Recent years have witnessed the emergence of student burnout and academic pressure as critical issues that higher educational institutions face across the globe (Neumann et al., 2016; Chong et al., 2025; Olson et al., 2025). University students must handle multiple academic responsibilities which include their heavy study loads together with their strict submission timelines and their need to compete with other students while meeting their own personal standards. The combination of these academic requirements together with the social and financial demands on students will result in negative consequences for their mental health and their ability to stay motivated and their overall health (Abdullah et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2025). The result of this situation leads to students experiencing emotional exhaustion together with stress and anxiety and loss of interest in their academic work.

Burnout establishes a common definition which describes it as a condition that results in full-body exhaustion through both physical and emotional and mental states because of continuous work under stressful conditions (Neumann et al., 2016; Jagodics & Szabó, 2022). Academic institutions experience burnout as a condition that results in decreased academic performance together with diminished learning participation and higher student dropout rates (Barusi & Kurniawati, 2024; Shamim et al., 2025). Academic pressure describes the academic stress that students experience when they attempt to meet the academic standards which their instructors and their family members and society expect from them. Students who face this type of academic pressure will experience serious psychological effects which will disrupt their regular daily activities (Zhang et al., 2025; Olson et al., 2025).

University students need to meet two main demands which require them to maintain perfect academic performance while achieving maximum employability because university programs now focus more on these two aspects than previous educational systems did (Chong et al., 2025; Jagodics & Szabó, 2022). Students today experience pressure to attain top academic results while participating in extracurricular activities and preparing for their future professional paths. The situation creates a situation that leads students to experience an academic workload imbalance which results in them ignoring their need for self-maintenance.