Burnout and the Brain (2016)
psychologicalscience.org
psychologicalscience.org
That’s why I’m burnt out.
Last week my motivation went to almost 0, and it took me a while until I discovered the why: I had been stunned by the SwiftUI demos, and wanted to get my hands dirty. But I hadn't had ANY time to dabble around because I had overburdened myself with promises to various customers. What I did felt very far away from what I actually wanted to do, and it got worse every day.
When I finally understood what the problem was, motivation started to come back. I played around with SwiftUI for only 5 minutes yesterday, and feel so much better already.
Do you have a side project that you would love to spend all your time on? (doesn't have to be coding)
That can be enough. What's the point of reading an informative book beyond satisfying your curiosity?
The only phrase I had that came close was referring to my current situation as wearing golden hand-cuffs. I feel constrained and unhappy a lot of the times, but boy are those hand-cuffs pretty to look at.
For me, when I realise this I quit and move on until the cycle repeats itself. I'm currently working for myself though so it's a bit different!
I think all the cool libraries that occur are a form of release valve for alienation. Engineers working in alienating jobs can at least do something of personal interest.
Now, will you b1tch about it for the rest of your life or are you going to find a solution and work to achieve it?
America is a place where you have more chpices, but also bear the consequenses thereof.
Let me take the opposite: should you be able to live behind a fruit stand in the woods and have your wife taken care of and kid put through college? Who should pay for that?
I don't think it's "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" as "make your chouces and deal with/don't whine about the consequences".
This wasn't how it started, I took a vital yet buggy and unmaintainable piece of software and got it to a point where new features could be cleanly added and new bugs were a very rare event.
And yet, every time I tried to make any significant change - generally intended to further improve the maintainability of the project - I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else.
Sole aim of some people is just to have power over others, force subordinates to commit their mistakes, and to replace subordinates with others who are increasingly zealot, obedient, and desperate. I have no idea how to defend myself in such situations, usually I just quit.
"Professional managers" (persons being managers and leads from the beginning of their career), and overeducated people joining the workforce late in their lives and straight from or shortly after the academia are the two profiles from whom I observed such behaviour.
In order to sniff these people out, all you need is a five-minute conversation where you challenge them on something innocuous. You'll find they have no arguments, overuse authority arguments and blindly follow the gospel of well-known programming books. Once at that point, quietly extricate yourself from the conversation and start sending out CVs.
These kind of people will fuck your shit up if you let them or can't find a way to limit your interaction with them.
Personally I find I am happy to deal with technical challenges - that's what the job is about, IMO - but political and otherwise artificial challenges are a massive turnoff which I look to either get removed or extricate myself from one way or another.
Looking out for the latter and dealing with it somehow before it escalates/accumulates is a great way to avoid getting stuck in a position where burnout can develop.
Hannibal the Carthaginian general for example spent nearly 20 years fighting the Romans on their own turf in Italy. He had a string of victories and also suffered incredible losses including the loss of an eye to infection.
Despite that he led his men and was incredibly popular. After laying waste to the Italian countryside for two decades he was reluctantly recalled back to Carthage where he served as a statesman for several more years.
He was then exiled and a price put on his head and he made plans to ally himself with other leaders of the day - honestly his life goes on and on. The guy's resiliency is incredible and he isn't the only one of his age. There are numerous examples of similar people from the history of the time.
I suppose your modern day cases like Musk or Jobs are what we'd think of today. The former's challenges are well documented but the latter had just months to turnaround a sinking Apple and restructure the company before it ran out of money. He'd been through many ups and downs and again displayed a resiliency which is pretty remarkable.
I think that everyone's ability to handle stress varies. What I'd love to know is why some people can suffer incredibly and not only survive but thrive and if there is some way in which we can learn how to suffer the everyday arrows slung our way and bear our burdens better.
If you don't have enough to handle an issue, you need to be around people who do. They need to be interested in the same issue and you have to give them reasons why you need to be on their team.
There are lots of people who handle stress well one time. There are very few who can handle it as it piles up. They can't do it without others around them absorbing some of it. 'It takes a village' and all that. Niall Fergusan's book the square and the tower talks about the networks of people behind famous personalities and stressfull events. It's very interesting to understand how those networks emerge.
The village props up the endurance athletes. Because that give the village the best shot.
Arguably Hannibal:
- is in control (he's leading),
- he's probably rewarded through pillaging, (I feel that reward is absolutely key to continue pushing through)
- there is probably a sense of community while they are laying waste,
- as a leader he probably get "fair" shares of reward for himself (cf. the Iliad, opening list of treasures)
- the work he's doing is probably aligned with his own values (unlike Xenopho who was hired as mercenary in terrible conditions), as we can see he didn't want to stop campaigning
- work overload is probably there, as campaigning men have little sleep and work a lot (cf. Cesar)
Conclusion: Hannibal is less at risk of burn-out than men serving under Hannibal.
I only bring this up because rewards can be (and in my opinion the best ones are) immaterial, the type of things that would fit into the self-actualization part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I think this type of reward is much more critical than material ones for being able to endure those conditions for a long time.
This makes burnout sound incredibly similar to "Learned Helplessness." Tweaked, I suppose, to the problems of a workplace.
Great leaders probably do not suffer from self-doubt and honestly believe in their own righteousness. I am often amazed by how the executives I meet genuinely seem to lack the ability to self-criticize and admit wrongdoing, even in personal settings. For great leaders, the worldly rewards and affirmation in the form of praise are never ending. This makes individuals highly resilient to external stress.
I see a lot of 'flat' organizations where there's one person having to manage 50+ people, which IMO is just too much responsibility, especially if they have multiple roles (financial, personnel, strategy, etc).
The first thing that anyone needs to learn if they grow into a leadership position is to be able to delegate instead of doing things themselves / micromanage. That is difficult for e.g. software developers because doing the work itself (writing code etc) and doing it well was what got them there. In a lot of cases.
I think it can get as bad as a form of PTSD induced by constant low-to-mid level stress rather than one major upfront trauma.
I would recommend looking up a concept called CPTSD (Complex PTSD)[0] which is a somewhat controversial idea that one can develop a flavor of PTSD specifically from long periods of chronic trauma. (PTSD is ordinarily described as hailing from acute trauma.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_post-traumatic_stress_...
Robert Sapolsky elaborates on them comprehensively in his Stanford lecture about depression[1]
[0] http://www.psychiatria-danubina.com/UserDocsImages/pdf/dnb_v...
By reading [1] it seems to me that the way he very efficiently coped such immense amount of pressure was through strict sandboxing of his work-vs-personal life and proper delegation to his lieutenants; it gave him ample time to spend with his wife, children, in-laws, his church and his hobbies.
[1] Rockefeller's biography "Titan" by Ron Chernow
But in all these stories there's a huge selection effect. We only hear about the great generals, not enough about the disastrous ones. We hear about the refugees who persisted, not the ones who gave up.
Having witnessed multiple burnouts first-hand I'd say this description is only half-way helpful. In my lay-man experience a burnout occurs when the aforementioned precedes several days without sleep. Lack of sleep over a prolonged stressful period must be avoided, especially from ages 30-40, otherwise damage will highly likely occur, similar to blown fuses in the brain, which takes many years to recover from (if ever, completely).
Many people that reach this stage of stress unfortunately acquire a tunnel vision that convinces them they are invincible and can do anything (except take care of themselves and their loved ones). It is one of the scourges of modern life, and a tragedy that people are not properly prepared for this in school, especially in industries that are susceptible to it, like ours.
Working twice the hours does not mean you are putting in twice the effort or getting twice the results. You're more likely to be a complete liability, because you're tired, unfocussed and not capable of thinking straight. Doing this for a week or more is a recipe for disaster. As for this leading to "more decision power" than people who chose not to indulge in such antics, I've yet to see this in any role I've been in in the last 20+ years. Most places would not see such behaviour as a positive, either for you or your place in the team and organisation.
The human body is not a machine. We can't work long hours without significant mental and physical impairment. I've worked 12 hour day and night shifts, and seen the effects on me and the others around me. Extreme tiredness and disrupted body clocks lead to careless, stupid and costly mistakes. We were never meant to work such gruelling hours. I've worked 36 hours straight in a research laboratory. I was destroyed for several days following, wiping out any benefit of the effort I'd put in. And I made a silly mistake 32 hours in, ruining the whole experiment, due to one moment of inattention after 12 hours straight intense focus. Individual "superhuman effort" does not beat effective planning and efficient use of time and teamworking. Which is why so few companies want to rely on primadonnas, and instead want reliable and predictable people who won't flake out.
Today, I work regular office hours. Work hard while I'm there, and start and leave bang on time each day. I'm much better for it in all respects. And if you don't want to get severe RSI and burnout, I'd suggest at least considering these points. I didn't until I was severely affected by both, and it was not at all fun.
I thought this was just the industry norm now and was going to factor it into my salary when I start looking for a new job
Honestly, isn’t it safe To assume the company is underreporting the workload and instead calculate Salary at an average of 60 hours/week?
The company I work for has set working hours, with some flexibility in start and finish times. But it's basically 8 hours per day, 40 per week.
What surprises me most, is that companies aren't limiting work hours to 40. And that people put up with working stupid hours. 80 hours would be utterly insane. Even 60 is ridiculous. The evidence shows that people don't get more done if the hours are increased further. But people do need a life outside work, and any more than that and you have zero time to yourself or your family, and that's going to be detrimental to your health and happiness. Why isn't there more pushback against it?
I suffered from insomnia and chronic stress and it creates a negative feedback loop: You sleep bad because you're stressed out and you stress out because you're tired on the job.
It has to be noted that a bidirectional between insomnia and burnout specifically relationship with burnout has not been found [1].
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12529-010-9107-8
The bidirectional aspect (if burnout also causes insomnia) may be of some interest, but it's not the one I urgently want to convey to people in that may find themselves in this situation. IMO, in short; they should see a physician after one sleepless night maximum, and in the slightly longer term do some serious reevaluation of the work and family balance, or risk physically "blowing a fuse".
It really concerns me that many people on this trajectory don't believe it can happen to them, or that the burnt out condition even exists for real.
I'd be really curious to see more details here. What sort of damage do you mean? Why 30-40 in particular?
I realize this is only anecdotal evidence, but I've seen enough of it in people who are diagnosticized with burn-out to be frustrated that these aspects are not given enough coverage. The description I often hear is that of relatively mild symptoms, bordering on simulation.
As for "from 30-40": I don't think I've encountered people with (this kind of) burn-out younger than that. I believe it is because younger people are stronger and more resilient physically in general. That's not to say young people should over-use their resources at will: if they have acquired that habit then they will be at serious risk when older I think.
There are probably as many different reasons and dynamic behind every single burn-out as there are people. The thing I wanted to point out was my own observation that the kind of brain damage that I seem to detect among burn-out victims has always been preceded by several consecutive nights without sleep because of stress. It is not not backed by large cohort studies (as far as I know), it's just my observation.
I've just hit 30 a few months ago; in the past year or so I noticed that now I really need 8 hours of sleep and have to go to bed around 10:30-11PM. If I go a few days with less than 7 hours of sleep, my brain starts being quite lousy at managing my focus and emotions. And for a reason or another if I get 8 hours of sleep, but went to bed at 2AM, it feels like I got 5-6 hours of sleep when I wake-up.
In my experience, lack of sleep is not required to induce burnout. The progression can be very gradual.
Is it: 1 day stress means you need 1 day of relaxation and 40 days of stress means you need 40 days of relaxation? Or is the relationship quadratic or some square root or log?
e.g.
stress_in_days = days_of_recovery^2 or
stress_in_days = days_of_recovery or
stress_in_days = ln(days_of_recovery)
Related: I find it interesting that they write about the HPA-axis as I've learned that the HPA-axis was a biological explanation for depression. To be fair, the way burnout was described in the article, it didn't seem to be all that different from depression.
Edit: seems I was right, depression and burnout don't seem to be all that different [1]. I do think the name burnout describes more accurately what depression is than the name depression.
(I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this)
Quick take — it 100% can't be linear.
Take as an analogue a strain injury — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_(injury) — a first degree strain can heal quickly with minimal invasiveness; a third degree strain might never fully heal even with surgery and rehabilitation.
Some of stress is happening on a biochemical level — if your hormones get sufficiently out of balance, and especially if it leads to a downward spiral of short-term behaviors (alcohol, junk food, etc) then you might wind up in a seriously diseased state that takes a serious regimen to recover from. On the other hand, if you never get above some threshold of unhealthy biochemistry and avoid downward spirals of behavior, recovery should be expected to be quicker.
There's so so many variables that it's heavily confounded and hard to math out, but the relationship for sure has to be non-linear.
But whether the day is stress or not depends on your emotions, not on what the day is objectively. You can have a no-stress day which is really busy or even under pressure. I had some of the most productive days at work when I was solving a critical customer issue, simply because of the excitement (you can't do that everyday, though).
1 min of anger generates enough cortisol for the immune system to work for 1 hour in order to clear the whole thing. Imagine the damage of time spent reading (and possibly responding to, even if it's only in one's own mind) a random thread of enraging comments on the Internet.
Imagine the impact of having one's values constantly challenged in a professional setting, generating inordinate amounts of anger 8 hours a day.
It's really no wonder that this quickly generates constant, taxing fight-or-flight reactions due to abnormal anxiety, leading to irrational decisions and ultimately burnout and depression, where the untamed beast feeds unto itself in an uncontrolled feedback loop, even when the initial source of stress is removed.
This short, funny (yet well researched) video about emotions has been enlightening.
However, every person is different. External factors such as family, lifestyle and responsibilities can aid or halt recovery. Same goes for personality and internal factors. I know of cases of burnout turned depression where the person took 2 years to start working.
There is no universal function for how long a person suffers from chronic stress and the recovery duration.
Obtaining such a function entails fully understanding and measuring all factors and dimensions involved in burnout. And that would merit a publication in Nature.
I think a key phrase in there is "effort–reward imbalance" — everything I've found in both research and personal experience seems to show that burnout-type effects are much more likely when you're not getting enough of what you want and value.
As an example, think of two sports teams that both gave their all in a championship game — the winning team is much less exhausted, they're jubilant and bouncing around and celebrating. Both teams presumably expended similar levels of energy, stress, etc — but the winning team is full of celebration and joie de vivre; the losing team is licking their wounds and questioning everything.
There's still limits to the amount of physical and mental stressors we can handle, but winning helps a lot with processing and recovering quickly from stress.
I should have left my business years before I did, but it was the winning (contracts, technical coups) that kept me on. You end up like an addict, stumbling through the nightmarish days until the next dopamine rush (and crash) comes along.
Stress and burnout don’t just have mental impacts - they can have severe physiological impacts. I didn’t realise, acknowledge, or recognise this until my third hospitalisation, and years of increasing illness, made it impossible to continue writing off as “just food poisoning, again”.
It’s been nearly three years since I left, and while I’m physically better, and no longer spending half my life puking and delirious (it took six months for that to subside), I still have occasional anxiety attacks. My mother asked me about what I plan on doing for a career over dinner a few weeks back and I out and out fainted.
Never used to have any of this. I was the resilient one, the one who could carry the world on his shoulders - or thought he could. Broke me.
I've made some important and very useful changes:
- I've started saying "no" to others including clients, business partners, friends, family etc. Every time I do this, it is saying "yes" to myself
- I've blocked all social media and news websites from my phone (both apps and via Safari)
- I've gotten rid of all work emails from my phone too
- I have an alarm clock by my bed instead of my phone which sleeps in another room
- I start every day using the 5 minute journal method
- I journal (almost) every day before I start my work
- I no longer work weekends and evenings
- I've made peace with the fact that my business isn't going to grow as quickly as I want it to.
We do have choices at the end of the day. Check out the 5 balls for life speech by Bryan Dyson, former CEO of Coca Cola; work is a rubber ball that you can drop and it will bounce back, the rest of the balls that we juggle (health, friendships, family etc) are all glass balls which may shatter if we drop them.
> Maslach received an incredible outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who were grateful to find out that they were not alone in their experience of burnout.
got me thinking how important it is for us, humans, to compare and match our own experiences with the societal "averages". It's usually a relief to learn you are not alone in something that's happening to you, despite that it can be truly worrisome. But at the end of the day it's all relative to the averages and norms. And norms change over time, too.
Not saying burnout and depression can become a norm, just pointing out what it means to be a "social animal". Something bad happens to you and suddenly it's not as bad because you are not unique.
In such a state people are sincerely believing that, for example, aliens exist and they are the only humans and everyone else is a robot.
I've heard that people who develop stress/sleep deprived related psychosis over a period of two years are already sensitive towards developing it. The same people also should not take drugs, for example, such as weed.
My question simply is: when would it become burnout and when would it become psychosis?
(I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this)
Citation...?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
I also said that my other information was from people working in the field. If I say something like that, then I implicitly mean that I couldn't find it on the internet, which I find an interesting thing in itself.
...Homelessness creates perfect conditions for mental health issues to arise, and yet many tend to think people are only homeless because they were already mentally ill.
I might give this to a couple of MBB acquaintances I know and see how they react, but I find it odd that these industries ignore this. From my (perhaps naive perspective), it simply isn't profitable to ignore this and moreover also unscientific (I had the impression that some finance-based industries were pretty pin point accurate with things).
(I secretly hope we have a 60+ hour working person reading this)
I'm now approaching a different kind of malaise as with numerous management changes our work has appeared to become unimportant to our upper management and I suspect they will be handing it over to a team openly hostile to what we do and completely unequipped for the job. As much as I need healthcare to live I'm not willing to spend what are most likely my final years in a place that I don't think cares about our customers.
All this is to say that there are most definitely different kinds of burnout. One is more physical, the other is emotional. Both impact your mental facilities and ability to get work done. Both directly work on morale, which is why the solution to burnout in employees is to discover what's crushing their morale. If people are passionate and care personally about what they do because they know they are performing important work as part of a unified vision then extra work won't result in burnout. This isn't to say that you should allow your employees to be constantly overworked, just that if occasional extra work is needed, if you've done your job appropriately as a manager the impact is severely less and the cancer if negative thinking doesn't start to creep in. Once that does it's nearly impossible to rectify unless you're very good at rebuilding empowerment.
There is this excellent talk by Maslach, "Understanding Burnout" which dispels most misunderstandings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLPyV8lBbs
However, as with most conditions it's unlikely you will have any interest in it until being affected.
Burnout is caused by (1)increased workload not resulting in incremental feeling of accomplishment, and also typically with (2) negativity from external sources and a (3) high workload.
* macro-environment (office, commute, noise etc.)
* diet
* away time from desk
* meeting creep
* lack of dialogue from management e.g. (HR edicts, performance management curves)
* bureacracy
* deadlines without any clear goals behind them i.e. for ticking boxes
* micro-environment (team, equipment, desk, apathetic colleagues)
* workload (give a busy man things to do)
* family, finances etc.
There’s an intersection in the Venn Diagram between burnout and mental health issues, but also some distinctions.
I’ve viewed burnout to be one of two options.
1 - For creatives, a lack of creative fulfillment. Everyone has some creativity but I’m specifically talking about “artists”.
2 - Not being paid enough. Everything is relative. For some people “hustling” even if they’re making 1% salaries is too much. I think that the perspective would be changed if one was a C-suite level or a founder of that same company. We see this in Wall Street too, and nearly ever power law job. Most people, particularly blue collar workers, work physically backbreaking hours doing physically backbreaking work. They can’t afford the luxury of burnout. There’s maybe a large middle class band where people can. For people beyond that, maybe even on the higher end of upper middle class, they’re being compensated enough so the psychological checks and balances compute well enough that burnout doesn’t manifest like how it does for others.
I’d also argue that the optics of “success/growth at all costs” are falsely blamed in SV in particular because SV has a “fail upwards” mechanism that rewards failures.
Lastly, I think that stagnation is not the same thing as burnout.
I've seen all my favorite activities turn sour. Pleasure turned into pain. Relief out of reach. Breathe in – breathe out.
The world is like this. Breathe in – breathe out. It does not go anywhere, it just breathes. Breathe in – breathe out. Until it breaks. Breathe in – breathe out. Find your peace.