Motivation or Mental Health Struggles? What’s Really Going on With Students This Time of Year

Sadly, I don’t have my own student coaching clients anymore (one of the downsides of the Anti-Boring Learning Lab growing—a classic “good problem,” and still a bit of a bummer). These days, my window into what’s actually happening in the world of students and schools comes from a different place: our weekly Anti-Boring Certified hangout.

It’s such a sweet drop-in space — unfacilitated, low-pressure, and wide-ranging. Coaches might talk about student needs, new tech tools, the weather wherever they are in the world, or whatever craft project is currently taking over their dining room table. We call it our “water cooler.”

And beneath the casual vibe, something else is happening.

It’s also a place where coaches can get real support around whatever’s going on in their client load — because this work can be surprisingly lonely if you don’t have a knowledgeable, compassionate community to turn to.

During last week’s call (our second one in January), a distinct theme emerged, kicked off by one coach’s comment:

“Has anyone else noticed the kids are dropping like flies?”

I asked her to say more.

She explained that in her executive function coaching practice, they’ve had four students drop out of coaching recently. These students didn’t leave because academics suddenly improved — they left so they could move into therapy and access more intensive mental health support.

Around the Zoom room, heads nodded. A few coaches chimed in with similar stories from their own practices. This has also been showing up in asynchronous posts in our chat lounge, which makes it feel less like an anomaly and more like a pattern — especially in January.

So I want to pause here and ask: have you noticed this, too?

Students in Crisis This Time of Year

After the call, I mentioned this pattern in an email to a coach who recently left the Lab to pursue her PhD. I said something like, “It feels like kids are really in crisis right now.”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Students are in crisis right now,” she said. “I see this in most of my new students. Students who have been with me for a few years are doing better — not because life is easier, but because we’ve built language around stress and an understanding of how it shows up. We manage it together.”

“But new students,” she added, “especially in the last few months, need so much more support.”

What stayed with me was that distinction — not between motivated and unmotivated students, but between students who already have language and tools, and students who are still trying to make sense of what’s happening inside them.

That distinction matters as we look at what coaches are naming right now — and why motivation is so often the word everyone reaches for.

When “Motivation” Is the Word Everyone Reaches For

As more coaches tried to put language to what they were seeing, one word kept coming up: motivation. Or rather, the lack thereof.

In our chat lounge, a coach shared about a high school senior she’s been working with. During sessions, he never has a win to share. He can’t name anything he’s proud of. He doesn’t offer ideas about what he wants to work on. He won’t share his calendar (“it’s private”), and he rarely opens the grade portal unless they’re actively working through it together. Mostly, he just answers questions as they go.

It’s taken three months for him to open up even a little.

When he does talk, he’s very clear about one thing: he feels no motivation. He’s said out loud that he wants to conserve as much effort as possible and do only what he absolutely needs to do. From his perspective, this is simply being efficient.

From the coaching chair, it’s harder to make sense of.

His coach has tried a lot of thoughtful things. She’s worked through motivation barriers, shared science about effort and reward, and even offered to build a dopamine menu together. Nothing has really landed.

The one thing he is motivated to do? Learn more about motivation.

Her instinct is that mental health counseling might actually be a good next step. But she also wants to respond to what he’s asking for right now: the science of motivation. He’s hoping it will help him understand why he feels “not motivated.”

This Student Wasn’t an Outlier

As more coaches shared in our Certified Coaches hangout, it became clear this wasn’t an isolated story.

Others described a wave of college students who couldn’t seem to motivate themselves to put in effort, even as coaches increased support, scaffolding, and encouragement.

Across all of these examples, the surface presentation sounded the same: lack of motivation, disengagement, a sense that nothing was working.

Taken together, it became harder to believe that motivation alone could explain what coaches were seeing.

So why does January seem to be such a rough time for students — especially this year?

Why Now Is a Breaking Point for Students

When coaches started asking why this was showing up so strongly right now, the answer wasn’t a single cause. What emerged instead was a sense of convergence — multiple pressures stacking up at the same time, with very little built-in relief.

January as a convergence point

January isn’t just the middle of the school year. It’s the point where the calendar keeps moving, but the body hasn’t caught up.

By January, the school year is already four months in. The routines are familiar. The novelty is long gone. Winter break offered a pause, but not a reset — just enough distance for students to notice how tired they actually are.

Academic demands ramp up quickly, often without a soft re-entry. There’s pressure to “lock in” grades, talk about finals, or map out the rest of the year — all while students are still recalibrating after time off.

For many students, the coping strategies that carried them through the fall quietly stop working. Nothing obvious has gone wrong. They’re just out of capacity.

Mental health already under strain

January doesn’t create these struggles — it exposes them.

Many students arrive at this point in the year with far less emotional and cognitive margin than they had in the fall. Part of that is ordinary midyear fatigue. But part of it is something deeper.

Over the last semester and over the past few years, students’ baseline for stress and recovery has quietly shifted. They’re entering moments of increased academic demand with less buffer than they used to have.

For students without consistent support to help them interpret what they’re feeling, this strain often shows up not as visible distress, but as withdrawal — fewer words, flatter affect, minimal engagement.

In other words, January isn’t exhausting students on its own. It’s revealing how thin the margin has become.

The loss of a reset: rolling gradebooks

“I think it might be the rolling gradebooks,” one of the coaches said.

“The what?” I replied.

I hadn’t heard of them before — another reminder that coaches often see new shifts in school culture up close, long before they show up in broader conversations. Around the Zoom room, several coaches nodded immediately. Apparently, I was one of the few who’d missed this one.

Rolling gradebooks, they explained, are systems where grades accumulate across the entire year, with no clean semester or quarter reset.

And just as students are entering January already depleted, many school structures quietly remove one of the most powerful tools for recovery: a reset.

One coach described working with a student who seemed to be stuck in a never-ending semester.

“Wait… when does your semester end?” she finally asked — only to realize it essentially didn’t.

Without a blank slate, low grades don’t stay in the past. They linger. They follow students forward. And for students who are already tired, the sense that there’s no way to “start over” can make effort feel pointless before it even begins.

A broader backdrop that doesn’t help

All of this is unfolding inside a wider social and emotional climate that is actively unsettling.

Students in the United States — and in many places around the world — are living amid rising political extremism and increasingly aggressive government actions that affect real people’s safety, stability, and sense of belonging. Many are watching institutions behave in ways that feel unpredictable, punitive, or openly hostile. For some students and families, this isn’t abstract — it’s personal and frightening.

Even when students can’t name these pressures directly, they show up in bodies first: in attention, regulation, sleep, and energy. When the nervous system is under sustained threat, motivation is often one of the first things to go.

None of these factors on their own fully explain what coaches are seeing. But together, they help make sense of why so many students are presenting as “unmotivated” right now.

When stress accumulates faster than recovery, effort doesn’t disappear because students don’t care — it disappears because their systems are overloaded.

What Can We Do to Help Students’ Mental Health Right Now?

We can’t remove all of these pressures — and we’re not meant to. But we can be thoughtful about how we respond when motivation is the thing that gives way first.

As the conversation wrapped up, a few reminders kept surfacing — less as a checklist, and more as a shift in how coaches and students themselves are interpreting what they’re seeing and experiencing.

What felt most consistent wasn’t a new strategy, but a different stance: moving away from trying to “fix” motivation, and toward helping students make sense of what their experience is telling them.

Here are a few grounded ways coaches described responding:

• Treat “lack of motivation” as information, not a verdict.
  When nothing seems to be working, slow yourself down before changing the plan. Ask what might be underneath the perceived lack of motivation. Is the student protecting themselves from overwhelm? Is there a capacity issue that hasn’t been named yet? Or is a temporary shift in the purpose or tone of coaching needed — from growth to stabilization, or from pushing forward to holding steady for a while?

• Offer tools that help students sort motivation from capacity.
  Sometimes an interesting self-assessment can do two things at once: pique a student’s curiosity and give them a clearer place to start. The Motivation Checklist is a free tool designed to help educators sit alongside students as they explore what they mean when they say they’re “not motivated,” and whether stress, overload, or mental health might be part of the picture. It’s available in our Visitor’s Center if you’d like to try it with a student.

• Keep teaching the Emotional Regulation Mini-Lectures.
  Many coaches are leaning heavily on the Anti-Boring mini-lectures that help students understand stress and the nervous system. These short lessons give students language for what they’re experiencing — and help them make sense of their reactions without feeling broken or behind. This kind of language-building is something we focus on inside the Lab.

• Right-size the work within the coaching container.
  When a student is shutting down or feeling overwhelmed, it can be supportive to narrow the focus of sessions. Work on fewer goals at a time. Help students decide where their limited energy is most worth spending right now — even when the overall workload isn’t changing.

• Notice when coaching isn’t the right container anymore.
  Sometimes the most supportive move is recognizing that a student needs something different for a while. When mental health needs become primary, coaching may pause or shift — moving away from skill-building and toward helping families connect with the right supports beyond coaching.

And I’m curious — what are you noticing right now? Are you seeing similar patterns, or something different altogether? And just as importantly, what have you found that’s actually helping — even in small ways? If you’re open to it, I’d love for you to share in the comments. This work is better when we’re comparing notes.

None of these are sweeping solutions. They don’t remove pressure, fix systems, or make hard seasons disappear.

But together, they point to something steady: when students have language, understanding, and a trusted adult helping them interpret what’s happening, they’re better able to stay engaged — even when school, life, and the world feel like a lot.

And it’s worth naming this clearly: if your work feels harder right now, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong. Students are struggling this season. Many adults are too. January is often a time when capacity is low and demands feel heavy — even for people who usually cope well.

Part of the work right now is meeting that reality with steadiness rather than self-critique. Being kind to yourself, adjusting expectations, and naming the difficulty honestly are not signs of giving up. They’re signs that you’re paying attention.