Sleep Quality, Mental Wellbeing, and Self-Esteem as Predictors of Creative Burnout Among Pakistani University Art Students: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Background: University art students operate in a psychologically challenging environment that is defined by studio deadlines, criticism, producing portfolios, being judged and evaluated publicly, and relevance to identity of creative work. The paper investigated the correlations between mental wellbeing and sleep quality with self-esteem and creative burnout among Pakistani art students of universities.

Procedure: A dataset of quantitative cross-sectional survey data of 357 students of the university were cleaned, coded and analysed. The free-text institutional entries, branches, affiliated colleges and subcampuses were consolidated into six parent institution groups to report data collections and conduct institutional analysis: Bahauddin Zakariya University (BZU), Islamia University Bahawalpur (IUB), National College of Arts (NCA), University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Government College University Faisalabad (GCUF), and University of Okara. Rossedale addressing the responses of missing items relied on defensible level of scale-level generalization across existing responses through prorated/person-mean scoring when there was a sufficient amount of within-scale data.

Findings: Self-esteem and inversely self-esteem were found to have a positive correlation with mental wellbeing and a negative correlation with creative burnout, respectively. The low-quality of sleep was linked to less self-esteem and increased creative burnout. The last adjusted model revealed poorer sleep, less mental wellbeing and less self-esteem were independent predictors of creative burnout. The Bootstrap mediation showed that self esteem partially mediated the relationships of both wellbeing and sleep quality with creative burnout. Gender disparities occurred the most with respect to sleep quality whereby the female students rated as having poor sleep.

Conclusions: The results suggest the use of a prevention model where sleep health, wellbeing promotion, and self-esteem support are incorporated in university counselling and studio-based services to the students. The cultural sensitivity, non-stigmatization, and cultural integration of academic systems should be the key factors in preventing burnout among Pakistani art students.