Ask HN: How did you recover from burnout? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you recover from burnout?

31 pointsnewby19 comments

Specifically, how did you delete the connection your brain made between activity and failure?

Years ago, I tried to create my own little business. I failed. I tried to be persistent and worked till fatigue, depression, and anxiety attacks stopped me. I got into therapy, slowly rebuilt my life, feel pretty good now. I would even say it was a valuable experience.

However, it seems that the connection between writing/coding/building something and failure persists. I think I am not without creativity. I would love to try some side projects. But whenever I get excited about some idea and sit to work on it, my brain treats it like poison. The resistance is so strong I never make any progress.

I remember working on something all night and enjoying it so that when I finally went to bed, I was looking forward to continuing in the morning. How do I get this back?

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Martin Seligman, father of modern positive psychology who studied "I quit response" to adversity in people said "Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better.”

Your beliefs shape your mindset. The way you talk to yourself plays a key role in how you lead your life and whether you succeed in your goals.

Shift from learned helplessness to learned optimism by catching yourself in negative thoughts and disputing them with more positive and hopeful thoughts.

To do this – take note of your emotions and whenever you sense going down a negative path, reframe it using a more positive tone. Use language that describes the event as temporary and specific, hence fixable as opposed to a permanent and pervasive explanation with a feeling of hopelessness.

Change won't happen in a day, but if you constantly practice it, you will get back to enjoying your work and leading the life you desire.

All the best!

Something that really helps me uncouple programming from burnout is having a strictly-non-collaborative personal project in a language/ecosystem I intentionally avoid in the professional world. It's still open source Free Software but I don't ever want a pull request or even a bug report because then it becomes work and means the codebase is no longer a 1:1 representation of my own brain-space/goals/style.

Not that I have received any of those things, but I have steeled myself to be ready to turn it down if it ever does. The social pressure is real, and Github doesn't even let you disable pull requests so I had to configure a bot to automatically be an asshole for me: https://github.com/dessant/repo-lockdown

Here's the message I configured in my `.github/lockdown.yaml`:

```comment: Please accept my apologies for your wasted effort in closing this pull request, but I am not prepared to accept changes on this project at this time, if ever. This is a personal project for my personal website that I'm happy to share, but I want the code to be all mine. I would not be able to mentally connect with my codebase as well if it were a reflection of anyone but myself, and accepting others' code complicates the copyright situation regardless of the software license used. Please e-mail me with any bug reports :)```

Stress is the silent killer. I won't regurgitate tired advice, but one thing I swear by is Swedish Massages.

Every time I feel overwhelmed or close to burn out, it works like magic. I get out of the massage feeling like I've microdosed MDMA, and everything is 100x better. It improves your mood, your sleep, and your outlook in general.

When you're stressed your brain stresses and your body becomes tense. Eventually though, even when you're over with the stressful event, your body is still tense and you're still anxious.

Give Swedish a try!

Interesting, this is exactly what my psychotherapist recommended. I have not tried it yet, partly because I am tight on money right now and this is not cheap, partly because I was not entirely convinced it would be worth it - more convinced now.

However, I did find a physiotherapist to help me with chronic back issues and noticed that my mental state improves significantly after what they call "mobilisation techniques", which are manipulations that also release tensions in the body. I always knew about the body-mind connection but I guess I underestimated the effect.

Search for independent masseuses, they're generally cheaper and — if you do your research — much better! Perhaps check Thumbstack or Groupon, but definitely make sure to read the reviews to find Pros.

Happy that you've gotten a glimpse of the great feeling with the mobilization techniques; a Swedish massage is a bit tense, but the after-feeling is 100x better.

I literally consider it a medical expanse every month when I go, and it is.

Best of luck!

I took a very long break, about one year (but realistically, 6 months, the other 6 months I was busy renovating my apartment). I then eased into work; started with 4 hours a day, and didn't go to full time until I didn't feel ready. But also, I don't plan to work for long full-time. Even 40 hours a week is too much, to be perfectly honest.

Everyone is different, but for me exploring new programming languages is like therapy. I do it for the joy of learning, without the pressure of having to "succeed." I particularly enjoy finding an open source project that I find interesting, and begin contributing to it.

I don't have a solution. I highly enjoyed programming in school, I was learning non-stop. Everyday was filled with new concepts, most people around me eager to learn.....then I entered the work force, red tape, politics, plus I cannot pull all nighters anymore. Then, there is life outside of work, health, family, kids. I think as things become a routine, it becomes boring. You could seek a new employer but at some point you will realize most employers won't offer anything you haven't done before and unicorns are hard to find unless you are extremely smart.

Now, programming is a job. I do what is required, collect paychecks and chill out after work.

I probably should have mentioned that programming is not my job now. After that burnout experience I found a job that is not very demanding and I have no trouble performing that... except maybe it feels a bit boring after a few years and the desire to do something exciting once again grows inside me. However, so far I have not been able to. It's weird - I feel excited about something but when I try to work on it, the level of discomfort is overwhelming. I mean, I always had troubles with procrastination like every other guy... but this is whole new level.

Failure taught me one thing. My self-attested labels of being creative, a builder, risk taker ... were more likely rose tinted glasses. They were the fuel and the motivation of my all-nighters, that effusive optimism and self belief.

Motivation and other labels only go so far. Its discipline that got me anything worthwhile. Showing up and getting shit done, even when I didnt feel like it. A realist view of what could cause me to fail.

A little bit of world-weary jadedness does wonders in channeling creativity towards what really needs to be done.

Start small and build on it: find that joy for 30-60 minutes once in a while.

Reward yourself with some candy or something every time you feel that joy again.

You have to leave HN for a little.

It is likely that HN has been influencing you into associating writing/coding/building with failure.

Try to work on things without the idea of "Show HN" on your mind. I think a lot of paralysis can come from trying to impress people here. The hivemind will find some way to discuss (lack thereof) profitability, novelty, and accessibility.

>> It is likely that HN has been influencing you into associating writing/coding/building with failure.

Thank you for your opinion, but it does not feel right. I think there might be some truth in that part about trying to impress someone, but I do not think it is HN crowd. I hope this is not going to sound kiss-assy here, but I returned to reading HN after years and it feels inspiring and uplifting.

However, what your comment made me realize with more clarity is that if I manage to work on something again, it should be for me, for some intrinsic value, not to impress someone.

This gets deep and I struggle with this too. Ultimately, I had to rewire the connection between success/failure - winning/losing - trying/not trying. And for me, the assertion has become trying == winning == success and the only difference between that assertion being true and false is time.

Off topic: are you still abstaining from caffeine?

(Explanation: arrived at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15015671 when searching about "quitting"caffeine"for the Nth time..)

yes

This topic has come up so many times we almost need an HN FAQs or something..

How did I recover from burnout?

I done things that gave me energy instead of taking it away.

I didn't. Just trudging on.

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