The way out of burnout (2016)
economist.com
economist.com
I don't know how one overcomes burnout to be honest. I tried for another year when I got promoted, set boundaries, refused stressful work, etc. Then, I just became apathetic and cynical towards my work.
I'm now in the process of changing companies. I have no idea if that helps the burnout, but I know I can't continue in my current position, even if it actually became quite low-stakes "rest and vest" kind of a position after talking to the leadership about my struggles. The damage has been done, and I could not repair it.
I'm losing all of my unvested RSUs but I expected that the new job won't be able to match that. I do think that you have to reduce your TC expectation in this market.
A) Increases your skill somehow B) Gets you awarded a higher compensation
But most stressful work you encounter doesn't do either.
I find most stressful work caused mostly by poor long term planning, bad legacy code, or a poor work environment.
But most influences (be it internal or external) that can make projects stressful are totally predictable and there should already be strategies how to deal with them in an unstressful manner in the drawer somewhere.
What you can find more often is shops that don't even manage to organize qhat should be an ordinary, boring, slow day in an unstressful manner. And the worst thing is that they gain nothing by that. Some seem to be even proud of how stressed things are (they confuse stress with productivity).
good luck for your next steps, hope you find a chill and joyful spot
Hard situations? Depends on the deadline and the stakes. It can be rewarding (as in, you truly make a difference and the business sees that) but I don't aim to be a director so it's not something I'd like to do on a daily basis.
Funny thing is, in my experience, hard situations rarely require deep technical thinking, so I feel like my skills are worse off (which didn't really help with my burnout).
Losing skills is one of the most painful feeling I got to feel in the recent years. The idea of jumping is regular but you never know if the next one will be better ..
In fact burnout typically makes the patient be able only to do nothing.
There's a decent theory of coping mechanisms called Schema Therapy. Don't take it as gospel, but one may be surprised by some of the schemas actually present in one's life. I'm not sure one can go through this framework on their own though, since it is supposed to uncover deeply entrenched maladaptive patterns of behavior that feel completely normal to the patient.
Except that I ran into a burn-out. The trigger of burn-out is frustration, not fatigue. And they're exponential, and this was my third one. So it was a doozy. It's been 3-4 years now, and I'm starting to get 'normal' again, even if I tire easily.
My point is. During the all-time low of my last burn out, I wanted to do stuff. Nothing fancy, just watch an educational YT video or reading a book or a HN thread. Anything to satisfy my keep my mind occupied during the very long days (working was completely out of the question).. and it was impossible.
It was the most painful experience I have had, and I don't wish it on anyone.
Off course that's a sample point of one. But I wouldn't be so sure of what you're saying.
More severe cases of burnout or depression can extend this to basic activities such as eating, hygiene or even speaking - some people may be unable to speak back despite hearing and understanding others. Such cases of course require immediate psychiatric in-patient treatment.
To me that looked like taking a few months to spend with my partner and traveling to spend chunks of time with friends and family. It re-oriented (or rather, helped me re-discover) to the importance of these connections relative to work.
That said, all of that is easier said than done and not everyone can just take time off from work. But seeing a therapist regularly was the 0 to 1 that gave me the energy and my soul back to figure out the rest.
Actually, I was aware of it, and rationally knew I was creating stress that could be avoided, but I persisted.
What made it click in my situation was how my therapist explained it to me. Basically, he said that I was someone who needs a challenge. But, instead of reaching for something higher, I created negative challenges like taking on too much work, waiting until the last minute, purposefully antagonizing people, etc.
There are many problems with that (and that's what made me internalize the knowledge that I should really stop doing this): - I cannot not meet these challenges. So the stress I put on myself was tremendous. - The reward is zero: I was doing what was expected. The cost to me was high, but the result was not better.
I was literally digging a hole for myself and putting a lot of stress on me to make sure I'd get out of it.
That explanation made me look out for behaviour that would put me back in that hole. I can't say I've succeeded all the time, but at least a lot more than before (where I did not even try to avoid it, but purposefully dug that hole).
I recognize it when the thought of getting away with something creeps up. If that happens, I force myself to either not do what I was asked/wanted to do, or start working on it now and take pride in doing the best job I can by taking my time for it.
For a bit more than year the only thing I could read was science fiction books, when I would usually read ~20 technical books a year and do multiple courses. For a while I even thought I had somehow got ADHD as I couldn't focus.
I came out from that about 6 months ago and I'm slowly coming back to my 'normal'. I put myself the objective of learning Functional Programming and just finished a couple of beginner Haskell books and courses, which I found quite refreshing.
The best thing about these burnout discussions is that everyone just makes up their own definition to fit whatever symptoms they want to talk about.
The WHO has a pretty clear definition that I find a lot more useful.
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
The word "burnout," hasn't suffered the same unfortunate fate, although there are those of us who are waiting for competition to declare that they have burned out so we can take their share of the profits etc. It's more of a self-inflicted wound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorde...
Yes it can be occupational, but it can also be applied to home, location, country or life.
When thinking about being burnt out by life, its more commonly known as suicide but not the only reason for suicide.
When thinking about being burnt out by a country, its seen in a variety of ways, like not voting for brexit if you are british and relying on the EU to draw up the legislation, which may or may not be enacted in full. It can be the culture of the country, the way people did/do things because its always been done that way.
When thinking about being burnt out by home life, I think most parents can relate to that, but social conformity means they must maintain a stiff upper lip!
Either way, I take everything people in authority or expertise or both say with a massive pinch of salt. I've seen so much hypocrisy its laughable.
On the point of inability to relax, calcium has a massive stimulatory effect[1]. Sodium (too little or too much) also causes a rise in osteoclasts which release calcium from the bones.[2,3] And there is so much salt in the processed food today (dont think I need to provide links for that), and water hardness is a contributory factor (dont think I need to provide links for that), beit soaking in the bath, having long showers[4], or drinking lots of hot beverages, is it any wonder people cant relax? If you get banged up in a mental health hospital, you wont be eating processed food, so your sodium intake will likely fall, and they probably filter their water so its soft water, to reduce estate maintenance costs.
So yes the WHO has a very narrow definition of burn out, but in the absence of any other definition for the above possible factors, I think the populace apply their own definitions and interpretation of burn out, although needing a holiday could be applied to country/location/home burn out whilst not being recognised as burnt out, like I've described above, mainly because to quote Monty Python "Always look on the bright side of life..."
Also, considering the all encompassing nature of the DSM, I'd have thought they would have had some input on burnout, but it looks like they are still contemplating it as a mental disorder.[5]
"Stemming from a lack of conceptual clarity, the current state of burnout research remains, unfortunately, largely circular and riddled with measurement issues."[5]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2269601/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3060537/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5635092/
I fail to see the need to have worked poorly backed political ideologies into an unrelated post unless the intention was to FUD or flame.
The core point
> Yes it can be occupational, but it can also be applied to home, location, country or life.
Completely.
In general, there's usually something very pathological going on for calcium to become dysregulated in the bloodstream, such as cancer, hyperparathyroidism, hypervitaminosis D, or hyperphosphatemia.
Sources: any physiology textbook, supplemented with a cell biology textbook.
Hyperphosphatemia is very easy with supermarket cappuccino style beverages as is extremely hard water, and an NHS that fails to act on any diagnosis for several years, even from 3rd party's.
I say extremely hard water, based on the amount of chalky residue left behind in a situation best described as pan evaporation. Never seen anything like it before in all my life.
But then I only have to look at the water and food regulations to see the govt is using legislation to create health problems.
The perfect GDP boosting circle jerk to the unassuming uneducated person on the street, unless of course big business is influencing or writing the regulations?
I’ve gone through burnout and mentored a few dozen people going through it. It’s nothing to do with relaxing, or is confined to work. It’s all encompassing, has strong parallels and likely includes depression and an anxiety disorder. It has more of a sense of the inability to initiate anything rather than the inability to do nothing. Everything feels too hard, you feel too old, you see no prosperous future, and you yearn to end everything - not suicide, but to quit work, quit life, and disappear. These sounds like the appropriate mental response to unrelenting and uneasing stress to which you see no way out of. Most people suffering burn out spend an awful lot of time simply doing nothing.
However myself and the folks I’ve worked with as a mentor at work on burnout share the trait we lose the ability to identify things we enjoy - video games, music, travel, etc, lose their redeeming value and they can’t identify what music they like any more or a game they want to play. When they relax, it’s spent ruminating. To that extent maybe the articles point is true.
For me the way out was vipassana meditation and Buddhism. It taught me to master my rumination, detach myself from the stress, and discover the value of simply being rather than being someone or something. I recommend it to most people but only one or two have actually tried it.
Do the people you mentor also do Buddhism and meditation? What did they do that helped (or did they just never recover)?
One way to recover is to just do nothing. The resources will start to accumulate back but it'very slow.
One thing that worked for me was multivitamins. I could see a change in a week.
Not sure if it was proper burnout or something else (bad diet) though. The simptoms look the same.
My suggestion to most is to start with Gil as a teacher -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Fronsdal
He has an enormous amount of recorded teachings and does a daily mediation at 7am PST on YouTube. I would start with this:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq_lRuaNj50Nm-SRxYPFSTyTt...
Regarding recovery I think most people do, but it does require dramatically changing your lifestyle in some way. You’re there mostly due to how you view life and your situation, as well as the situation. I think no one is ever the same and their limits in life are closer than before. You have to be more gentle with yourself, and more aware of yourself. A lot of vipassana meditation is learning to detach your “self,” or awareness from your thoughts and feelings and sensations and being able to observe them without becoming entangled in them. For instance I feel anxiety in my chest. By letting my thoughts and feelings be as they are but holding the tightness in my chest in awareness without judgement, the tightness eventually dissipates because it never really existed somatically. Concurrently my anxiety does as well, and I can then let the thoughts go as well as they’ve lost their power. It’s taken me two years but at this point I am fully engaged in my life, learning and loving more than I ever have all that life has to offer. I’ve got a great job at a late stage startup and switched from senior leadership roles to distinguished engineer roles.
Good luck man. Find friends too, friends are hard to engage with when burned out, but it is helpful.
I also found a lot of help in meditation and developing and practicing mindfulness. Recognising thoughts and emotions as they arise and to not identify with them was a big eye opener and relief. Just letting thoughts be or talking about it with someone when I noticed a pattern really helped. I think part of it was also processing some buried away issues.
I thought it's not burn out, but just getting older and wiser :)
Very few people over say 40-45 year old are chipper and burst with energy and enthusiasm. On the contrary, most of them are in sort of "Aikido mode", when they try to deal with whatever threats and external demands come with minimum amount of energy expended. IMO, it's a combination of just having less energy at that age, and the acquired wisdom that most things that you could be doing, aren't really worth doing.
What I find funny about this is that it would imply I've been burned out since I was 10 or 12 years old. "Just do nothing" was something I never considered possible for me, or desirable in general. For me the struggle was, and is, always about autonomy - being able to do what I want, instead of chores, homework, demands of parents, $dayjob, errands, demands of partner, etc.
It's weird because my job is OK and I love my kids, and it's not that bad - I just feel like an NPC doing this day after day and want to "jump off the rails".
Sometimes the only thing I can fall back on is that even if I can't choose what I'm doing I get to choose how I'm doing it.
I remember one internal dialogue from that time:
-She woke up already. I barely had half an hour today to do something else than cleaning and that's only because I skipped some tasks. Where's my time off?
-What do you mean where's your time off? This was your time off.
It got better when I let go of my mid 30s childless person presumption of having time after work.
Also it got better because my daughter is now two and a half and can focus on an activity for the 114 seconds at worst it takes me to use the toilet.
They would rather be entertaining themselves, being with their families, relaxing, etc.
Yet they have to work, and do things they don't want to do day after day, month after month, and year after year. On top of that they often have to pretend to like it, and to spend time with people they don't want to be with.
It's even worse if they have to commute or not get enough sleep, or if they're not valued at work or don't feel they can make a difference.
After a while, that takes its toll. Some can handle it, but some can't.
> A psychoanalyst explains why for people feeling “burnt out”, simply trying to relax doesn’t always work
The article explores the challenges of recovering from burnout, suggesting external solutions like reducing working hours or engaging in contemplative practices. Psychoanalysis is also considered as a means to address burnout’s psychological roots. It can help individuals learn to relax and understand underlying vulnerabilities that contribute to burnout. The patient’s childhood experiences shaped his view on rest and productivity, which he is now questioning. The article encourages reflection on internalised habits and ideals of productivity to find a more fulfilling way of living.
Starting out, writing some Borland C++ code to render a pixelated 16-color 3D sphere on a VGA monitor was magic! Now, even a beautifully ray-traced photoreal landscape would be an unimpressive yawn.
How do you find that novelty? That magic? Is this burnout, or something different?
Like building an operating system, or a hypervisor, or a vm for some made up language, or an autograd engine, or something that sounds absurd. What about an optimizing compiler?
Maybe venturing into project Euler could help? What about learning about approximation algorithms? Or randomized ones? What about numerical optimisation?
Maybe the magic is not in the not knowing, but in knowing how things are done, seeing the connections between things and building beautiful abstractions that just work.
I think it is a sign of the times that a lot of people think there isn't fun or magic in programming anymore.
With the internet there's always know-it-alls going "why should I use your programming language instead of Python?" when you show people an experiment. Or maybe you build an internal app that solves a problem at work and there's 20 people saying "why didn't you just use Notion".
But even before that... I remember building a primitive text-to-voice synthesizer in the 90s and showing some friends, and they just said it was crap because they saw something on TV that was better. Of course mine was just a toy, but I remember even as a kid wondering why they were comparing the accomplishments of a 15 year old with IBM... On the other hand, I made some internet forums back then and on-line people people loved it.
So maybe ask yourself who's doing the yawning. Is it other people vicariously basking in someone else's glory? Or is it yourself not enjoying the journey.
EDIT: That actually reminds of magic. Some people say that magic tricks shouldn't be revealed. Well, I will admit that I yawn at magic and magicians, but I enjoy knowing how the tricks are performed.
When you perform magic for other people it should be on par with if not better than what they've seen before.
When you perform for yourself... Anything goes. You set your own bar.
The second group really won't care about how it's made or what can be learned, and won't care about sharing the experience... Which is fine, but makes their opinion absolutely useless, unless your product is targeting them.
I guess it's harder to find time to learn the basics -- vs the old days where all you needed was a few `for` loops and some math.
I struggled with that for years before finally accepting that the magic wasn’t coming back. I’ve since moved on to other non-tech interests that are giving me that sense of magic again.
I think what a lot of us found to be so magical and entrancing was the initial process of discovery and learning. At least for me, it was downright addicting to figure out how to bend the computer to my will, but the thing about that phase is that it’s kind of a one time deal. Once you’ve learned how to write software to a professional level, the only way to keep the magic alive is to keep going deeper. And frankly I got to a point where I didn’t want to spend any more time in front of screen.
Also started "labor" hobbies (car maintenance, welding, etc) but I think a professional mechanic or welder would say the same thing about their jobs. Why? "Professional" (aka money) ruins everything after a while. You get to a point where all you do is the same thing over and over, maybe with slight variations in between. Unless one has full, money no object, choice of what jobs to accept, this will happen.
Obviously not a problem exclusive to people living paycheck to paycheck, but it certainly would be easier to deal with if you could take some time to recover without financially ruining yourself or worse.
It's not about what you actually do or don't do, it's more about how you manage your life and what your view of everything is. I haven't really been the hardest working or the most productive.
I feel like people who say that, it's like a way to compensate for that failure by projecting an image of super hard working people who have reached exhaustion or great competitive athletes who have reached failure. And I think that no, you can get burnout with a bad management of your life, your way of thinking, and with some really bad habits, and above all "stress that has not been successfully managed" [0].
I have recovered (or so I think) but I can't make as much mental effort as before, I feel that I reach my "limit" earlier, and that if I continue I can end up the same as before. But I can work on long term projects being constant. But I feel that I can't push myself like before.
[0] https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
He gave me a list of other services he offers like -Credit fixing -Taking down bad records online, recovery of lost crypto and many others I can't mention them all.
Internet doctors in shambles after learning they're just occupational therapists.
By that definition it is indeed an occupational phenomenon, but in practice that classification doesn't help much.