I stopped home last Saturday afternoon to run a few errands and catch up on some of those family responsibilities that mothers are always reminding their children to do. It was a nice change of pace for a Saturday afternoon.

So after I had accomplished most of what I had set out to do, I delegated myself a break, grabbed a soda, clicked on the television and picked up the paper. It wasn’t long before the program on whatever channel was on, caught my attention.

It was, I found out after a barrage of commercials, a network special report on stress. I watched for a while but soon flipped the channel to M*A*S*H.

It wasn’t that the information wasn’t interesting. I guess I thought that on such a laid-back afternoon, it just didn’t apply to me. Maybe it was because stress was out of sight and out of mind.

It’s normally part of my everyday life. Stress and deadlines, the stuff that all journalists and students thrive on, right? It becomes a challenge not to let all your responsibilities get the better of you as you push to get everything in.

I didn’t think about stress again until the next morning when, cup of coffee in hand, I opened my Sunday’s Chicago Tribune and found an in-depth feature on burnout.

At the bottom of the page was a box with a quiz (taken from Dr. Herbert Freudenberger’s book “Burn Out—The High Cost of Achievement”) for readers to take to check and see if they’re over stressed and burning out.

Later that night, after prompting by a Star co-worker who had taken it earlier, I found a pen and took this quiz:

“Consider each question in light of how much you’ve changed over the past six months. If the change is great, assign 5 points to the answer. If there’s been little or no change, assign only 1 point.

. Do you tire more easily?

2. Are people annoying you by telling you, ‘You don’t look so good lately’?

3. Are you working harder and accomplishing less?

4. Are you increasingly cynical and disenchanted?

5. Do you feel a sadness you can’t explain?

6. Are you more forgetful?

7. Are you increasingly irritable?

8. Are you seeing close friends and family less often?

9. Are you too busy to do routine things like make phone calls, read reports, send cards?

0. Are you having more aches and pains?

1. Do you feel out of sorts when your busy day comes to a standstill?

2. Is joy elusive?

3. Can you laugh at yourself?

4. Does sex seem like more trouble than it’s worth?

5. Do you have very little to say to people?

Add up your points and see how you rate on the burnout scale: 0-25 points, you’re OK; 36-50 points, you’re a burnout candidate; 51-65, you are burning out; 65 and over, you’re living dangerously and threatening your physical and mental well-being.”

After both of us had taken the quiz we compared scores. He was a burnout candidate, I was burning out, and it’s only the third week of school. The scariest thing is that I doubt we are the only ones on this campus who would score this way.

We spend our lives under stress and often it seems the harder we work, the less we get done. And so we desperately work trying to keep up but then get to the point where everything seems hopeless. Then we get depressed and often ill.

Whether you know you’re a stress addict, or even if it’s something you think you have control of, burnout is always lurking just around the corner. What needs to be kept in mind is the fact that stress and burnout are not selective, anyone is susceptible. The trick is to watch out for it and learn how to deal with it during the rough times.

In a time when the already fast-paced world keeps getting faster, and there never seems to be an end to life’s never-ending demands, we all need to remember that it’s OK to call time out and take a break.