The psychology of stress and burnout
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Extreme sports or intense physical exertion have been key, for me, in dealing with daily stress.
And no, I'm not some superstar adrenaline pumped athlete, just an amateur that loves skydiving/paragliding/fast motorcycles/hiking/etc over the weekend.
I didn't realize how much these activities help me, until I had to take a break from them for whatever reason (e.g.: winter where it's cold enough that you can't do most sports, but with not enough snow to go skiing or something).
I could almost measure the effects: the longer the break, the lower the threshold for daily stress -- from feeling slightly irritated to almost angry over the simplest triggers, if enough time had passed.
Then I'd do one skydive and it would make all the difference in the world, whatever daily stressful thing would happen "in the real world" it just felt like it didn't register as dangerous/stressful in the brain.
My feeling is that you can raise your tolerance threshold for what counts as stress, you just have to find out what works for you.
I'm guessing it also has something to do with these activities being very focused, so you're kinda disconnected from what's happening in the world and just truly "in the moment".
Maybe that pause from stress is what does it?
Has anyone else had similar experiences?
I think it boils down to this: The more you value your out-of-the-office life and the more enjoyment you gain from it, the less negative impact your job can have on your life. Of course that's dependent on having a job that permits you to have a life outside of work, being able to schedule regular out of work activities, and if not, finding the motivation to go do random stuff ad-hoc.
Now I visit a farm every week for ~30mins to see some animals, go ice skating regularly, gym regularly, and give my friends a break from parenting by taking their kids to the park to play.
When I stopped going to the gym regularly, when I started going to bars after work more, drinking more, and my life became more "sleep, work, drink, repeat", my mental state deteriorated, my ability to cope with bullshit at work reduced. Getting something resembling a routine of Good Things I Enjoy outside of work resulted in a near instant turnaround.
Thank you for posting this, I love reading other people having similar life experiences as myself, and I hope you feel the same from this too.
Perfect summary.
> Of course that's dependent on having a job that permits you to have a life outside of work
It probably explains the increased demand for flexible hours.
Although a lot of employers view that as a signal that the employee is a slacker, when I'm actually incredibly more productive if I can just take a break randomly in the middle of the day, do Outside Stuff and continue later.
> Thank you for posting this, I love reading other people having similar life experiences as myself, and I hope you feel the same from this too.
Definitely feeling the same.
One thing I have noticed is that some activities raise that bullshit threshold waaay more than others, and I can't really understand why, it's definitely not because one is more pleasant than the other.
Have you noticed anything similar?
Or desire to not have flexible hours, but go back to rigid 9-5 and to know you'll always be free after 5pm unless the business is burning down (rather than constantly on-call dealing with more bullshit every other day)
> One thing I have noticed is that some activities raise that bullshit threshold waaay more than others, and I can't really understand why, it's definitely not because one is more pleasant than the other.
Not sure if pleasant is the right word, but rather, internally rewarding.
Going to the gym is unpleasant, and whatever muscle group I've worked that day aches for days due to the intensity of the workout, but the end result (looking in the mirror) is hugely rewarding. Going to the farm isn't always very pleasant given the smell of animal droppings, but for some reason, by the time I leave the farm I'm feeling great. Ice skating is also gruelling, I fall a lot, I can't go more than 2-3 times a week as invariably I do something to damage my leg or ankle one of the days, but I still come out feeling great despite the pain.
Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment, and have gone from being punished at work (high stress, high deliverables, high reward, followed by burnout) to similar outside of work.
Then again, I've discovered a love for musical theatre which is no pain but still huge gain (for me).
> It probably explains the increased demand for flexible hours.
> Although a lot of employers view that as a signal that the employee is a slacker, when I'm actually incredibly more productive if I can just take a break randomly in the middle of the day, do Outside Stuff and continue later
That's awesome when you can find that. More often I find that "flexible hours" means "if you're an early bird, you're on your own until we decide to meander in, and expect to hear from us about work at 8pm or 9pm at any point during the week."
Walks in nature also do wonders for alleviating my mood. I've actually started taking outdoor walking breaks at work since the circumstances of this year lead to a lot less opportunity to walk out in nature than usual. This is also why I try not to work in a major city, because I need to see trees, grass, and hopefully flowing water on a regular basis.
This 1000 times. There was nothing physically challenging about the work that burned me out. I wasn't starving to death, I could stop doing it at any time (in theory), and it would have been perfectly manageable for someone in a stronger mental state than me. It was the all consuming, this-work-is-my-life attitude that allowed it to become something so crippling.
The first thing I recommend to anyone that shows early signs of depression is: take care of eating/sleeping/exercising.
Besides giving a concrete plan of action, if you take care of those, quality of life greatly improves, and you can "build" on that, getting out of the rut.
Soccer is one of the few things I do that allows me to interact with people in a completely different professional field.
And working out gives me a sense of accomplishment completely divorced from my career, which I can carry with me all day in the way I feel physically.
All of these help provide context to my life (and reality), which I think helps me deal with stress at work. Another outlet my dad once suggested was reading fiction as a way to remind yourself there's more to the world than your world and to keep things in context.
Some ask how you have time for these activities with work. I ask how you can work without these activities.
Edit: Formatting and expansion.
That 100% focus is probably it then, you're basically relieved from stress for the duration because you don't have time to think about it like when you're "idle".
And the risk of crashing because of wandering thoughts is a pretty good motivator to be focused 100% :)
> And working out gives me a sense of accomplishment completely divorced from my career, which I can carry with me all day in the way I feel physically.
That feeling!
While actually doing it you might, or might not, actually enjoy it, but that whole feeling in your body after you're done... it truly feels like a really rewarding accomplishment.
> Another outlet my dad once suggested was reading fiction as a way to remind yourself there's more to the world than your world and to keep things in context.
It works, but I find that fades pretty quickly, you need to do it really often to persist it.
I don't (think) I'm doing it for the adrenaline, that would have faded sometime in the last 10 years.
Besides, as you said, you can get that cheaper/faster by riding a bicycle in rush hour traffic or standing near a ledge.
I think it's the 100% focus that does it, which sounds similar to what you describe with racing mode.
But once that lesson is learned -- there's not much need for adrenaline. Just rational aggression.
Even when I got a soaking it didn't really matter, you get so wet you can't get much wetter and then get home and have a warm shower.
It was also a great way of getting rid of tension. If you're angry you pedal harder and go faster which is more fun, so breaks any vicious cycle.
But intense physical exertion _is_ stress, so this approach can backfire when your stress load is too high.
Probably because one is achievable and you know more or less how much you've got to go and the other is pretty abstract.
Maybe also the fact that one ends pretty soon (not to mention you can stop at any time) and the other goes on for way longer (and maybe you can't stop it).
At least I get to fly after that :) ... unless the weather changes
Which is to say... if I wanted to be the #1 code all the time coder in the world, I would not want to be training for an Ironman or something that required 15 hours of fairly high physical stress a week.
Or if I wanted to train for an Ironman, I would not also work for a startup with my hair on fire all the time.
Clearly some people do both. Investment bankers love triathlon in fact. It seems to have negative physical effects after a while though... something has to give..
There's a quote in a jump plane that I really like: "you just have to get comfortable with fear"[1].
> What alternatives would you recommend?
Anything that requires you to be 100% focused on the task at hand, or physical exertion (or even both).
The catch is that you need to feel satisfaction from it, and humans suck at predicting what activity is going to give them satisfaction, that's why it's best to just go ahead and try different stuff, see what works.
You can usually tell within the first few minutes if it's for you or not.
You're right though, some activities give me a big ol' "meh", and some make me feel joy right off the bat. Don't know for sure until you try it.
This year's new activity is going to be snowkiting, if we get any snow... (Snowless-November in the Canadian Prairies? What the heck?!)
Even after 10 years, the ride to altitude is the scary part for me -- and others that had the decency to admit it -- as soon as I'm out the door, everything calms down in the body, it's weird.
I'm guessing it's because while in the plane you have very little control over what happens, and the exit is especially dangerous because a lot of weight (skydivers) shift to one part of the plane.
> Snowless-November in the Canadian Prairies? What the heck?!
I feel your pain, we haven't had a decent winter in a few years now.
I climb, have lots of friends who climb who do software. The two seem to go together well.
Like sports, you are never "there", you are always just getting better. You can take a break and play easier pieces just for fun, challenge yourself and practice difficult pieces, or focus on one specific area for improvement like rhythm/counting, switching from classical to jazz for a while, playing crazy orchestra reductions with way too many notes, improving your ear by trying to play along with pop music, etc.
The other nice thing about music is it's convenient to take a half-hour break from work, play/practice a while, then go back to work. It's funny: while I love playing music, I don't much like listening to it when others are playing it. I can spend 2 hours working on Chopin, but am bored after about 15 minutes listening to classical music, even if it's with someone at a concert. Just doesn't do it for me to listen. Played Fr Horn in a band and that was a lot of fun too, lead to friendships, etc.
If you're into it, music is a huge field that you'll never outgrow, even on a single instrument.
It originates from the head but the impact is on the whole body impacting the HPA and other hormonal systems. And later whatever is controlled by them e.g. body fat. And once it impacts the body additional distress signals may be generated there. Healing obviously needs to take into account the head but that may not be enough.
Prevention and early counter measures are very critical!
Nowadays family life provides enough of a contrast to work as does a few holidays in the mountains and some day trips hiking in the countryside.
As a result, I came very close to dying or permanently injuring myself on a couple different occasions – and I am the sole provider for my family with a one and four year old.
If engaging in risky or dangerous activities makes you feel normal or alive, you should probably take that as a warning and maybe get checked out. Can't hurt, anyways.
Yes, it did start as a reckless "last thing I want to do before I die" depression kind of thing while I was a teenager.
Fortunately for me, all the physical effort/socializing/amazing scenery/nature changed my perspective 180° and now I'm a happy camper.
People that knew me before actually commented on how responsible/cautious I've now become with all my hobbies, some even call me grandpa :)
I probably won't be able to do all my hobbies forever, I feel that my reflexes are not what they were, but I'm compensating with experience.
Life is beautiful, I want to experience it as much as possible.
This is a problem. High sensation seeker, (dopamine seeker) with low perception of risk. Understanding risk is a skill. You can improve it through training and applying conscious decision making. Risk management is trying to mitigate the "unknown, unknowns." If you do not understand the risks, you cannot avoid the pitfalls until it stares you in the face.
Risk is also relative. Stand on the side of a busy road you are (mostly) safe. Walk out onto a busy road you are not. It's that stark.
Mark you are really out there :)
He is looking into opening a bakery now, and by the look of it, no amount of convincing is going to change his mind.
So no matter what you do, your mental robustness and coherency comes first. Don't let anybody every come close at touching that.
Btw opening a bakery is an amazing prospect if you go into it full force ahead, with happy thoughts and planning. Opening one as a result of a burnout, well I guess it can be therapeutic, but not sure about the validity of the idea in that case. Taking half a year off everything can probably bring you more life force at your disposal.
I operate a restaurant and I know about 50 people who do. Believe me - there is no shortage of stress and your just as likely, if not more so, to get burned out.
Tell your friend to seriously think twice...
One of the hardest job I took, digging trenches (summer) which made me cry the first week, was one of the less stressful mentally too.
You have a 100# mix of french bread, and it isn't rising properly. Will it continue to rise if you leave it in the proofer long enough, because the water it was mixed with was too cold? Maybe the guy doing the mix forgot the salt, or the yeast (because trust me, unless you're doing the mixes yourself, those things are going to happen).
If the mix will rise eventually, how long will it take? How are you going to change the schedule of the bakes so that the oven is at the right temperature and the bread is finished baking before the local restaurant comes to pick up their daily order?
If the mix is missing an ingredient, do you have time to make a new mix? Do you have room in the freezer for the dead dough, so you can save it to stretch out other mixes? Do you have anything delicate in the freezer that might melt when you dump a hundred pounds of warm dough into the same space?
If you're making a new mix, do you need to order more flour now, because you're using more than you expected? How is this going to impact the rest of the mix schedule?
Repeat that chain of thought for every kind of bread or pastry your bakery sells. It's exhausting as hell, mentally.
Humans have been baking bread for thousands of years. At this very moment I could find 100 sources of information, free and for sale about the specifics of baking bread. I could get these in the context of baking at home, baking for a group, or baking for commerce.
Contrast that with the poster's problem of implementing an architecture for an identity access management system. (I have experience with this).
There is no way to relate the tasks involved in baking for profit to designing and building a working technical system that likely is highly unique to the technologies and circumstances of his environment.
I quite sure IBM could set out to design and build 500 profitable bakeries with their own people and be successful on upwards of 90% of cases. Those people setting out to build 500 different <insert your favorite complex computer system here> would fail upwards 50%.
I'm not saying running a bakery is easy, but I am saying running a bakery is less stressful than implementing a functioning computer system.
Has anybody here claimed the opposite?
Somebody (who I suspect has never worked in a bakery) posited that perhaps the stress of food service was physical, as opposed to mental. That's a guess which sounds reasonable, but it turns out that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in a commercial bakery that are perhaps non-obvious to people who haven't fully considered what goes in to making a successful and financially stable bakery. I wasn't trying to argue that building an operating system is less stressful than a bakery, but I WAS trying to establish that there's plenty of mental stress to go around (in addition to the physical stress of being on your feet and moving around all day) when it comes to working in a bakery.
[1] sandwich preparation, finishing touches for cakes, closer to a starbucks.
I worked there for almost but not quite two years, and by the end I was managing the bread dough for all the mixes (moving things in and out of the proofer and fridge as necessary to make sure they were ready to bake at the right time), mixing all the specialty breads (multi-grain loaf, rye breads, holiday breads, basically everything but the sandwich bread, french bread, hot dog buns, and pizza dough), handling 95 percent of the actual baking, plus I was the person who kept track of the pastry stock, produced and baked pastries, and did the final prep work (frosting the brownies and cakes, etc).
If you're curious, please don't hesitate to ask me how often things went smoothly.
ps: I am not saying thta being the customer interface is easy. Just not in bakeries and some other kinds. My mother was a post office clerk, it was famous for the angered waiting line venting violently on the powerless employees, sometimes physically. I never had to deal with this in the food serving business.
I think it's really easy to look at something from the outside and think "how hard could that really be?" I bet if you asked someone who wasn't in CS how hard an identity management system is, they wouldn't think it is all that hard. Only once you get into the details do the challenges become apparent, and I suspect that's very true for bakeries as well.
For me, it took couple of years and few failed jobs until I got on track. Today, I'm more than happy to be my own boss as freelancer.
[1]: https://remotetogether.slack.comDon't be afraid to say "no" to the client, especially if you have given them an honest estimate and they are pushing you to revise the estimate downward.
How do you land those roles reliably? I have no idea. Some combination of luck and networking, I'd say, as my best positions were always inbound requests. (Generally: Hey Courtland, we saw that you built cool thing X. Could you build the same for us?) It really helps to be in the financial position to say no to anything that doesn't meet your standards.
For me talking about stuff helped me realize i was angry and depressed. It's hard to see how your mind comes up with ideas, an outside observer can point out motivations for behavior that aren't obvious from inside my own head.
Exercise kind of quiets my mind down. While burning out, work kind of hurts. It's not exactly but something like painful to execute. With excercise, I kind of rescale that feeling. Executing on X isn't as bad as running for a half an hour.
Having a couple of friends you can talk to about whatever is nice. Family is great too, but they don't always have the perspective to give helpful insight. Parents, spouses, might not tell you the whole truth, or their perspective is colored by the past. A friend will tell you you're being an idiot, or not.
Also, fellow commenters gave pretty good advice too.
There's something about serving food to people that seems to be the emotional counterpoint of mad tech.
In this case, the primacy of establishing a separate fund as your bank roll, and protecting it by not letting too much of it ride on any single bet (no matter how great the bet seems), is very appropriate to self-funding your own businesses. If you lose your bank roll, then you have to stop gambling, which is bad if you are convinced you have an edge.
*I'm not a gambler of any type, unless you count investing 401k/IRA savings in index oriented ETFs and mutual funds gambling (not an unfair position).
My advice would be to not even consider it without having enough money to sustain yourself for a minimum of 2 times the period you predict will take you to become profitable in your desired venture.
So if you spend 3000 a month, want to become a freelancer and expect it to take you 6 months until you build up steady business you should have a minimum of 36,000 saved up.
I learned this the hard way, hope someone out there heeds this advice.
* Can't or won't keep the accounting books in order.
* Micro-management of staff that want to do the job.
* Under-management of staff that aren't doing the job.
* I /suspect/ not paying the staff enough (in money/respect/etc) to keep good staff and keep the motivated.yes, most restaurants fail, but most businesses fail, because people think of it as some kind of paid vacation rather than an actual job.
getting up at 5am and making croissants is a very different thing than getting up at 5am and dealing with people screaming at you because an api endpoint isn't functioning.
this applies to any business.
> Every task that happens in back and front of house has a very specific start time and a very specific duration allowance - there is no flexibility and no opportunity for pacing or giving yourself some slack.
you've clearly never worked in ops or SRE. or working in a mine, on an oil rig, or on an airplane, or a squad car.
not everyone lives the life of a spoiled computer programmer which seems to be your baseline for evaluation.
At the end of a hard day in the kitchen I'm ready to go hang out with friends and enjoy my free time.
At the end of a hard day as a software dev I can hardly string a sentence together and want to go be by myself.
Likewise in the kitchen I didn't get given completely unrealistic timeframes. As long as I focused and worked hard it was all good.
As a software dev I constantly have pressure to perform miracles and hit unrealistic deadlines from all sides. And the pressure is cumulative. If I have a bad day today I'm going to have to work extra hard and under more pressure the rest of the week to catch up.
If the food services industry paid as well as software dev I'd go back in a heartbeat.
Another way to look at it is, nobody can tell you what to do unless you're willing to hear it from them -- so always be mindful and reasonably opinionated about who you have at your "ear".
Baking for friends is a fun way to pass the time. Baking for money is a quick road to a second burn out; it was literally years before I was able to stomach the thought of baking cookies or bread for my wife after I left the bakery I worked at.
Maybe it's because I grew up in a working class mexican neighborhood where trades and unskilled work are the majority of occupations, but sitting in an office chair for 7hrs a day is paradise compared to baking, mechanics, or any type of manual labor.
This is the real problem with manual labor, low-skilled labor, and jobs like baking.
The real stress isn't the day to day work, it's knowing that you are slowly wearing down your body but not earning enough to "get out of the game".
It's lack of financial security.
If as a baker you could buy a nice home and pay it off in 7-10 years it wouldn't be such a tough gig.
8+ hours a day, 5-7 days a week, nearly every week for years on end is liable to turn any hobby in to a slog eventually. Except for some people and some hobbies it doesn't. Somehow some people make it work, and enjoy it in the long run, without burning out.
Don't ask me how. I haven't found that magic job myself, and always tend to burn out on anything eventually. I need variety. I can't do any one thing for the long run without getting sick of it. Unfortunately, making career changes is difficult and stressful. So I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe someone who's made it work for themselves can chime in.
This led to an accumulation of adverse events I was too stressed to effectively manage. Including especially physical injuries that had lasting negative effects.
I "hung in there" until my early 40's, when a career blow knocked the last pin out from under me.
I knew what I needed and wanted to do next. But I was frozen.
Physical health issues have continued to accumulate and to paint me into a corner.
Guard your physical health! Without it, life is much harder, and one problem tends to become two, become three...
Your physical health is the basis of your mental health and well-being. When you are physically unhealthy, it is much harder to be positive and productive. Especially when symptoms weigh on you persistently and take away your ability to focus and think effectively and to be comfortably social.
There is precious little in life that is worth the sacrifice of your physical health. And beware of scenarios that suggest or demand a trade-off against some future promise.
Those reassurances most often simply serve the person or system demanding the sacrifice. And it is a sacrifice -- don't expect to "get it back."
As part of a start-up you're expected to be insanely productive at all times - so much so - that "normal" productivity feels like you're spinning your wheels and not getting anything done.
The other side is the company encouraging being a "hero". Being the one who can do anything, who gets X, Y, Z done on time, even if it takes all night. The praise and recognition fades quickly - as you realize you've set the expectation such that you can function at 200% at all times. (And you start feeling stressed as you fall to 150%, to 120%, to 100%.)
Some of the comments in this thread are spot on. For the level where I'm at (not full-bore burnout), I'm trying to prioritize my life outside of work again (aka have a life outside work). Sleep well, exercise, pick up hobbies again, go for hikes again, and so on.
Burning out to me - is letting work take up a disproportionate amount of your time and mental energy - so much so that the microcosm of work starts feeling like the most important thing.
Getting out of it (for me) is all about regaining that perspective.
Many people struggle to even achieve 100% most of the time. Work consumes such great amounts of energy that not much fun can be had on evenings or weekends. Going out with friends? Forget it. Laying down is most that can be done. Even though that work is only 8-10 hours each day (not much considering how much many people work) there is nothing left at the end of the day. All energy is spent on just keeping oneself alive and getting by. Sometimes even that is too much and after years of a seemingly good job, everything is gone. Quitting is not an option since there is not much money saved. Working less won't provide the money needed to keep on going. Changing jobs won't cut it since all other jobs would be worse. With friends forgotten and family dead, there is no point to keep on going.
To get over burnout, you need a series of successes. Create small, attainable goals and complete them. Engineers in particular need a sense of accomplishment. This way you will look forward to you next endeavor instead of dread it.
Those easy wins then made it easier to focus and successfully complete a major 9 month infrastructure overhaul without any downtime(!), and while the sense of accomplishment from completing that successfully was huge (and the bonus wasn't bad either), the stress during that period was extremely high, and the resulting burnout was very real. A few months later, as that became obvious, I quit my job. It took more than 15 months off work before I began to feel even slightly recovered.
EDIT: and to tie this in to my other post[0], it's also worth noting that all I was doing during this period was "sleep, work, drink, repeat", which no doubt contributed to it.
I like the simplicity and elegance of that definition. It means work, pressure, "stress", pain, etc., are all completely irrelevant as long as there are enough successes over some interval of time.
It went great! But, it was very busy, and I couldn't hit pause because i was teaching a live class. Took me 3-4 months to recover, and I got almost nothing done.
I was running over capacity, and I knew it (I also knew it was temporary, which is why I did it). Yet it was anything but a failure!
[1] - http://sup.org/books/title/?id=25725
[2] - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/01/we-have-bec...
Recipe for burnout is inverse of recipe for success
Word Overload: Job demands exceed human limits.
Lack of control: Inability to influence decisions that affect your job.
...
[0] http://www.slideshare.net/botchagalupe/does16-london-better-...
For what I could get from the article, under (mild) stress your thinking becomes sharper, but as it lasts longer, it breaks you down and you can't handle stressful spikes.
So, perhaps, not being stressed all day long is the key? I mean, just surf the stressful spikes, don't have a light stress constantly, because you won't be able to deal with those hard moments of stress (and yes, they will come someday and all you've gained from the light-stress-boost will be thrown away because you'll burn out).
So, worrying about money or being fired or <insert real life problem> all day every day will wear you down and limit your ability to reason. There's not much brainpower left over. This is why it's, for example, difficult to be super productive at work when you're going through a divorce or dealing with a breakup. And why it's never a good idea to launch a new product while moving house.
But, going bungee jumping or downhill mountain biking or racing cars or just driving too fast on the freeway. That's relaxing. Gives you focus, gets you away from the chronic stressors and into the immediate. Wonderful.
citation needed
For example, the blood becomes thicker in order to clot faster when you are bleeding. However, with chronic stress, this can cause thrombosis.
Under stress, the stomach stops the digestion so that the energy goes into running to flee the danger. With chronic stress, your stomach is messed up and you get all sort of indigestion.
And so on. Many examples of changes that have a simple explanation but are hazardous in chronic stress situations.
For reference, read the Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers or anything by Robert Sapolsky.
It seems to follow that stress is useful when it's really needed to make you sharper, but one should prioritize getting out of that state as soon as possible.
At the time, like a frog in warming water, I constantly normalised it - working 20 hours a day for a year isn't stressful, it's heroic! I enjoy this! I thrive on stress. The booze? Oh, that's just to help keep me awake.
About four years ago I stopped eating and sleeping properly - I mean, previous to that I hadn't done either properly either, but four years ago it ceased to be voluntary. I lost huge amounts of weight. I told people I was on a diet. I started having bouts of delirium and puking that would put me out of action for days or weeks on end, unable to sip water even, slipping in and out of sweaty consciousness. I told myself I was just really unlucky with food poisoning.
About six months ago I just stopped - couldn't go on, couldn't face another day in the hell I'd created for myself, stomach knotted from anxiety and hunger but not hunger. Went on sabattical. Watched mountains for months. Read. Cried. Ranted and raved. Began to heal. Got medical help. Discovered that I had given myself a stress driven syndrome not really seen since children in fucking Victorian workhouses - cyclical vomiting syndrome.
Gave notice. Sold equity to company, made orderly transition. Three months on, I'm still coming to terms - beginning to remember wanting things, having desires, not feeling like every moment not spent working was a betrayal - being able to feel something like joy. Above everything else, I haven't puked in months and I'm even beginning to have to watch my weight.
The main thing I've learned on reflection is that I did this to myself. I chose roles and responsibilities that crushed me, and I failed to emotionally disinvest in the company as it grew. I also habituated stress to the degree that I didn't even perceive it as stress, and denied it to myself even as I ground my teeth to aching stumps. In hindsight, I can of course aim to not put myself in the same situation again, but at the time I had nothing to really check my reality against. People around me were supportive - but rather than saying "hey, you're killing yourself", it would be "want another coffee? Need smokes? You work so hard." - so essentially enabled the behaviour rather than confronting it. There's an almost dangerously cultish obsession with industriousness in our society.
I digress.
The other thing I learned that I hadn't really understood was that stress can ruin your physical, not just mental, health.
> There's an almost dangerously cultish obsession with industriousness in our society.
Yes!
I hope she continues to find a way through it - it sucked even more when I had no idea what it was, and was rationalising it, sometimes into nightmarish proportions.
Yes, exactly. This behavior is encouraged and ingrained in just about every aspect of Western culture (especially American culture), and it's ruining people's lives. "I pulled myself by my bootstraps, so you should too! Nevermind I did it right after WW2 when America was most prosperous and other countries were rebuilding, nothing has changed at all in 50 years, you can easily do it too!"
People pretty much have to go through burnout themselves in order to stop buying into the cult-like behavior.
I spent most of my 20s working for startups and constantly being stressed out and working crazy hours because they weren't doing so well, and I wanted them to succeed. It took being hospitalized for me to finally disconnect from it a bit.
I also didn't look as hard as I should have for a new job when I was laid off, and that time helped me recover, although it wrecked my finances in the meantime, which I'm still recovering from.
Best of luck to you.
It's too easy for many high-performing people to display an image that it's all cake, no stress - even when they're secretly being crushed. Then, other high-performing people see them and think, 'that person does so much and barely breaks a sweat - I've got to pick up my game.' And, then it spreads and spreads until we are all secretly playing the game and slowly killing ourselves.
Not too long ago, I walked away from a potentially large payout. It sucks to think about it. But, I had enough money in the bank, and it just was not worth it. I was the company's hero, the core of the technology, and I was leading many of my younger employees along my same self-destructive path. On the surface I looked invincible and had answers for everyone and could take on every task, but on lunch breaks I was doing shots of whiskey in my car.
You can read from the other comments that it is not common knowledge yet what stress actually does to you.
Stress as a facility is useful for humans and other animals. It helps the body to focus on the threat and increase the chance to escape and survive. Stress makes a tiny damage to the health but once you survive, the body returns to health.
However, there are cases where you have long-term continuous stress, without any release. It is common with social animals like humans, and an example is the burn-out. The tiny damage becomes major damage and can be irreversible.
You mean de-stressed, not distressed: the captain of the Titanic sent out a distress call because his ship was sinking, while the string quartet played music in hopes of de-stressing the ill-fated passengers.
Well... isn't it?
I actually phrased it as "it's all in your head" to highlight that you _can_ do something about it, unlike cancer, it's something you can control by power of mind/will (not saying it's easy).
- formerly burned out.
So is a brain tumor or glaucoma, in a literal sense, but I doubt many people would seriously use the expression "all in your head" for any of those. In my experience it's overwhelmingly used for anxiety and depression, with the implication being that there's no hard physical problem and that you just need to change your habits/attitude/beliefs (which, incidentally, is an approach that is notably ineffective for schizophrenia, apart from being done with others as a harm reduction mechanism).
I was there, and then one of my friends died, which triggered me to quit my job, which ultimately led to me being able to get enough mental acumen back and make good decisions to lead myself out of the hole I'd dug myself into.
Over 15 months before I was capable of getting myself back into the workforce properly. Fortunately I have very understanding family who let me live with them rent free, and had saved enough that I was able to do this. Not everyone is this fortunate.
This is very hard, to be sure. But it is possible, and while I'm not sure I'd agree that it's absolutely necessary to recovery, it certainly does make that outcome vastly more probable.
Of course this is hardly a new concept. But, for reasons beyond my knowledge at this time, it seems almost never to be usefully expressed. We see it everywhere from "oh, just cheer up, it's all in your head!" to the Christian doctrine that the only truly unforgivable sin is that of despair - but only rarely anything that's likely to help those who need it most.
So not only it is not helpful, but it is infuriating to be repeatedly lectured about the same old wives' advices he already knows, as if he was stupid.
I won't even comment on the abyssal stupidity of your last sentence, you really have no clue of what you're talking about.
The going for walks, making sure I spend time with friends, etc, is what I do now to insure that burnout is a lot less likely to happen again. It does seem to help considerably.
I had to go through a long period of stress and burnout to really believe that burnout was something that could happen to me, though, and take preventative measures seriously.
> "go for a walk" or "work out" or "sleep more"
is actually sound advice to bring back normality. "Fake it until you make it" is part of recovering and becoming a "normal person" again. Those "normal people" giving you the advice catch depression like one catches a cold. They suffer for three days and then it vanishes again and the sun begins to rise in the moring. They don't understand the concept of eternal darkness and slow but steady decay while being still technically alive.
In order to recover the source of the illness needs to be cut out from ones body and life, whatever the source is. Sometimes (often) it's not even obvious.
Yes, you are in pain, yes, you are broken, yes, you cannot go back to your old life. But there might be a new life you can evolve into. You probably have to let go of things you hold dearly. Habits, people, substances, part of your senses, part of your body, your goals, your beliefs, etc. whatever it is that makes you sick.
Here is what it comes down to: you can put a dollar figure on the money saved from going with an open office plan. You can't easily put a dollar figure on lost productivity due to conversations going on around you.
Long answer: If you really feel this strongly about your working environment then you should seriously consider telling your manager. It's in their best interests that you're happy/comfortable/working as smoothly as you can. If they can't or won't change your situation, look for another employer. Ten years, Christ.
Actually I've had 3 over the past ten years. They're all the same. You've never noticed?
* work from home
* rent a private room in a co-working space
Use passive insulation, either in high quality headphones or ear defenders (much cheaper, but no music).
That's why you have fewer guards in that system.
It breaks down when folks stop getting 'caught'.
But for my part, I don't know how you'd work under those conditions. I have a hard enough time working from home with my wife on the other side of the house teaching kids violin. I have both over the ear headphones and IEMs, though... that might help?
i mean come on.
o.p. has had three different employers in 10 years (and actually this goes back more like 15 years, since "open offices" became a fad, and five different employers). Every place is exactly the same.
source: am o.p.
Another that I can't recommend enough is listening to old video game music. Something you love and played as a kid. For me it's N64: Zelda, Mario Kart, SM64, Banjo Kazooie. It's all on Youtube. There's something Pavlovian about music that accompanies passive focus and puzzle-solving.
Amiga games. Can't go wrong.
Also "pink" noise works rather well for me in extreme situations. I can even sleep in busy airports with it.
I.e. Sleep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIw7oeZKpZc
Leave work at work.
In my case, not being able to leave work at work has been one of the factors in my decision to leave academia.
I always use it to "reformat" some terrible behaviors due to stress.
Definitely not the answer to anyone's problems, but perhaps gives a new perspective.
As discussed in other comments, stress has a very simple and intuitive explanation.
it's a think line to walk, unique to each of us, where you try to grow as much as you can without crossing it