Burnout is an official medical diagnosis, WHO says
www-m.cnn.com
www-m.cnn.com
Oh well - maybe if I can get our sprint velocity even higher this year, I can get a bonus and go on a vacation to /really/ recover!
1) Learn something.
2) Get a small win after a big loss.
The ideal project to do when you're feeling burnt out is something that is well inside your comfort zone and can be completed in a couple days, but also teaches you something new. Something like learning a new framework, or building a quick new "toy" that isn't really critical to the business but users would find interesting, or doing a refactoring that you totally know how to do but have been putting off for months because other stuff is more important.
I've also had managers put me on projects like this after slaving away for months on a project that gets canceled. In hindsight they knew exactly what they were doing, and the fact that it was kinda fun and not critical to the business was actually a long-term investment.
Burnout happens when stress isn't followed by rest. When stress feels endless. And when stress feels like it's pointless.
The solution therefore is to make sure you always know why you're working so hard, build in reward for your hard work, and take a break after a specific period of stress.
Always have the end in sight. Always know your goal. Always make sure you feel progress toward the goal.
Crucially, when the specified period of stress comes, take a fucking break. Whether you're done or not. Very important.
I myself often fail to follow these lessons. So I write them here to help me remember :)
PS: for a more in-depth exploration of these 3 rules, read Peak Performance. It helped me a lot.
There's a whole sub-type of burnout which comes about even in relatively low stress environments.
In fact jobs I loved and cared about have often brought much more stress exactly because I cared about the outcome, and when I failed to live up to my expectations at that job it felt like a personal failing and I was letting everyone down.
If you or anyone you know feels like that, then it's a serious outlier condition worthy of academic study.
Why not? Let's bet a few people do. There are certainly people who live their life in a permanent joyous state, no matter what. Rare, perhaps but I wouldn't dismiss their experience as a condition.
It can be boring, mundane, unfulfilling, uninteresting, repetitive, etc... That doesn't generally produce a traditional "stress" but does wear on you emotionally.
Edit: oh I see now your suggestion is to craft an invariant as reward for your labor after a specific period of expected stress whether or not it's successful. That's probably not a bad choice, as long as the choice to go on a break precedes the stressful period
Human brains arnt built to withstand the onslaught of meaningless emails and endless reports and presentations. Offices are just awful in many instances.
The cure is rest. Since it was identified by Freudenberger and elaborated by Maslach this has been the accepted treatment.
Of course, this isn't much use to you if you can't rest due to your external commitments, but sometimes even just identifying that you have a problem can help.
Some folks have pretty good in-band home remedies, or at least growth inhibitors, for burnout. Bringing them to bear isn't done by everyone, or may not even be universally applicable, but I'm not sure rest will bear out to be the only cure for this ailment in the long run.
What is a good alternative to capitalist production that doesn't involve slave labor and or millions of deaths?
But I can see that diagnosis and treatment would be more difficult and less standard when there are no clear signs of depression or other disorders. And there would be a two-phase treatment: First phase is getting out of burnout mode. Second phase is preventing the relapse. Confusing the two phases will only result in frustration.
Given that CBT is the first-line treatment for chronic depression and has a really good success factor, we can see that what you are saying is technically correct (it can happen) but the assumption you make earlier:
> Identifying causes for mental health conditions is problematic and not very fruitful
Is, while also technically true in some cases (it is a broad statement that applies to more than depression), as connected to depression plainly false.
You've constructed a compelling argument that seems to check out based on only a tenuous relation between different true statements.
I hope that this is just a prejudice and not something you believe as someone suffering from depression. If this is in fact the case, know that in a lot of the cases causes can be discerned and you can with treatment in fact be able to live a lot better. In the small minority of cases where you are depressed because of a biological limitation (yes, this also happens - it's just not the most usual trajectory), that's when you treat it with a (hopefully life-long) line of antidepressants that work for you.
Many times the reasons why it's hard to do less are mental hangups(like fear of failure, perfectionism, the Ides that you're worthless as a coder if you're not coding 24/7) that prevent people from doing less and a therapist would help with that.
Of course sometimes what is preventing someone from doing less is their financial situation in which case you unfortunately have a lot fewer options.
For me it was quitting my job and starting a consulting company with a couple of friends. I make less money and work more but I have a way better time doing it and that has allowed me to recover.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s serious, but it always seemed to me akin to “shellshock” vs “PTSD”. Shellshock just carries a lot of weight as a word on its own. It sounds serious and traumatizing and you don’t really need to know what it means in order to respect the diagnosis.
"I work so hard that I get sick" is more acceptable than "I get sick because I'm crazy/mentally ill". Which is in itself a false choice.
There is little reason to doubt that problem-gaming exists, sure, it is a manifestation of something more general (à la Behavioral-Addiction/OCD) but having a name for it helps to talk about it more precisely, and being able to talk about a problem is the first step to finding a solution or way out.
People fight to not have the label "depression" over them. It is really sad in my opinion. It's your health, it is time to put the pride away and don't care about terminology and do whatever you can to get better.
Given this critical center concern, your closing thought of location tracking (while relevant for a nation-state actor) pushes the whole thought process a bit over the line of sounding reasonable.
[citation needed]
Neither is true as far as I know. What do you refer to?
Trigeminal neuralgia being impossible to refute and sharing the same medicine (tegretol).
And I sure as hell wouldn't want to get onto any of these anti-depressants with all of their side effects and tapering problems if you ever want to get off them again.
Which is really important. Right now it seems to me like we classify many different things with vaguely similar symptoms as burnout.
Maybe she did have a depression though, it was quite a bit of work just to get a work leave for her, we had to see so many doctors. We didn't push to further afterwards and now that she no longer work at the same place, she is much better.
> According to the handbook, doctors can diagnose someone with burnout if they meet the following symptoms:
> 1. feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion > 2. increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job > 3. reduced professional efficacy
Is there anyone here who hasn't had this ? I have this constantly, for almost a dozen years now. How is calling this a medical problem even remotely reasonable ? You're paid for your job, because it takes energy to do it ...
I think everyone's typical week has at least a couple of "OMG I hate this place!" moments that are related to a particularly difficult commute, a technical problem that crops up at a particularly frustrating time, repeated runins with a difficult coworker that you usually only have to deal with once a month, etc. But you're able to "talk yourself down" within a few minutes.
But when it's every day much of the day, it's a problem.
So where do you draw the line is the question.
There's a really great Usenix talk about burnout I stumbled across, and it so perfectly described what I was feeling, even down to the fact that I found myself drinking more and more each night just to be functional.
On paper, I took a pay cut at my next job, but I earned enough in overtime to more than make up for it, and I've gotten significant raises since then.
When your manager asks 200%, there's zero stress. It's like someone pointing a gun at you demanding you lasso the moon. It's funny. Because you see, whether you get shot or not does NOT depend on whether you try. Therefore it's a sunk cost. There's no point worrying about it. In fact, there's very good reasons to be very easy going about it. No point shortening any break.
The same with your manager. He asks the impossible, and of course you won't deliver. So whatever will happen, has already happened. It does NOT depend on your level of effort. Whether you get blamed ... is already determined at that point. Whether you get fired ... is a done deal. No point worrying about it, as the decision is made. Find an online course, or watch some esports on Youtube. Put in the hours, but ...
It's no more worrying than the idea that an asteroid might be (in fact almost certainly is) on a collision course with the earth right now.
That's the whole point: that's actually not the question. Read the diagnosis guide. There is no line there. None whatsoever.
Makes you wonder why we even tolerate psychiatric care ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
> Rosenhan's study was done in eight parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or "pseudopatients" (three women and five men, including Rosenhan himself) who briefly feigned auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had no longer experienced any additional hallucinations. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and had to agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The average time that the patients spent in the hospital was 19 days. All but one were diagnosed with schizophrenia "in remission" before their release.
I repeat "All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and had to agree to take antipsychotic drugs".
What
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[0] https://icd.who.int/browse11 [1] https://icd.who.int/browse10/2016/en#/Z73.0