Are you suffering from burn-out?
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
Can I do this forever? (Y/N)
If you answered N, stop making excuses, realize you deserve positive changes
in your own life, and do it.Hard decisions are difficult things to do with a stress-shot mind. Particularly when it's so easily framed as "admitting defeat"
One day I was talking to another of the assistant managers. I asked him about burn-out. Do you ever feel like you might be burning out?
"Not me. Can't happen"
"Why"
"Because I got burnt-out a year or two ago. I just pushed through it."
He was smiling. Sort of in a fatalistic way.
I'm not denying burn-out: I get it all the time. But I do think we over-emphasize it. As Jacques points out, if you live a life of leisure you have little danger of burning out. You also have little danger of living a life of challenging yourself to do new and complex things.
I think, as my friend pointed out so many years ago, that the problem is viewing burn-out as an yes-or-no situation. In fact, there are degrees of burn-out, and you can drift into burn-out land and drift back. What people really need to do, in my opinion, is learn their own rhythms. Personally, I like working hard for a few months then skating for a month or two. I find I get more done. I find when I am working hard, taking a ten minute break every hour helps. Sometimes I take all day on Saturday and watch movies. Or go for a hike.
So the trick isn't avoiding burn-out. The trick is learning your own rhythms so you maximize your productivity while you're stuck on this rock. Burnt-out? Back off, sure. But note your rhythm, and next time you won't burn out as much.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't get your kick on.
EDIT: That didn't come out exactly as I wanted. It sounded as if I were just telling folks to buck up. But that's not what I meant to say. The point was self-reflection.
This gets back to learning yourself -- your rhythms and values. I find that if I immerse myself in something I am deeply committed to, burning out is a learning experience. But I immerse myself in something I hate -- working for some other guy, doing something because I am forced to? Burning out can really hurt and require lots of time to recover from.
That's why I don't do that.
Burning out early and for a long time -- indication that you are putting a lot of effort in something you resent.
That's an excellent point though, and if life is a marathon then being burnt out is probably best compared to having to sit out a part of the race because you can't run any more.
I'm all for tackling all kinds of stuff, sometimes more than what you can naturally expect a person to do, as long as it doesn't leave any lasting marks (or at least none that are disfiguring) I say go for it. But keep an eye on the limits. When I was 23 the wife of a friend told me I'd be dead by 30 if I didn't slow down. So far so good. But I do understand now that there are limits to how much you can do without paying the price for it, and in some ways (in terms of missed opportunities and lost friends) the price was pretty high indeed. If I had slowed down just a bit somewhere in the early 2000's I'm fairly sure my life would have been quite different compared to what it is today.
You are spot on that it is all about learning yourself, your rhythms and values, that's exactly what it is. The machine called your body does not come with a list of 'do not exceed' parameters, and they're different for everybody, so only experience will tell you what you can and what you can't do.
I tend to live like a cat nowadays, either extremely lazy or hyper focussed on some project for a while, and then I take a break again. It's worked well in that I can still push myself to achieve something when I have to (and those lists really help), but at the same time I've learned that there are limits and that there is more in life than a keyboard and a screen.
Hey I was up until 2am coding and got back up at 8. When I get the coding Pon Farr on my mornings get a little hazy :)
This actually relates to your article. For the last month or so, I have been trying "banker's hours" coding -- 9-5 and taking time for everything else. It was great.
But something funny happened: I stopped making progress. Sure, I would make a little bit at a time, but nothing like what I used to do.
I finally figured it out a couple of days ago. For some reason, unless my body and mind is convinced I am serious about driving through to solve a problem, I get very little traction. But if it's 11pm and I'm getting ready to go to bed but realize I can code it better and then go act on it, things work out. Unlike working for a BigCorp, working for yourself involves a gut check.
A lot of problems are like hills -- tough on the front side but easy on the back side. If you only go 1/4 way up the hill, you just slide back down overnight. But if you go balls-in and stay with it until you make it, suddenly it becomes easier.
Perhaps one must suffer for their art.
At least that's my experience, for what it's worth.
I mean, the timing is right: we just had some burnout discussions on the first page, but what does this blog post bring ?
I know we just had a burn-out discussion on the first page, that's exactly why I wrote this.
Please note that it is very well possible to be well on the road towards being burned out without realising it and that by showing what is and what is not burn-out related it might help a few people to realise what is going on.
Sometimes the 'normal' lack of inspiration or drive for a while gets mistakenly labelled as burn-out, sometimes you get the notice that person 'x' is no longer because they and those around them failed to notice the seriousness of the situation until it was much too late.
If you feel that it is a waste of space and time to write this you're welcome to use the 'flag' option, I thought it was relevant and that's why I spent the time on putting it together.
You start the blog with some introduction, you put a link to Wikipedia and then you re-list the Wikipedia phases.
So, I'm not dismissing your time spent writing this and I'm pretty sure it helps, but there are probably much better ways to rewrite that blog post and make it better.
For me writing about burning out is like writing about a disease that I may or may not have suffered from, as I wrote here - and elsewhere - I spent three full years 'off' because the sight of a keyboard disgusted me, I couldn't see the point in shifting bits on hard drives around any longer. Doing physical stuff was a welcome change from all this virtual work and I still do a lot of that on the side now to keep a balance in my life.
The wikipedia article is very dry, as a rule I list the sources of the stuff that I write and I took the list and expanded on it to put this in to context so that it becomes easier to see if you are at risk or not.
Writing about my personal experience is a different kettle of fish altogether, I'm not even sure if I am quite ready to document that phase of my life, it was not the most happy occasion. What prompted this was the ease with which people throw the term 'burn-out' around, as if it is somehow a fashionable thing to be suffering from, instead of a serious and potentially debilitating (and in some very unfortunate cases life threatening) condition.
I'll think about putting together a piece on what exactly was my road to total misery and how I recovered from it (and to some extent am still recovering) but I still shy away from listing myself as having burnt-out, simply because during the whole thing I never felt bad about myself per-se, just about the work.
So, rather than beg for more, I thank jacquesm for being willing to share as much as he already has.
Yes, his sharing is mostly in the form of ambiguous subtext. That's okay. I can read hints and I enjoy ambiguity.
Here's a general piece of valuable advice: If you want people to tell you what their life lessons really are, meet them offline, perhaps in a bar or coffeeshop. Keep all recording devices off. Promise not to blog what they tell you without permission, and/or until one or both of you are dead. Keep that promise.
Meta-advice: Make a habit of meeting people in coffeeshops. Though it has many advantages, the Google-enabled internet is a lousy medium for heart-to-heart honesty.
I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of burnout jacquesm mentions.
A compulsion to prove oneself:
This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.
Working harder:
My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.
Neglecting one's own needs:
At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.
Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress):
Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost entirely my own fault.
Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed):
It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life and I killed all hobbies.
Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent):
-- See displacement of conflicts
Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression:
I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but during this period of my life, I did.
Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very productive.
Still, it's okay to cry.
Any more than this is too personal to share.
could you share how did you come out of this phase (perhaps there is much more than just moving to a different job). Do you have any personal stories? I ask this because, as I understand this is not the nature of the job but an intrinsic battle that you won.
The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so there is something wrong with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the problem was exactly none of these.
The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life, especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting balance and getting my health back.
I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with my wife again.
And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two years to lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life.
And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing, less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then.
And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless. Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.
I could relate the 'balance' aspect to (unburnt) people I see (both I whom look upto and them, who are seemingly 'happy' in doing the chores of the day). I am by code/articles/hn all of my waking hour. During work hours and when I go back. I even have my lunch and dinner by my laptop. I read articles or watch (from the huge list of google tech videos, that I have to finish).
What I gathered from earlier posts here is to 1) not compare with anyone. If anything learn and use yourself as a benchmark to improve upon. 2) don't worry about the results. 3) don't fear the failure. 4) baby steps (do anything that is answerable to big task, anything.) and from you : 5) balance.
I look forward to doing a 'Tell HN' after I overcome this struggle.
It seems to me that you may be overloading yourself, especially if you have a 9 to 5 job. One of my friends is working through "How to Prove it" (see http://technotes-himanshu.blogspot.com/search/label/htpi for his blog on his progress - just one book, not three books like you are doing ). He has a boring (but consuming) corporate job, just got married and is other wise busy. He works for a steady 4-6 hours or so every Saturday and that is it.
And from personal experience, if you are trying to "level up" technically on top of a demanding work schedule, a steady and regular series of small bites seems to work better than ultra intense efforts, which burn you out fast.
PS: If your algorithms book is CLRS that is a tough book to combine with other hard books and on top of a job!
I picked up -How to prove it- based on your recommendation(your comments on bradfordcross's blog [on machine learning]and later on your blog)
Algorithms -by Dasgupta,Papadimitriou,Vazirani is the book i picked up (available free at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html). I understand CLRS is the bible (i own a copy),but I don't think I am competent enough to attempt it now(especially after my work with SOA,ESB and every other mind rotting jargon) I felt this book to be digestible(atleast the first chapter). I could take a pause, think and continue from where I left. (please let me know if you have any cautions/advice regarding this book). With CLRS, I would have to pick and trace back every notation and come back.
Foundations of computer science - Aho and Ullman (available at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html)
I intend to finish these before end of this year. I have a (strong)feeling, I may miss this goal, hence the parallel study(shameful/guilt note - i missed the deadline last year). Will take your advice- work thru htpi first.
It started to manifest itself in 2002. I worked too much, had too much responsibility. I went into a decline and 2005 it all went awry because of change in circumstances I didn't have the resources to cope with. I was wise enough to quit my job, but it was too late. Anything I tried after that wouldn't succeed.
It's a condition where it's hard to reflect on yourself. To see your personal condition. And accepting it, even less. I couldn't.
One day I stumbled upon a stress test and took it. Bang! Almost full score. Then I took notice of myself, started analyzing my condition, and realized, "I'm a burn-out. God dammit".
That was 2007. I've been laying low, really low, since then. Living off my pension. Recently I realized I was better off again. I could read book again. I even felt an urge to start some coding again. I took a stress test again. Much lower score, great!. But right there was also a test for depression ... I took it. Bang! Almost full score. "Now I'm depressed. God dammit".
That was shocking. But I have this strange feeling, that depression is much easier to deal with. I'm growing in my capabilities. I can learn again. I believe I'll become reasonably functioning again. Only time will tell. And time it will take. I can wait. I want my life back.
I could give you details quite similar to SMrF's comment. Read that, and take care.
My personal path to recovery involved a complete redo of my entire life. I quit my job, moved to a new city. I took an entire month off and did nothing but stuff that was fun, (mainly programming :-) My new job is a boring corporate coder type job that requires very little of my attention. I also started dieting, quit smoking and took up running.
You can get better! It just takes time. Please be patient with yourself.
Believe it or not, even after everything that happened to me, I very nearly did it again! I began spending all of my spare time working on my side project, (my goal here is to eventually own my own company/startup). But at least this time when I started getting anxiety I realized, "wait a minute, I think I know why this is happening..." :-)
They ended up taking advantage of me. Even though I was a Part-Time worker they would try to give me Full-Time work. In the end I was leading projects still as a part-time employee. I had endured many late nights and one full on 24 hour marathon coding session to prepare for a big telethon (American Idol - IdolAid). I frequently found myself wishing I could just walk out, but I was afraid of the effect it would have on my career. I developed trouble sleeping at night. I would stay up all night laying in bed because my head was still racing. Even though my body was exhausted, I couldn't fall asleep. I still have this problem now and then till this day.
When I finally got my degree I decided to leave that place and it was the best decision I ever made. Even though I didn't have a job lined up yet I was not nearly as stressed. Everything turned out fine for me, though I still feel the effects sometimes. I often joke that it was like Frodo in LOTR, once I had borne the ring (stress) for so long I could never be the same.
The danger of defining burn-out as only this extreme is that there are a lot of people with milder though serious cases who may not appreciate that it's a problem.
Doing such things should be held to the level where they merely and as optimally as possible enable your own wishes. Not that this does NOT preclude altruism. I practice altruism and take great pleasure from it. But then, it can thusly be seen as one of my wishes -- when I approach it on my terms.
For a long time, work and neighbors wanted me to meet their needs. But they paid little or no attention to mine. Very one way, and very draining. Don't mistake profession of mutual interest by another party for actual interest on their part. (Actions speak louder than words.) If you continue to be rather underwhelmed at what they offer in return, it's a good sign that your interests do not align. You are at the edge of the tar pit of burnout; turn around, before you turn into one of those fossils that will one day be displayed in a museum. Very undignified. ;-)
I've spent 3 full years doing nothing but manual work (metalworking, building a house and a windmill) because I was literally at low tide. Still not sure if it actually was 'burn-out' (no sign of depression afaik) but other people I know in my environment that structurally overworked themselves have taken similar measures.
It's tricky because it is easy to confuse an extended case of 'programmers block' with being burnt-out, I think the key difference is that a person that is burned out will not be easily able to get back in to the same profession that they burned out in.
I think that's a big part of what drives the open source movement, programmers getting appreciation from other programmers about their work in a way that 'closed source' will never give and money can't provide.
The last couple of weeks I spent on two tracks, the one is building a small RV (just drove it to the other side of Europe, so I guess that worked out well :)), and a web project that I hope to launch sometime later this year.
When I'm tired of the one kind of work, I switch to the other, it seems to work better that way.
You have to be in your garage to be woodworking for example. You can't be on the couch with your wife pretending to watch a movie with her.
Perhaps we can also see the quality of work more easily from physical work too.
That sort of mental occupation does not happen with physical work at all.
I worked my way through college, mostly as a bartender, and for a little bit as a janitor for the school. In high school I set up large canopy tents for a company. I learned through this that a lot of physical work is cathartic. I can get my frustrations out. I provides my body something to do, and my mind a trivial foreground task, so I can get lost in thought -- not the intense focus of solving a problem, but just a mind wandering, tangential set of thoughts. I learned how nice it is to be able to walk away without concern, without the work consuming my thoughts.
There are two different aspects of all of this from my perspective. One is the exercise portion, bartending can be a good aerobic workout if you let it. Particularly if the bar has good music, basically you dance all night. This really is a good way to "zone". The other aspect of it is the menial task as a gateway to meditation. I mentioned my good thinks above, most of these came sweeping or mopping. Mopping a mile of hallways at night, or cleaning up after the bar closes, provides this, and is a great way to learn to enjoy the quiet.
All of this is hard to get as a professional. I personally would take that job if I were you, just to learn about the stuff I mentioned. The skills have definitely helped me in my life. Anytime I feel burnout coming on, I have to stop and reprioritize. I don't have bars or universities to clean up anymore, and I don't go dancing much. Instead I apply these things to my gardening and yard. Mowing is almost as good as sweeping. So is pulling weeds. The exercise i get by going for long walks, or hitting the gym. Doing this stuff really helps me get centered, and allows me to be more productive than I would be without, even if I reclaimed the couple hours spent on it daily and used them for work.
HTH
edit: thought about, but forgot to mention: There was a big component of bartending: talking to people every day. I am a total introvert, I can go days without talking to people about something other than work. The bartending thing really forced me to interact with people in a social, general way. This is surprisingly important, even if it feels awkward/uncomfortable. At least a couple times a week I go to a coffee shop or bar and interact with strangers, because it really does seem to do something.
The thing that I really liked about the guest services gig was that the harder I worked the bigger my take. I made a lot of money doing the job and I definitely felt better about it because I knew that if I hadn't put in my best effort I wouldn't have made quite as much. So, I guess what I am trying to assert is that perhaps there is a sort of link me and presumably you, sophacles, who enjoyed working a service job, moreover one that most people hate, because of the nature or getting more value for more work and our interest in entrepreneurship?
To me money is merely a means. The real goals are:
* Interesting problems * Interesting people interactions * adventures * access to cool toys/equipment (and the actual need for it) * changing environment
Money just pays the bills and puts food on the table. I personally have a long history of maximizing the points above (the money has been good enough to not be a problem too :)). Sure, I could work real hard, and get the money to enable the rest, but the net money and benefits would probably be the same, but for more work. Instead I build a way to get my goals into my environment.
Does this match what you were saying?
I am 20 years old, and I feel that I have a lot of catching up to do. This may be viewed as an insecurity, but it is an extremely motivating part of my life.
No matter how much of these I read, it is not going to slow me down. From an outside perspective it is unhealthy, yet there is no way that I can withdraw from this cycle until its the right time.
The right time will come for everyone. Just as it did for those telling there stories.
Thanks. HN is the shit.
I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of burnout jacquesm mentions.
A compulsion to prove oneself: This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.
Working harder: My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.
Neglecting one's own needs: At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.
Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress) Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost entirely my own fault.
Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed) It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life and I killed all hobbies.
Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent) -- See displacement of conflicts
Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but during this period of my life, I did.
Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very productive.
I think sometimes people think that because something is "work", it can burn you out. But anything that you can't do forever can burn you out, right?
Sure it's not always working but it is something that is always present and has to be jumped into at short notice even if inconvenient.