Hacker News Reader

Thank you for this.

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.

+1 to all of the above. Especially “try stuff”.

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.

Hate to say it but depending on your long term objectives taking a sabbatical might have been the worst thing to recover from burnout. You want to reassociate effort with reward, and the best way to do that is to work on small things related to what caused your burnout that will "guarantee wins with low expectations". By pivoting to something different you reinforce the association of the previous form of effort with failure (in the negative space of rewarding yourself for not doing it).

The levels of stress I was enduring started causing physiological symptoms that eventually forced me to take medication to calm things down. It was also severely disrupting my sleep, which was causing other health problems.

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.

My experience, and analysis of it, bears striking similarities. Looking forward to your blog posts!

> 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.

Yeah, I don't think pivoting is the only natural outcome here either. It's just what I realized was part of the puzzle for me.

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.

> 2. If work is your support system, your life exists on shaky ground

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.

Yes big money exploit workers. What else is new?

> What else is new?

People are learning anew that they have a say in this relationship, and after decades of hiatus, starting to resist again.

I hope people will one day learn that the cake is a lie. Nothing bad will happen if you dare to say no. Quite the opposite.

It's a house of cards built on greed and fear.

> 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

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).

Agree w. most everything presented.

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.

Can you clarify no 1? What are you if not your thinking and your feeling? I'm not trying to be snarky, i am actually legit curious about how to develop a sense of self that doesn't have to do with, y'know, sensing.

You are the one who sees (or 'hears') the thoughts and feels the feelings. The reason this distinction makes sense is that, arguably, most if not all of 'your' thoughts and feelings are actually preconditioned from the outside. This lets you disidentify from an outside programming.

But how do you define yourself outside of thinking and feeling? Even the thought to disidentify is a thought, no? I don't understand.

The thought 'disidentify' is just a word for describing the process of understanding it.

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.

Excellent question, it is a long process to start understanding that you are not your mind. And learning to live in that mode. Lookup talks by Osho if you want to get started.

There are many paths to these insights, and I personally used the "Waking Up" app by Sam Harris. I gravitated to this because I was pretty allergic to anything that looked too spiritual or mystical (due to my own pretty negative religious history).

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.

His content 100% resonates with me, because he talks about the truth. Very few people do. Most people talk about meditation or mindfulness and other prescriptions but not truth. Spirituality, mystical things , religion are all meaningless words.

I should clarify that I didn’t mean to imply that he does not resonate with you personally, and meant to direct that at future readers curious about the subject but skeptical about a particular style of delivery.

And I agree, meditation and mindfulness are not some ultimate prescription, but a stepping stone.

By experiencing yourself as something in addition to your thoughts.

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.

By learning to calmly observe your thoughts and emotions.

What I don't understand is that the act of observing your own thoughts is still a thoughtful action.

If thinking is like inner speech, then there is also an option to be quiet for a while. You start the act of observation by telling yourself "now I am going to observe", but then you can stop talking.

The goal is not to stop thinking forever. Thoughts are useful. The goal is to stop thinking obsessively.

Thinking is like drawing pictures, and watching those pictures is a different process.

The other answers here are great, and the question that helped me make sense of this was: if I am my thoughts and feelings, then who/what is aware of those thoughts and feelings?

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.

This is one of my favorite lectures on this topic. It's a podcast from Sam Harris from a couple of years ago, but I still go back to listen to it every few months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u45SP7Xv_oU

Can I follow you somewhere?

I'm currently trying to decide how/where to publish, and haven't decided whether or not I'll use a pseudonym when publishing (a lot of my personal stuff stems from family issues that I'm cautious to go into publicly).

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.

"When I start working again, it won’t involve picking up where I left off, but something completely different and oriented around these deeper realizations and helping other people find the same insights for themselves."

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.

> The first "realisation" is what is commonly taught within the first 5 sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy

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!