Demystifying burnout – A deep dive into its symptoms and remedies
leadership.garden
leadership.garden
And now we call this burnout? While in reality, it may just be exactly the other way around. Mass psychosis ousting those who dare to wake up.
Now, you can call me cynical, but I'd invite you to think about who's really cynical here.
Just a thought.
I had a series of expectations about the role of the break I was about to take, and how it would serve as a recharge to enable me to jump back in. Instead, it’s been a gradual process of waking up to the systemic reasons that led to the burnout, many of which had nothing to do with the (legitimately stressful) work environment I was in.
It’s hard to summarize this in a comment, and I’m currently working on an outline for an extensive series of blog posts exploring these realizations in depth. But a few of the big things were (and I should emphasize that the following points just scratch the surface):
1. I am not my thoughts or feelings. It’s surprising how far this one will take you
2. If work is your support system, your life exists on shaky ground
3. Personal struggles become work struggles and vice versa. You can’t draw a clean box around grief and loss, or pretend that work stress can stay at work
4. There were major gaps in my life in terms of social connections, time spent in nature, finding artistic outlets, etc.
5. Focusing on real self-care/improvement as one’s primary purpose in life open doors internally and externally
As I transition back to work, it won’t involve picking up where I left off, but something completely different and oriented around these deeper realizations about myself and helping other people find the same insights for themselves.
These things are nearly impossible to see while in the midst of a burnout state.
But I will put a link in my HN profile when I get things up and running, and if you shoot me an email (address in profile), I'd be happy to ping you when I get this off the ground. I expect this is at least a few months out, but I'm hoping to do most of the writing while the experience is fresh.
This is why I despise it when the likes of Jack Ma, Elon Musk, et al try to promote a culture in which staying at work till 9pm or later and coming in on weekends is normalized, and tell everyone in their 20s that that's the only right way to live. It's horrible advice and incredibly short-sighted.
Then you have the likes of TikTok who have meetings late into almost every evening and blame it on the time zone difference between USA and China, when they could have planned better, drawn lines, and have more reasonably-planned meeting times that fit both time zones. Employees in their 20s who don't know better just drink this Kool-aid and get burned out.
Those people will never have time to make real friends outside of work, date healthily, or otherwise find a real support system that can emotionally support them without a conflict of interest with the workplace.
The way you find that healthy support system is precisely by having evenings and weekends to yourself so you can go to venues where you can meet people outside of work.
People are learning anew that they have a say in this relationship, and after decades of hiatus, starting to resist again.
It's a house of cards built on greed and fear.
The only difference between TikTok and older fast growing consumer tech companies (Google, Facebook et al) is that their headquarters are not in the USA, so west coast employees are exposed to this. I remember seeing someone I used to work with at FB complain about this, and I smiled as this person used to try to put meetings in my calendar at 9pm on a Friday.
I'm totally agreed with you in principle, but just pointing out that this isn't a new phenomenon that TikTok invented (though I hear they are pretty bad).
Setting aside any discussion of rewards, there were red flags everywhere telling me I had to take a step back, and fast (my doctors agreed).
But beyond the physical health, this is all a matter of perspective and framing. If measured on the traditional metrics of reward vs. effort (shipping things, happy customers, compensation, respect of peers, interesting problems, etc.), I had no reason to burn out.
The trouble is that most people are conditioned to believe without question that those are some of the the primary metrics/rewards that matter. For me personally, part of the burnout was due more to a misplaced emphasis on things that most people would classify as "wins", but from which I derived no personal satisfaction.
Going deeper, much of the burnout wasn't related to work at all.
And deeper still, some of the burnout was due to a deep misalignment between the work I was doing and my core values. What I really want out of life.
Pivoting might be the worst thing for continuing down the path I was on, but to me that's a feature, not a bug.
Love your perspective. I didn't want to assume (which is why I disclaimed in the first sentence). Hopefully my comment will still be helpful to people who don't want to pivot their life.
I think it's also worth mentioning that I didn't think I wanted to pivot my life. I just wanted to get back to work with a more sustainable approach. Gaining enough distance from work and the traditional pressures associated with being immersed in it was incredibly helpful for clarifying what I didn't know I wanted.
I couldn't really hear myself through all of the noise.
Such condescending drivel. The first "realisation" is what is commonly taught within the first 5 sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy. The fifth seems like a move in the right direction for a person who considers (2) and (3) to be so enlightening to justify teaching other people about them, but ultimately coming up with purpuses for your life and ranking them sounds like setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment once the inevitable days where such self-proclaimed purposes can't be achieved come.
Envisioning dedicating an entire blog to enlighten others about these "realisations" people generally have before turning 20 just makes you sound like a narcissist.
This is something I learned early and explored regularly in my therapy journey of many years, but I never directly experienced it until I had time off to explore it more deeply (mindfulness meditation, time in nature, photography all helped here). It's one thing to understand this conceptually. It's another thing entirely to experience it directly, and it's that delta that seems worth exploring.
My goal in writing all of this out isn't to enlighten people, or to claim I've found the one true path, or to proclaim novel findings about the nature of self. But rather, to re-explore the interesting parts of the break and what worked/didn't work for my own clarity, and in case that information resonates with someone or helps them through their own stuff. In short: "this is what worked for me, might not work for you, do with that what you will". I'm certain it won't resonate with everyone, and I'm ok with that.
To be honest, one of the biggest things that has made me think twice about this project is that I don't want people to think I'm taking myself too seriously.
But your comment helped me realize that I'm not actually concerned about naysayers, so thank you for that!
Now that I have ranted enough in the parent comment, here are my 2 maybe constructive cents:
1. Learn what it means to be relaxed again and make this your first priority. F** everything else, if necessary. Anxiety and stress don't have a chance if you aren't tense.
2. Go out into the sun and spend a lot of time in nature. If you can't get out of bed in the morning, make it a habit to go out first thing in the morning for an hour or so. Force yourself if need be at first.
3. When anxiety or self-blame start to emerge, feel it and focus on the feeling itself intensely. This makes it impossible for it to take over your mind.
4. Make fear a positive experience by using it for something positive, e.g. learning how to focus on your feelings or reframing it as thrill.
5. Try all methods you can find to cope. Everyone is different and not all methods work for everybody.
Going along with 3 and 4, realizing how much worse avoidance was than embracing anxiety and the causes of it was a game changer.
The book “Flow” also applies here.
Think about it like this: As long as you believe that you are your thoughts, you are identified with them. They are you. Can you control your thoughts? No? Ok, there's the problem.
But you are not your thoughts, actually. You are able to 'hear' your thoughts. If it weren't so, who would be unable to control their thoughts in the thought experiment above?
Did you ever walk down the street and suddenly have your mind comment on something you see without you having asked for it? Where did that thought come from? Did you intentionally cause it? Or did it just happen and you recognized it happily (or sadly) talking inside your mind for no good reason?
Try the following experiment: Ask yourself what will be your next thought? What happens? If you really are your thoughts, then you should be able to know what the next one will be, no?
Edit: You asked how do you define yourself? For me, it's easiest to think of me as the one who thinks or feels, or better "the one who can hear thoughts or feel feelings". Ultimately, I believe this is just another thought that helps deprogramming a conditioning. In reality, your 'self' does not even exist. It's a concept made up by the mind.
I haven't personally listened to Osho, but if other readers find that the content doesn't resonate, there may be a different packaging that does. I personally needed something strictly secular, and I don't know if that's a factor with his content.
And I agree, meditation and mindfulness are not some ultimate prescription, but a stepping stone.
Think of listening to a talk station 24/7, since you were 2. You have come to see this radio station as your own internal voice - it seems to always be there.
Then suddenly someone turns off the radio. Or tells you - hey, this is a radio, notice the hum and its weight and warmth. Or says - listen, there’s silence in the room in which the radio-produced sound exists. Or, “notice, you’re breathing. You just inhaled. Now you exhaled…”
There’s an infinite amount of practices evolved to do just that.
The goal is not to stop thinking forever. Thoughts are useful. The goal is to stop thinking obsessively.
But what started to really open this up for me was beginning a morning mindfulness practice for a few minutes/day. This practice trains you to pay close attention to sensations in the body, and eventually to thoughts and feelings, and by paying this close attention, you start to directly experience your thoughts as thoughts, instead of your thoughts as you. Guided meditations that point this out can be really helpful (I used the "Waking Up" app, but there are many resources).
Over time and with practice (~10 minutes/day is where I started, and I spend 20 minutes now), my perspective has shifted from being my thoughts, to being the space in which thoughts occur. Gaining this space is extremely helpful if you have the type of brain that generates a lot of negative thoughts, as mine tends to do.
It also helps you see and short-circuit certain negative thought patterns as they happen. This has been a fundamental ingredient in accomplishing real habit change.
I think some people are more naturally aware of this insight than others, but for me it was a gigantic and helpful perspective shift.
Me, I support one disabled family member near full-time, another one 4 days of the week, and another occasionally (neighbor, on-call).
I decided to give up alcohol a couple of years ago, got put into a weaning off of it over time (yeah, that rough). Every 18 months or so it flares back, now I am down to almost nothing (usually 2-4 shots every 12 hours, some days none(!)), and the past few months are very rough, worse than the past few years.
Full-bore burn-out every other day. Working on this, but considering going back to alcoholism.
> These things are nearly impossible to see while in the midst of a burnout state.
Yep! Whiteboards help, write when good, erase the other notes when better.
Burnout is not classified as a clinical disease per the latest International Classification of Diseases. It is clumped together with other environmental factors such as poverty, and thus does not as such qualify as a reason for paid leave - though national qualifications differ.
"Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is _not_ classified as a medical condition.
It is described in the chapter: ‘Factors influencing health status or contact with health services’ – which includes reasons for which people contact health services but that are not classed as illnesses or health conditions."
Please see the press release by the WHO: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
I personally do know the condition called nowadays as burnout does exist, but as current medical consensus, it is a cluster of symptoms caused by systemic faults.
1. Turn off async comms outside of working hours. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16314901
Things companies actually do:
it would be counterproductive to tell a team in london team that they can't message each other because the the email server server only sends things during california working hours.
These used to be the default expectations around email: your recipient will see it during business hours, when they next dial in. Broadband and always-on internet creeped up without us really examining this, so Outlook is now just a chat client with a weird UI.
- i'd rather log in at 9am and see a bunch of late night emails than logging in at 9am and then seeing a deluge of auto-sent messages flood my inbox at 9:01.
- there needs to be some 'core' working hours, but people may be in different time zones or may do their best work in different parts of the day. if you're a night owl, we shouldn't do anything to stop/discourage you from doing work at 1am.
With Slack, for example, you have so much fine grained control. I don't know if it makes sense to implement a blanket "shut off communications after hours" policy
Framed in terms of the Conservation of Resources model, my own burnout was illuminated and it gave me somewhere to start in how I move through and (hopefully eventually) out of burnout.
Sometimes I daydream about what I would say to a bunch of undergrads as career advice, and if I had to pick one thing, it would be: learn about burnout so that you can recognise the signs and act. For most of us, our careers are a marathon, and by letting my burnout fester, I'm doing the next 10km with a significant injury.
1. Fluffy pieces like this abound, and they are worthless. It may help you to draw similarities between articles espousing the urgency and importance of tackling climate change and the deafening silence of actions and consequences that follow. Why is this so? Because talk is cheap, and feigned concern is much cheaper than expensive change.
2. Why is there burnout? Because corporate incentives are antagonistic to human needs and corporations are more important than we are. This manifests every time some over-elevated micro-despot demands deadlines and urgency from their underlings. Much as banks lending against fractional reserves is the true source of money creation, emotionally stunted 'leadership' making misguided plans for the future is the true source of stress. Remember always that their goal is to be promoted into a higher strata of distance from effort, and your toil will be forgotten the moment that happens.
3. Gaslighting you into thinking more yoga will improve your working environment further increases the problem, as it recontextualises the problem from one of their making to one of your failing. If you're stressed or burned out, it's obviously your fault.
4. Meaningful change _was_ possible, but is likely no longer as the labour market has shifted back in favour of the corporations. Most people are currently more interested in keeping their job than causing a fuss. Unions are an obvious fix here but until they become more palatable by a) improving their significantly outdated image and practices and b) overcoming the stigma imposed on them by corporations, then they'll be forever waiting in the wings.
5. Cross-timezone work is fundamentally inhumane. There is no right to one's circadian rhythm but to suggest it's not important is a biological fallacy. However as corporations do not sleep it is inconvenient for their workers to do so. Conference calls from PT to India are common, no one is happy in that arrangement. This could be solved by partitioning work into same or very-similar timezones but that would be a burden to the leadership so it does not occur.
6. Work outside of working hours is entirely to the company's benefit and your personal detriment. A quote I read recently said it best "In ten years, the only people who will remember that you went above and beyond for your job are your kids.". If you are working for yourself or have a >10% equity then this does not apply, you do you.
6a. Given the above, your reachability outside of working yours is a direct attack on your life, yet we all install the corporate messaging app on our phone and check it like a drug habbit. Slack repackages your availability as a product and sells it. If any company was serious about work-life balance then they would simply turn off slack at the end of the work day.
I have more of course but these are probably the best.
Coda: If you want to learn about the actual science, then I suggest listening to Dr. Maslach who literally created the field (and was responsible for stopping the Stanford prisoner experiement)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQy1Zc37Bd0
Edit 2: Here's the timezone overlap between SF and Mumbai, in case you were not aware: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=...
Question is, what can we do about it? Thats where I really start to feel powerless, the challenge seems insurmountable.
To clarify, I am taking a stoic stance on this, not a detached or unconcerned one.
Family situation, school or even internal stress that you create for yourself because you have 100 hobby projects can all cause a massive burnout too.
Contrariwise, I've heard of people stress out about how large their Steam backlog has grown.
sigh
Yes, yes it is. That's made worse by companies that don't care about that at all, so you end up with meetings at 7AM and 11PM in the same day. It's pretty difficult to compartmentalize when your work has a follow the sun rotation.
> 6. Work outside of working hours is entirely to the company's benefit and your personal detriment.
If you are a 'salaried' employee in the US, the whole concept of 'working hours' is thrown out of the window.
On Slack: it can make an existing problem worse. I do prefer some quick discussions over Slack than being forced to check email threads outside 'working hours' to see if there's anything relevant to me. Or, worse yet, getting actual phone calls. Slack _can_ create entirely new problems, but it's usually just amplifying a bad situation.
It depends? If the hours are enforced in the 'you must be here from x:00 to y:00' sense, then it should also be enforced in the 'no work/emails/etc from y:00 to x:00'. Flexibility with the former would make me willing to entertain some flexibility on the latter, but most developers don't work such rigid hours. However, I do and as a result I look at Teams/Mail outside of office maybe once a month for the most.
This one sticks hard for me. Whenever I get hit with burnout, it's brutal, but all the articles make it sound like it's just being a bit bored with work or school. It's easy to end up thinking that there's something wrong with you, and that everybody else can handle unlimited stress just fine by taking a few minutes to relax every day.
Fully agreed upon the cross-timezone work as well. I've been working on a project with people from an overseas team and even though they are great, it just doesn't work to only have an hour or so of overlapping working time each day that inevitably gets taken up by mostly pointless status update meetings rather than real discussions.
GAS or general adaptation syndrome explains burnout quite simply. There's an alarm reaction that happens in us. Next a resistance phase where our bodies try to fight it off. Finally, an exhaustion phase where we let the stressor take its course(aka burnout).
“It is not stress that kills us, It is our reaction to it” - Hans Selye
Why the cynicism is perceived as something wrong or even a symptom?
Cynicism is just the most probable approximation of reality stripped of forcibly uplifting false narratives.
This has always existed
It could just be that you don't want the job you have anymore – and that is often good! You get to find a job you do want and your employer gets to find somebody who wants to do your job more than you do.
It could be that the job was just too dangerous and difficult for you. You will be removed from the jobsite, and maybe that is what you wanted all along. Someone else that wants to have a job can take the one you left. And your employer gets a benefit from getting a fresh, uninjured person.
I'm currently going though something close to a burn out, things like making coffee can make me cry. Haven't slept more than 3 hours in a month and can barely form a coherent sentence half the time. But hey, at least now i know i need to find a new job! Sure that is gonna go great.
You get to find a job you do want and your employer gets to find somebody who wants to do your job more than you do.
As if the root problem is that you just don't want to really do your job. (As opposed to the far more likely: you absolutely did when you started out -- until the employer started getting in the way. And telling you to take more yoga classes as a way of coping).
You can be the thing that changed as well.
Fortunately, however -- once you have enough observational data with these things (so as to be able to make a balanced assessment about them) -- it becomes perfectly reasonable to come to the conclusion that "It isn't me, it's them."
Cause you know, sometimes it just is.
I mean, was it all computer stuff or did you change it up with ditchdigging?
I actually did it once ~15 years ago. Left software due to burn out and took a 50% paycut. All my stress disappeared. White collar non sales jobs are pretty easy coming from a software background if you have some complementary people skills. The complexity is much lower so it's easier to shine. Was great for a few years then decided to have kids so I needed more $ and went back to software. The stress had just been waiting for me the whole time :)
That is completely missing the point of what burnout actually is. Some people take years to recover - good luck starting a new job.
Dissatisfaction with the current job is a signal to go somewhere else. Being on the verge of completely stopping to function as a human being is necessarily bad.
And all this to make more bucks for some rich arses.
But if you consume too much of pretty much anything you'll get sick. Even good stuff. That's perfectly normal.