, practice good self-care, and know your limits. At the end of the summer, you’ll be able to say you powered through the downtimes and made a positive difference in the lives of your campers.

Discussion Questions

1. What’s one self-care action you can take now that will protect you from burnout later?
2. What do your body and mind feel like when you find yourself in the panic zone, and how does it help to be aware of those feelings?
3. What camp activity do you find the most exhausting, and how can you work with others make it less so?

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Photos courtesy of Oak Crest Day Camp, Somerset, NJ; Forest Lake Camp, Chestertown, NY.

References

180 Engineering. (2025, September 30). Five tips to prevent the new workforce threat: Quiet cracking. 180engineering.com/five-tips-to-prevent-the-new-workforce-threat-quiet-cracking

Cassidy, F. (2020, January 31). What is job burnout and how can you deal with it? Raconteur. Raconteur.net/talent-culture/job-burnout-guide

Dike, C. (2017). Stress vs. burnout. assets.raconteur.net/uploads/2020/01/stress-vs-burnout-a.png

Leiter, C. M. (2016, June 5). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. National Library of Medicine. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4911781

Pfeffer, J. (1999, November 1). The knowing-doing gap. Insights by Stanford Business. Gsb.stanford.edu/insights/knowing-doing-gap

Psychology Today. (2026). Burnout. psychologytoday.com/us/basics/burnout?msockid=31ff027b5c586381080710fb5def6240

Varma, S. (2025, February 3). Preventing burnout: A guide to protecting your well-being. American Psychiatric Association. psychiatry.org/news-room/apa-blogs/preventing-burnout-protecting-your-well-being

Greg Cronin, MPA, CPM, CCD, CPRP, was a camp director for over 30 years and has been training staff since the early 1980s. He is a nationally known conference speaker, consultant, staff trainer, author, former American Camp Association National Board member, standards visitor, and corporate trainer with more than 200 clients nationwide. Greg has trained thousands of camp staff on youth development and leadership. He has appeared on TV, radio, and Capitol Hill as a spokesperson for the camp experience and is a frequent contributor to Camping Magazine. Greg is featured in ACA’s “By the Expert” book series with chapters on leadership and staff training. To book Greg for staff orientations, training, and workshops, please email [email protected] or call 703-295-6661.