When feeling worn out, rotate
noamlerner.com
noamlerner.com
As someone who has undergone real burnout from burning the candle at both ends for to long, I wish it was this simple. Its sometimes called a mental or nervous breakdown, and the only real solution is to disconnect from everything you can (hard to disconnect from kids), and just try to get back to a stable place. For me that was living in a Costa Rica for 3 months with no TV and spotty slow internet. The only thing you can do is sit on the veranda and relax.
In my mental model, I look at relaxation/disconnection like sleep.
You can behave as if it’s not important for awhile, but eventually it will catch up.
Personally, since I couldn’t see the burnout around the corner, I didn’t have the internal self talk to remind myself that relaxation is not just a waste of time.
I’m now working on baking this into my every day life by building habits around it. For me, that looks like:
- Mindfulness practice in the morning (using the “Waking Up” app, which has solidified the concepts for me in a way that no other app ever had)
- Regular walks in nature
- Cannabis + music listening sessions
But I can’t stress the value of mindfulness enough. For me it has become a tool to check in with myself more often and to really notice how things are going instead of just getting carried along by the currents of each day. And note this is not the same thing as some common forms of focus/concentration-based “clear your mind” meditation practices.
> I get a good night’s sleep I erroneously feel like I should be able to sustain my (probably unsustainable) momentum
Try to have patience.
When we see an improvement we get attached to it. This happens when losing weight, sleeping more, etc. Changing habits, even slightly, always takes time.
If, it seems to be evolving in the direction you desire in the long-term, you're good. Extrapolating from one or a few data points won't give good predictions.
> When I try to relax, I feel like I’m wasting time if I do it for too long.
Trust yourself.
Do you feel you're wasting time after a few hours, days, or months? If you relax enough, the need to do stuff usually comes back to you on its own. No need to force it via guilt or worry.
If you objectively can't relax as much as you'd like to, then remind yourself _why_ you're doing the things you do. You'll probably have great reasons to do so —making the most of some opportunity, doing it for your loved ones, whatever.
It could also be you needed to avoid relaxing some time in the past and now you have more space to relax but haven't re-analyzed your current situation properly and are not aware not-relaxing is not adequate strategy now, according to your desires and objectives.
Burnout is very real and very different from the notion of “worn out” described in the piece. I started to realize this more deeply when I noticed that there was just about nothing that I could interest myself in, even the most tantalizing personal project ideas (some might note this sounds like depression, and I agree. I’ve dealt with varying levels of depression for most of my life, but burnout became a multiplying factor).
I think if more folks realized how different they are, they would take burnout more seriously and take more steps to avoid it.
I know I would have.
Doing nothing is healthy and is a great way to regain health.
(Feeling guilty about it or worrying about "what I should be doing" will prevent it from restoring us, though. It only works if we accept our health needs.)
The constant need to go go go is so deeply ingrained in so many of us, that the first instinct is to conclude “there’s something wrong with me”.
Burnout seems to be the body/mind’s way of enforcing that downtime, so that’s definitely a critical lesson to take from all of this.
you can get normal human levels of exhausted without going bonkers unhealthy woeking through it.
OP is a sustainable and healthy tactic
If someone is struggling with motivation one day, there are a number of “get motivated” tricks that may help.
If that person is struggling with motivation due to depression, and has been for awhile, that motivation advice is going to fall flat.
Burnout and being “worn out” or “fatigued” are often very different things, despite the fact that the latter two are symptoms of the former.
I hope you see where this eventually leads, because it's a common pattern when discussing mental health topics. There is a single instance of the "true" thing and no one else feels justified in taking care of themselves because someone else has it worse. I'm sorry that you had burnout, but there are better ontologies of burnout than drawing the line around your experience as "real".
The parent is making a distinct difference between what the industry typically refers to as "burnout" and what actual, physical, burnout is. As someone who has gone through phases of burnout and currently working through yet another one in my career I can attest the parent's definition IS the correct one.
You are not burned out when you are bored at work. You are burned out when you are so tired of doing something that you cannot bring yourself to not only do it, but anything else. When you need drugs to get through the day. It's a combination of depression/anxiety/fear of failure that manifests as what I can only describe as a feeling of wanting to disconnect from everything forever and sleep. The only solution is to disconnect for a long time. I, for example, have not programmed as a hobby in almost half a decade. It's the only way I can stave off repeated bouts of severe life crippling burnout.
Be far less sensitive. Also, perhaps you should try to experience burnout before a needlessly pedantic out-of-nowhere virtue signal.
As with all mental health issues, there is no clear line between "fake" and "actual, physical". It's a spectrum. Even small amounts of stress and boredom create physical responses.
I have Bipolar disorder and I will happily admit that anyone can suffer depression & mania symptoms, and that the difference between what they suffer and I suffer is one of magnitude and not one of categorical difference.
The article author sounded a little bit burned out. You were/are severely burned out. Is there something wrong with saying it like that?
Unrelated, read both of these statements and tell me you don't see irony:
> Be far less sensitive.
> Also, perhaps you should try to experience burnout before a needlessly pedantic out-of-nowhere virtue signal
The parent is saying "I broke my ankle - fractured in several places I was crippled and needed surgery you did not experience a broken ankle". You cannot fix this problem by icing it. You need a systemic reduction in everything.
The author is conflating a sprained ankle with a broken one. The parent is saying that is not true. A lot of people who have sprained their ankles have come into this topic to tell everyone "WELL ACKTHUALLY" in the most obnoxiously stereotypical HN way possible thereby diluting the actual meaning of the parent's statement. There are far too many HNers who have a permanent craniorectal issue.
> If you can be restored from simply doing a different task, then its not real burnout.
You're not wrong, it's just that you seem not to realize this statement was a "well actually", probably because you happen to agree with it.
What I'm saying is that it's especially easy to get caught up in this mindset when discussing mental health topics. The existence of "real" burnout artificially introduces the concept of "fake" burnout.
Let's be clear, the concept of burnout and worn out is more compassionate, descriptive, and most importantly has the important consequence that I'm interested in avoiding: not turning into a who has it worse spiral that ultimately ends in people with burnout not being able to identify it because someone else has it worse.
It's this class of false negative that I believe is important to have a conversation about. These people often go unnoticed, because despite having burnout will not identify it as such because someone has it worse.
I get that you're interested in the false positive case, and that's fair. I understand that if too many people misidentify worn out as burnout that it can make burnt out people feel like people aren't able to understand their circumstances as severe, but I trust you'll consider both types of error as important and deserving the attention they do.
I do get what GP is trying to say though. I just believe its all the same and "small burnout" can be fixed with small tricks.
Strangely enough, the fix to burnout can be finding different/more engaging work to help overcome the cynicism and sense of hopelessness.
I don’t think I have seen “real burnout” as you call it. If it is so debilitating, I guess it must be pretty rare, or this would be causing a massive social and economic disturbance. It seems lots of people are feeling worn out nowadays, so this article seems like it could be useful.
Yes. Offline is the new peace of mind. Trouble is, the mind needs something to work at/solve and it's forever trying to solve some puzzle. People regard reading as switching off, but reading, for me, is an active pursuit, rather than passive. I read to become a better version of myself, so yeah: the only real solution to burnout is literally to meditate in a cave sans smartphone or book.
And honestly if you're fully burned out, it's still helpful to have suggestions like this that might make things slightly better - most people aren't able to go to Costa Rica for three months and relax, so suggesting that's the only cure to burnout is just telling a lot of people that they're doomed forever because they can't take a tropical vacation.
> the only real solution is to disconnect
So I was trying to deal with my dad's tragical slide into depression by convincing him that the monsters he's fighting aren't "real".
And he asked me a question bluntly one day (in my own native tongue, where it sounded heavier).
"What is real to you? Is what you experience real and what I experience not real?"
The problem with defining this sort of reality from a personal view point is that someone's biggest problem in their life so far might be the 100% on their scale.
It sure was in my case, my burn out was showing up in my weight (was 54kg at 6'2), while my dad ended up ending his life over work stress. And I still think my situation was worse than his, but just that I was still bouncy when I hit rock bottom.
So what someone shares as a real problem and a solution might work for them and a million others (because that's a 1 in an eight million shot), which makes it totally real for them.
Also If something works for you, sharing it doubles its effectiveness - socially and personally.
Of course, the conclusion this should lead to is that we have yet another very good reason why a modern healthy country should be providing Universal Basic Income.
Changing activities and habits is ok but paracetamol. The causes are still there.
A bunch of years ago, I did a part time MBA, including weekend and night classes. So I remember sitting at my desk at the office and thinking "cool, very soon I get to stop working and head to class" and then other times thinking "cool, there's no class for a few days, I get to focus on just work!"
The context switch was refreshing and something to look forward to, in both directions.
Something that's great about part time programs is that everyone you're in school with is in the same boat - they already have generally decent careers but are ambitious and capable enough to make the investment in furthering themselves (or pivoting) - that's a great group. The full-time MBAs kinda felt like "kids" in comparison - I don't mean that as a put down, they were capable and driven in their own way, I just think the part timers are special in that way.
Something that worked for me - I didn't feel the urge to graduate quickly (would be different if I needed the degree to pivot roles) so I graduated in 5 years whereas others did it in 2. This had multiple benefits: I got to focus more on each class w/o burning out, and I got to meet WAY more people and do many more social things - ski trips, study abroad, etc.
I also took the strategy of trying to learn what I don't know. My background is in engineering/tech/economics, so I made sure to not take any "Managing IT" type classes and to test out of as much Econ as possible. Instead, I focused on things I didn't know anything about (entrepreneurship, marketing, competitive strategy etc.) All of that served me well.
Mainly, the MBA is social and fun. A bit after I graduated, I opted for an in person graduate program in Data Science and promptly bailed. The social element was so boring that there was no reason to be traveling to campus - was missing out nothing compared to studying at home. But the MBA, the material is good but I found the social/personal evolution just as if not more valuable.
Happy to answer anything else. What school are you going to?
I devised a system where I just roll the dice each morning to see what I will focus on for that day (each area is assigned a number). That way I don't just do the 'fun stuff' and neglect the unpleasant tasks for too long. The random nature of deciding adds some variety to my work week.
Sometimes, after a few consecutive days (or weeks) of hard work (like learning new frameworks while trying to deliver features at "normal" speed) I'm completely unable to play or compose music. My brain just won't work at all.
In these cases, sometimes I cannot even read light fantasy or cook basic meals.
One thing is to be bored of or frustrated with something (which is important too — we don't live to work —, but this is a separate topic), and another completely different thing is repeatedly going over what your bodily and/or mental health can take, for weeks or months on end.
I think rotating is good advice, but it works more on motivation than exhaustion.
This affects everyone to some degree or another. It’s just an order of magnitude worse for me.
I love that it just shares an idea. It doesn't spend pages trying to qualify every nuance and detail and counter-argument of the idea.
Regrettably (or maybe it's helpful), this will always lead to people nitpicking the analogy or idea apart, based on their personal interpretation of all those undefined details.
The alternative is switching jobs or teams, which I don’t want to do: my manager and coworkers are great, I am progressing my career quickly, and it would be impossible to get the same pay without sacrificing WLB.
This creates an interesting dilemma: the harder I work in the short term, the more I risk burnout, but once I finish my current project I can take a long vacation and likely won’t feel burnt out once I switch tasks. If I try to take it easy so that I don’t accumulate burnout as quickly (or take a long vacation now rather than later), I simply accumulate burnout at a lower rate over a longer interval.
I feel like a lot of people don’t burn out in isolation or completely unexpectedly, but because they are faced with similar situations as I am in. How closely can I flirt with it while still accomplishing career objectives?
I inline-skated as a kid, or "aggressive inline" the sport was called. I wore my wheels down to such an angle that I had worn through the blade frame and made it to the bearing. I didn't have money to replace them so I just pushed through it quite literally. This caused me much teenage angst, but with money from my first job, I bought Randy Spizer II signature boots and all the kit to get them rolling. $750 Australian Dollars, phew.
The new frames let me run "freestyle" wheel configurations, only two wheels on each blade with the two middle wheels removed, so a pack of 8 wheels was actually enough for two sets of skates. That gave me a backup set for when I eventually wore through the wheels again. It was still an ongoing struggle, but I was better off having solved the problem with money.
Upon reflection, I never once thought to rotate my wheels. I just wore them until they pretty much crumbled off the rim, then replaced the now very unusable wheels.
In instances that a problem is so complex that it takes me more than 2 weeks, I will switch mid-problem for a couple of days. It gives me the time to recover, and a lot of times I can then attack the problem with a fresh perspective.
It's one of the reasons I'm one of the most prolific coders in the company I'm in.