Understanding the neuroscience behind burnout (2022)
yaledailynews.com
yaledailynews.com
Here are a few big insights that have really helped me:
- You never have to feel like doing something to start doing it. This insight is so strangely freeing. It really got me out of my head and the loop that I was in berating myself about motivation.
- The act of doing something is usually what creates motivation to continue. Tell yourself you'll spend 30 minutes on whatever it is. No matter what it is, I always know I can survive 30 minutes of it. However, 90% of the time, the timer goes off, but I don't feel like stopping. I've found my grove and I keep going.
- Procrastination isn't poor time management; it's poor emotional management. Be gentle with yourself. Know that you can be scared, frustrated, or angry but don't have to let those emotions define you. CBT works really well here. Don't define emotions as "good" or "bad". Define them as "useful". If the emotion you feel isn't useful, acknowledge it, but realize it's fleeting and let it pass on. Some people like to visualize emotions as clouds drifting by.
"And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."
(My grandmother, who survived the Great Depression on a farm, had the Desiderata posted on her wall. https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html)
This is one of the techniques I use when feeling burnout or overwhelmed by an insurmountable task list. I set a goal to just get one thing done. Sometimes that snowballs into getting more things done and sometime it doesn't, but at least one important thing got done, which greatly helps my mental state.
Also, I like all the points you've made and they ring true because I've experienced them more than a handful of times, but I still struggle to grasp their usefulness when I need it.
It's funny how emotional states can be the exact opposite of what may be best at the time.
Lastly, respect for parenting a child with special needs. Putting most of yourself on hold for an unknowable number of years is a rocky uphill trek. Keep a hold of yourself, but a tighter hold of them.
An addendum about the merits of fiber, hydration, and exercise could also help in difficult times.
What I'm about to say obviously pales in comparison to raising a child with autism, but entering an ultramarathon/triathalon is a quite good way to experience something like this first hand in a safe environment. The amount a human can actually "go through" when it's asked of them is entirely remarkable.
Not as extreme as an ultra, but still an unimaginable feat for most people.
I wouldn’t have believed it if he didn’t wake me up to rub it in my face when he got back.
*I severely misjudged the length of the trip before setting out, thought it was about 5-6 miles.
As you get older recovery time is an issue it takes a long time to get over hard workout unless you've always done it but even so it's still not like when younger.
"Be gentle with yourself. Know that you can be scared, frustrated, or angry but don't have to let those emotions define you".
could become:
"I'm gently with myself. I know that I can be scared, frustrated, or angry but I don't let those emotions define me".
The difference is interesting to me.
Edit: You just inspired me to rewrite Desiderata in the first person. I'm not conceited enough to believe that my version is doing more than faintly echo the original text but it was a (self) enlightening process. Thanks
I move placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember the peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
I speak my truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
and so on.
As someone who has suffered from depression and related procrastination, thank you for your kind words.
Everything the GP comment said is still worth considering. It’s just that you might need some assistance if you’re neurodivergent. Also remember that it’s a spectrum and to be kind to yourself.
ADHD is no joke, it can be extremely debilitating. I was force-fed medication throughout my childhood and couldn't stand the physical side effects, which opened the door for several abuse-related traumas.
Now that I'm approaching 30, I am considering getting back on medication. For the last 15 years, I've relied solely on caffeine and weed to medicate which is great for what it is, but just not enough, and sometimes counteractive to my goals.
Regardless, if you are struggling with ADHD, I would recommend going on youtube and looking at videos by a guy named Russell Barkley. He's got a bunch and wow did I feel seen after watching a few of them.
I've been prescribed just about any ADHD medication you can think of, but they all pale in comparison to solid coping mechanisms. I know my options are basically adderall or vyvanse, and I know how I react to them.
Caffeine is a decent substitute most days. What it comes down to is my aversion to the physical response of amphetamine, as well as the long-term implications of blasting my brain with speed every day. I haven't had any drug problems, I take a rational, knowledge-driven approach to the disorder. But I want to feel like I'm at 130%, not 80%. I'll probably return to vyvanse, just much lower doses than I used to be prescribed, and see how that shakes out.
It's hard for people without this disorder to really appreciate the implications. I just lost a best friend last year over his toxic behavior and insensitivity around what he believes is a made-up disease, despite overwhelming evidence for a genetic explanation involving reduced dopamine uptake.
I too am high functioning and have a system that mostly works for keeping food on the table and the lights on. Professionally I’m doing great in fact. That said, a lot of personal stuff has fallen through the cracks and continues to. Hence the meds. I’m also working with a psychiatrist who specializes in ADHD and it’s been really helpful. Highly recommend.
I've found it to be a better trade-off that's helped me make a lot more progress in addressing the things that worsen my focus/follow-through/ability to take care of myself and help avoid counter-productive cycles of anxiety, depression, and short-term reward seeking behavior.
It's not perfect, there are still undesirable side-effects, and managing medication tolerance (without just endlessly bumping my dose) is something I've had to figure out on my own, but I definitely prefer the feeling of clarity to the fog.
I have recently experimented with vyvanse 30s, and it's been quite nice. As a child, before I became homeless at 15 and was finally able to stop taking medication, I was being pumped with vyvanse 70s, and it was hell.
I also highly recommend caffeine. I don't primarily get it from coffee or sugary drinks, but caffeine pills which allow me to precisely dose myself throughout the day and analyze the effectiveness. This has worked well for the last decade, but I still don't feel like it's effortless, and that's what I want.
I typically stick to just a morning coffee, but I've never actually tried caffeine pills. I suppose if I'm dispensing advice on the benefits of experimentation I might have to look into them, thanks!
Not meditation, though. F**k that.
Also, for those starting out, it might take a few tries to find the right med(s). For me, just a stimulant or just an antidepressant didn't do much, but a stimulant and an antidepressant together has made a great improvement in my life.
When you talked about procrastination, ist reminded me of a Video that I watche every time I feel that procrastination overwhelms my life, which ist usually every 1-3 years.If you dont already know it, i Hope you enjoy it: https://youtu.be/mhFQA998WiA?si=YoO06S48xo8H5fKq
> - The act of doing something is usually what creates motivation to continue.
> - Procrastination isn't poor time management; it's poor emotional management.
Thank you for sharing these. I've heard point #2 many times, but point #1 and #3 are huge insights to me!
You simultaneously feel like you're too burned out to be able to do some entirely new thing, if you can even muster the energy to engage in the switching process (e.g. job hunting, etc.), and the familiarity of the thing that's burning you out brings its own kind of perverse comfort.
However, now that I've been deeeeeep in it for a couple years (still doing the thing that's burning me the whole time and even now) I've developed an appreciation for what it probably really is... existential malaise. That's a really useful thing to experience. Because it can be used to redefine a superficial value system you've adopted, to get to this point of dread in the first place, toward things you do actually find personally fulfilling for their own sake. Sometimes in dramatic fashion.
This describes an average Monday. Though I would not describe it as comfort but as continuous eternal pain you try very hard to ignore.
Everything has its unsigned and signed integers.
Go on…
On top of that you then are faced with this constant increase in "tech" that is supposed to do so much amazing stuff / make everyone more efficient, so now you are forced to do even more work in those 40 hours or get squeezed by wealth inequality? The new AIM chatbots coming out now can do so much! wowee! now I can be in 4 meetings at once?
Then on top of THAT you also have to wake up each morning facing global climate change where there is no real effort to change the course (you can say all you want about renewables, but as long as these graphs keep going up we're all going down https://www.climate.gov/).
People do get value and meaning from their work, whatever it is, it just feels like this mindset and social structure of the industrial age doesn't match up with any of the challenges we face nor does it feel like it fits with all the knowledge and technology that has been developed. What's the point if what we're doing on a day to day basis takes so much of our energy and then just gets us closer to human caused environmental destruction no matter what it is?
Such a great example of how the fear reflex is functional from a survival perspective. We often talk about how we can combat our fears (e.g. public speaking, dancing, etc) and this serves as a good reminder how this primitive response serves a purpose.
All of our emotions (when we're healthy) are tools. They're all programmable to some extent as well. If somethings not actually dangerous, repeated exposure to it will desensitize you to it, for example.
Not necessarily, as someone who has a difficult anxiety that I have to deal with very often, being exposed to the situation doesn't make me any less fearful of it.
It takes an active approach to pierce through anxiety and fear. Repeatedly becoming terrified of something will more likely just make us feel bad, and helpless. Actively perceiving something frightening as tolerable is the kind of exposure that helps.
Another key thing a lot of people don't know is that you need good sleep in between stimulus exposures. Also, you probably need a shitload more exposure than you think. Persistence is what will save you.
If your situation isn't actively harming you and is only a risk, then exposure therapy will work.
Asserting that one modality must work for everyone is ascientific nonsense
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/livingwith_wildlife/bears/encoun...
I'm disappointed that an error like that made it through the fact checking process. It makes me doubt the rest of the article.
well anyways that's starting to feel like, i would not mind that level of familiarity and interaction at my job and maybe in society out with strangers, people i am competing against for resources, like, milk at the grocery store.
it's just me, and, my spouse, that i dump 100% of my social needs on, and i'm a lot, so i exhaust her quickly. i learned to keep bottled up most of my need to deflate after a day because that is basically holding someone hostage, to hear how my day went, as therapeutic as it is for me, it's an exchange of toxic assets that deserves compensation or greater distribution across a wider audience... like a workplace or a society tolerant of exchanging with strangers
so in the vein of lugging all this work around that gives us burnout, i have a theory that we're bottling way more up and solving it solo, poorly, just accumulating baggages that a different world used to exchange freely as part of a social acumen.
anyways i've put myself in a precarious situation of being vulnerable to a bevy of reality checking thread responses, which, i'd gladly take as good medicine to hear what i'm getting wrong; but i think i might have lobbed this point generally in a direction that is accurate, even if not precise: we dont have "our people" anymore and we're rotting together
Its tiring to be mostly on receiving end, either there is a lot of negative stuff being unloaded unto you, or people are hopeless in some basic situations and can't speak up or generally help themselves or similar, and there is very little I can actually help with.
What is important for long term stable relationships is to have them balanced, give what you take in similar if not same ways, and not be a semi-constant source of negativity/complaints, everybody has their limit. The shit I've been told from some of my close folks, without ever asking or wanting to hear that... I would never bother them with such crap, its often borderline rude, and usually there is 0 I can do just listen or stop the whole circus.
>Its tiring to be mostly on receiving end, either there is a lot of negative stuff being unloaded unto you, or people are hopeless in some basic situations and can't speak up or generally help themselves or similar, and there is very little I can actually help with.
I’m sure OP is wonderful and I don’t want to make assumptions about them, but I’d hate to do this with someone who is really negative and finds too many things to complain about. The other thing you mentioned is that if you’re a certain type of listener, it is an exhaustible skill to engage with so many “i need comfort not solutions” type stories and conversations.
Very much this. I'm in a similar situation myself, and I noticed at some point I started mentally begging for any of the complaint to be something solvable, because I'm running empty on comfort. It's especially hard when you heard the exact same complaint for like 5 times in the last two weeks; comforting stops feeling sincere just by sheer repetition.
They never existed.
Cycle goes something like this. Factories in parts of the city shut down after it get cheaper to run them outside. Those spaces lay empty, rents drop, decay begins. Poor Artists move in. Area starts getting interesting. Yuppies move in cuz of the 'cool' factor. Property developers notice. They start buying everything up. Rents jump. Artists get kicked out. And you end up with boring rich people living in a formally cool area.
"Loft Living" is a great book, although it's been a minute since I read it. To quibble on a minor point -- if I remember correctly, a major part of that book was pushing back on the narrative on part of that cycle, that these factory spaces "lay empty".
Something she describes in this book is that these factory spaces were still very much in use by light manufacturers, and that it was the rich real estate interest specifically targetting this area for redevelopment that pushed a narrative that it "lay empty" so that they could more easily get the neighborhood rezoned and push out the manufacturers for more lucrative residential tenants.
I see this comment everywhere and it irks me. Here's my point-by-point, obsessed-fan's rebuttal:
1. It isn't a loft. It's an unusually large apartment.
2. It's explained on the show that it's a rent-controlled sublet illegally inherited from a grandmother of one of the characters. The illegality of the situation is a key plot point in one of the episodes.
3. It's obviously easier to shoot on a larger set than a smaller one. It isn't hard to suspend your disbelief on a fairly minor point. Would it have been a better show if they had shot it on a smaller set purely to satisfy people who want realism?
4. The size of the set is irrelevant to the storylines and characters. The characters don't otherwise live lavishly or appear to spend out of proportion to their income.
5. All but one of the main characters lives with a roommate or romantic partner throughout the entire show's run.
This stuff occurs in smart people more than it should, usually with some sort of anxiety disorder or ADHD. Some of the best public info on this is from Dr Jessica Eccles who examines the relationship between cognition, emotions, and the autonomic nervous system. This stuff shows up in a lot of stats, eg a huge portion of people with long Covid have some sort of hypermobility.
There are effective psychopharmacological treatments for dysautonomia which is usually the underlying mechanism.
Sorry, I don't see how that could possibly be true. People with CFS have fatigue to the point where they can't get out of bed. The fatigue from burnout is usually driven by workplace conditions. Like sure, they both have some kind of environmental trigger. But CFS can almost become a disability, whereas burnout is much more narrow and temporary.
While certainly some with ME/CFS are so bad that they cannot get out of bed the vast majority have good and bad days and you don't see them on their bad days and they look just like everyone else on their good days. One of the reasons it's considered an invisible disease. It's a spectrum and some people manage it better than others.
Sometimes the burnout isn't so temporary - even this article talks about how repeated burnout becomes an problem with the person entering a state of depression which bares a lot of similarities to ME/CFS.
Most people with ME/CFS will never be diagnosed and those people will often think they just have issues with burnout. That's what I though for over 20 years and I have a severe form of it. I though I was managing burnout and then graves disease. It never occurred to me that I would have something like ME/CFS until I stumbled on a random twitter comment that linked ME/CFS with hypermobility which I also have a severe form of. So here I am adding my comments to the internet.
There are generally a whole bunch of rather weird and rather rare comorbidities that occur in people i.e. it is known by its associates. That's what a lot of Dr. Jessica Eccles work goes into.
Fairly certain it wasn't the case for me anyway, I can see what caused me burning out, and can also see what I did to help me get out + prevent it from happening again.
The advent of covid and the long covid that has brought with it has resulted in a large number of people who were previously well and are now very sick. There are public studies done around this cohort and I've done a number of private studies of > 60 people with long covid and I have the WGS of > 15 people who have the SNPs that I'm interested in - which is a rather large number for a 'rare' disease and especially large for a private person.
Attribution is difficult, it's very easy to mistake one thing for another, disambiguation requires careful consideration.
I can't overstate how much getting fit helped me. I absolutely still get burned out, with the same depression, anxiety, and existential malaise, but the lows are never as low, and it is always much, much easier to bounce back.
I don't know how much of it is a purely psychological sense of resilience you build up by regularly putting yourself through difficult physical stressors in small doses, and how much of it is from physical changes that (presumably) improve your autonomic function and balance... but whatever it is, it's been life changing, going on about 10+ years now, depending how I count it.
It's directly linked to stress, I think the predispositions are linked to not being able to ameliorate stress so anything that helps manage stress will help.
What is hypermobility in this context?
https://www.ehlers-danlos.com/assessing-joint-hypermobility/
Individuals can have symptoms like fatigue, GERD, poor circulation, neurological problems, psychological effects.
There are many causes too, certain antibiotics, chemo drugs, covid, autoimmune. It is extremely unrecognized.
A specialist in my area used to have a 1+ year waitlist. Now, he moved to a different state.
There is an exciting treatment in the pipeline. WinSanTor is developing a cream with pirenzepine. In clinical studies there was a systemic recovery of nerve damage. I have spoken to a chemist who had nerve damage from flouroquinolone antibiotics, which caused his dysautonomia and he recovered using oral pirenzepine. Keep in mind WinSanTor is targeting diabetic neuropathy in their studies but it should work for other neuropathies.
Interesting, pirenzepine is a antimuscarinic agent (M1 selective antagonist). Neatly in the class of psychopharmacological drugs.
I predominately use Amitriptyline and Modafinil as well as Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) and a very strict diet. Modafinil is a no-go for anyone with gut issues and I don't know the alternatives very well. Modafinil in the morning and Amitriptyline at night help push my autonomic system into the sympathetic and parasympathetic states respectively. I have a very complicated rational around choosing these meds which is not fully fleshed out yet, but they worked for me and work for some others in the long covid cohort. So for now it is good enough and what I'm sticking with. As I understand the science better I might consider switching up the meds and seeing what happens. I still get PEM and would love to be able to fix that.
Generally, this family of drugs should no longer be used as first line treatment. Doctors still often use it as first line for UTI though. It carries a very high risk of damage to tendons and neurological system.
It is also the only antibiotic which is topoisomerase inhibitor, other drugs which are topoisomerase inhibitors are chemo drugs. It means that it blocks the enzymes needed to divide and regrow cells.
That's exciting. I got blind-sided by that. A doctor just said he was prescribing 'an antibiotic' like it was no big deal, and I had never had issues with any other antibiotics. I was told by the pharmacist do not exercise while taking these (found out a few days later it can damage your tendons, several people ended up with snapped achilles tendons) but otherwise nothing else.
Took a single pill and within a few hours I felt fairly strong neuropathy all over my body. Took a few more days and a few more pills before I determined for sure that it was caused by the pills and not something else, and got the antibiotic switched to doxy. I continued to get neuropathy in my limbs quite often for years after that. It's mostly reduced now but I think it might have caused damage in other parts of my body, and may have helped lead to me getting the Tinnitus I've been dealing with for four years now (there's a causal link between the two).
Since they prescribed it to me the surgeon general has slapped big warnings on the pills, but I was shocked a doctor didn't think to warn me about the possibility that there could be any serious side effects (it was also the first medicine I took where I had serious side effects by it, took me by surprise).
Seems it's actually not that uncommon that people have bad reactions to flouroquinolone antibiotics, it just wasn't recognized for many years. Wish I was given an appropriate warning. I might not have risked it, or asked for a different antibiotic I know didn't have issues at least.
Obviously, not every individual will suffer from side effects but even if its 1 in 100 that gets neuropathy from a single pill when other drugs are available is pretty wild.
It is extremely common doctors even fail to accept that these drugs can cause side effects listed on the drug label.
Not something I particularly wanted to get into but the genetic predispositions for long covid do seem to appear most frequently in the more intelligent. And since our society is so stratified by intelligence a large portion of the population does not directly interact with intelligent people and are truly sincere when they report that they don't personally know anyone with long covid. My experience is quite different as 1/3rd of my friends that I knew prior to my own issues have developed such long covid/ME/CFS issues of their own. I went through the whole gifted / magnet schooling system so my peer group is substantially biased.
I am not surprised, since many of them were easily manipulated into a pretty bad risk trade off that even a plumber would not take. Regret is bound to be high for that kind of people.
Historically speaking many of the brief episodes of strange psycho-somatic “illness” with vague descriptions were found among the equivalent of the laptop class and suburban wine moms.
Yes, there is a general question of why do otherwise smart people believe ridiculous things. There is a common refrain that because they're smart they can more easily rationalize their beliefs but I don't believe that is true.
I think diminished ability to ameliorate stress leads to stress aversion behaviors and a strong attraction to rules, structure, and authority. I think when the effect of that is greater than their intelligence they become prone to believing many untrue things but once intelligence goes over a certain threshold that effect is lost. I think that's why a lot of the bell curve memes ring true to many people where both the very smart and the very dim share the same beliefs but for different reasons.
Historically speaking most of those people, generally considered hypochondriacs, did have the conditions they complained of. Historically medicine has been literally blowing smoke up peoples asses, draining their blood, and feeding them mercury.
I think it's a bit weird that you're using evidence from the same medical system you don't trust to get covid and the vaccines right to unwittingly gaslight on their behalf.
You are simultaneously dismissing others personal anecdotes while providing your own as evidence. I believe you are reporting honestly of your observations, just as I believe these wine drinking suburban moms do have the conditions they complain of. This stuff does affect women worse than men and for the aforementioned stratification reasons those affected are more likely to be in the upper middle class and above.
Your immune system does not generally prevent you from catching anything; it allows your body to fight the infection more effectively the next time you catch it, thereby reducing or eliminating the symptoms. In your lifetime you will likely have caught some illnesses that you are vaccinated against without realising it, because you successfully fought the infection before it became serious. The COVID vaccine in particular never claimed to eliminate the symptoms altogether but reduces the severity so that rather than breathing through a tube for three weeks, you get a nasty cold. Long COVID is still a possibility and yes, very much a real thing albeit not well understood yet; I know at least one person who is recovering from it now.
>The COVID vaccine in particular never claimed to eliminate the symptoms altogether but reduces the severity so that rather than breathing through a tube for three weeks, you get a nasty cold.
Good examples of propositions that cannot be falsified.
Also, statistics are a thing; propositions like 'vaccination reduces severity of illness' can in fact be proven or falsified by studying a sufficiently large cohort, such as is readily available during, say, a pandemic.
Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) is probably the most used and widely accepted med within the patient communities and due to having a rather mild side effect profile is a great place to start. Such side effects include really crazy dreams, insomnia, and nausea. The stronger the side effects the more likely it'll work and the negative side effects will go away in time.
I predominately use amitriptyline and modafinil but I don't have the gut comorbidities that would preclude the use of modafinil. I'm not familiar with alternatives to modafinil but a friend who previously had success with modafinil, until the gut issues became too much for him, switched to levosulpiride and he says that worked great. This appears to be counterintuitive for me but psychopharmacological meds are a tough one because they almost always have more than one receptor binding affinity and there is the interplay between ligands of different types and strengths as well as how the brain and body reacts with it. In general I prefer the weaker ligands than the stronger ones and don't try to over-optimize such that every day is good, I target 80% of them.
I basically looked up what books are used in that field and read a bunch of those; Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology being one of the better ones. There are also books on dysautonomia but I don't know if there is a particular one I would recommend - the whole dysautonomia space is rather nebulous. My big takeaway from that is that is dysautonomia is super complex and hardly anyone understands it.
I suppose it’s theoretically possible for someone to get a IQ bump from HSV I think the correlation is more from selection criteria biased on severity.
There does seem to be a non-zero optimal for brain inflammations effect on IQ which could explain why smart kids have are likely to burn out when an existing predisposition to brain inflammation is made worse with age.
I wonder if this had to do with the fact that in modern society, we often have to go through great mental loops to convince ourselves that our jobs are meaningful. After all, they are very far away from doing things like obtaining food and shelter or even learning things we are curious about.
At some point, I feel like the illusion cannot be held for long: it starts in school when the learning is onstensibly about curiosity but then the gradient between curiosity-driven learning and being a cog slowly eats away at the facade that we have constructed in our minds of actually doing something useful in society until burnout becomes inevitable.
Seems rather obvious as society these days is mostly about furthering advanced technology for very little benefit to the average person except that it keeps the economy going only due to the fact that the economy itself is based on broken principles not compatible with our amazingly high human population density.
It's even worse in industry, where I worked after academia. I felt like I was using 5% of my brain to do things I was bored to death with. This isn't just me either: many of the people I've worked with feel the same, including virtually all my fellow PhD students.
I feel like the only thing keeping it going is the novelty of working in new places, meeting new people, and getting new projects. It's almost as if we have a basal attraction to novelty because it's a survival instinct, but we have distilled life so that novelty is the only thing left, stripped of substance long ago when we traded thought for automation.
Of course, it's even harder to see it because we have "propagandists" (i.e. then 1% of people who have carved out a protective bubble for themselves due to a combination of luck, ingenuity, and gaming the system) that say that amazing things are happening.
- only 1% of people are happy
- they are happy because they are lucky
- every happy person is a propagandist
You need immediate recalibration of your worldview. You only live once, and you ought to be happy.
People managed to be happy throughout human history because it’s a skill.
EDIT:
I wanted to add that I meant the above in good faith and not as an attack. I used to be unhappy too. But I learnt:
- every moment doesn't need to be hedonic bliss
- life doesn't have to be easy
- one's work doesn't need to meet all of one's needs
... and you can still be happy. Human beings are extremely tough and adaptable, but that is a capability that has to be exercised.
There is a bit of a problem with the Internet tending to amplify negative views, giving you the impression that everyone is unhappy - no, it's just that all the unhappy people are on the Internet all the time.
Here's major depression - and that's as diagnosed and treated:
"An estimated 21.0 million adults in the United States had at least one major depressive episode. This number represented 8.3% of all U.S. adults"
- happiness comes from outside yourself
- the world is fucked (people who think this tend to blame the economy, the environment, the threat of nuclear war)
- humans are weak and ineffectual, so we can't change the environment or ourselves
Why do these ideas exist? Because people trying to sell us on voting this way or that (illegal immigrants are ruining the country! big bad corporates are ruining the environment!) or spending our money a certain way first have to convince us that the status quo is unacceptable and that they alone can effect change.
Get rid of these ideas and watch your well-being skyrocket.
Because people are not blind.
And while happiness needs the "inside yourself", it also needs the outside. Especially the outside that affects the inside, like reduce socialization and spaces to meet causing loneliness, social media and "personal highlight reels" posts from thousands that one sees causing feeling of inadequacy and missing out, an economic climate that brings precarity and uncertainty, etc.
Of course if you e.g. make $200+ plus stock bonuses and such a year in a cushy IT job you might dispute the latter is a thing, and if you're an introverted "hacker" type, you might dispute the former is a thing as well. It's like billionaires saying "everybody can succeed, just look at my and my unicorn 1 in 1000000 company".
And while we can be happy even with bad external conditions (e.g. third world poverty) it's very possible that we cannot be happy with all kinds of bad external conditions, e.g. a damaged social fabric, widespread atomization of society, meaningless work, status and income uncertainty in a consumerist (not a third world, where everybody is poor anyway) society, and so on.
The universe doesn't give a fuck, and having one life is not a guarantee or a contract to anything, much less "hapiness" (itself ill-defined).
(Life doesn't have to be fair for your outcomes to be all up to you, by the way. You're dealt a hand of cards, and you can play them well or you can play them poorly.)
How you play your cards is up to you, and how you feel about it is also up to you.
I only meant that not many people can find true meaning in their work only, and that this phenomenon is far from a theoretical optimum. Of course, people that find meaning in their work aren't literal propagandists. Only, their efforts and enthusiasm is promoted as propaganda as an emergent property of the system that needs their efforts in order to support a pathological system.
If anything, we learn to be unhappy. It's no secret how toxic academia can be - I would say the original commenter's personal observation that only 1% of people are happy is probably because many people around them are deeply unhappy.
I know I felt this way when I was in a different career. Once I moved out of that field, I was astounded to find out that people are actually not depressed most of the time. I won't lie, the improved financial situation that followed was a big factor - it's definitely easier to be happy when you're not poor!
So, I agree, a recalibration is in order. But that might involve removing yourself from certain social groups as much as it requires a thought pattern adjustment.
It is very, very subtle but oh so simple (but not easy)
It seemed to be mostly about beating the individualism out of us, and memorizing some facts on things we didn't care about.
Make sure you go to university or you'll be a bum.
I grew up in the UK which has the most extreme sense of "anything unproductive is useless". I completely failed my English oral test but because I was good at Maths and Science they just wrote "A" in my grade for GCSE English anyway. Who cares about humanities education (low wage, low GDP, likely unemployment) if you are good at Maths? Many people on this website will even swear there is no downside to foregoing an education in literature, philosophy, art, etc. We also don't have a liberal education at university: I studied physics and only physics for my entire university education.
I sympathise with the article you posted. It's interesting that it has been historically considered a moral failure and even punished:
> The Benedictine Rule directed that a monk displaying the outward signs of acedia should;–
> "be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear."
Much of my shame over burnout came from knowing it was sinful. I don't think letting go of that shame has helped, though.
I worked at a company making project management software and, although in the grand scheme of things the product wasn’t meaningful, I enjoyed working on it until the company tripled in size and I was fixing bugs for enterprise support team number 3.
I like making things. People find satisfaction in toy making as well (especially at nerf, from what I hear), even though toys are not inherently meaningful.
What killed it for me was realizing that my individual contributions didn’t affect anything with the product.
Also, who gives a fuck if someone else looks down on you for being happy? Let them wallow in their own misery and judgment. You don’t need their approval. Live for yourself and not for others.
P.S. You might be surprised to find out what they are actually thinking. It’s usually not what you imagined.
That makes for a very lonely life.
> surprised to find
The surprise has come because what they are thinking is, in fact that expressions of joy make them respect you less. They hide it, but only for so long.
You don’t get to express joy to family or friends or partners. They will have less respect for you.
You do not get to be an adult man and feel joy about anything. You certainly don’t get to express it.
If I was guessing, they don’t actually disrespect you less. They are actually jealous, but don’t feel comfortable expressing their own joy, so they take it out on you, to pull you back down. They probably aren’t even aware that’s why they are doing it.
But that’s a problem with them, not you. You aren’t responsible for their emotional disregulation. It’s your job to take care of you, before you help others. Put on your oxygen mask first, yeah?
It’s a sad life to be rigidly beholden to only express emotions in ways that you imagine others would approve of.
If you care about the person or have the time, then it is good to at least consider their views and feelings (which are often different than what we imagine them to be — you can only find out if you go to the source of truth and ask them. This might sound scary but in a healthy relationship it’s okay to talk about this stuff), but you don’t have to be beholden to them.
And, of course, it should go without saying that doesn’t mean you should completely ignore the current circumstances. E.g. If you are at a funeral, you should tread more lightly, obviously. Every situation is unique, and you have to use your judgment.
It’s ok to do things other people don’t like, as long as you aren’t a jerk about it. Live authentically and listen to your inner voice. Do so with kindness, wisdom, and courage. You might be surprised by the positive reactions you get from others.
Good luck to you.
P.S. This is so important I have to say it twice. Everyone has issues and will project those issues in the way the interact with the world around them. It's not our job to cater to the issues of others. It's our job to take care of ourselves and live honestly and authentically. Sure, we make compromises for those that we love, but we want to do so because of that love, not because we are afraid of what they might be thinking.
Almost all of that has been gained, not through the quality of my work, but the degree of enthusiasm I showed for it. It's on me to make sure I'm still going in the right direction, because my audience will be swept up in the enthusiasm.
Joy is not only valued, but it is marketable. So is anger. Cynicism is considerably less marketable, and stoicism isn't really observable at all: you're probably thinking of expressions of woe implying great burden and suffering.
When you specifically say on an interpersonal and cultural level that "joy is not valued", and "only cynicism and stoicism are acceptable", that's a screaming red flag that you aren't hanging out with the right people.
I think toys are meaningful. They encourage exploration and fun. That's certainly meaningful and fun is a basic human instinct. What isn't meaningful is that which does not contribute to an increase in human happiness in the long-run, such as the creation of new iterations of phone models that last only a few years just so people have to upgrade.
It's difficult to define meaningful, but I would include that which allows people to enjoy their life in a sustainable world that is compatible with creating opportunities for freely exploring all aspects of human existence, while maintaining respect for other living beings. Much of what we do in the modern world is not that.
There is much more to learn. There are more unknowns. And there is much more competition.
If you take competitive sports and look at size of support stuff its ridiculous these days compared to 20 years back. There is coach, physio, shrink, nutritionist, biz manager, social media manager etc
So now extrapolate and imagine what things will look like 10 years or 20 years from now on the that trend line. Its just not sustainable.
People have to think about rate of change in the environment that surrounds us.
Everything feels like that all the time. And yet we constantly find ourselves 10 years down the line, with years of exponential growth piled on top, and some post-Malthusian explanation of how "actually it is sustainable if we just keep pushing through and believe in progress".
I'm not saying this or that _is_ sustainable, just that the point people declare it "unsustainable" is often only the beginning. It's a (mis)perception David Goggins speaks of a lot - about just how much deeper an organism can dig in crisis, or how low our pain/risk thresholds are set. Maybe we unconsciously factor that in.
Personally I think that's reckless and we are better heeding warning signs. But if we'd done that in 1970 climate change wouldn't be a thing, right.
Especially since a lot of them are not.
It's often corporations acting as middlemen and extracting value like parasites, bussiness making bullshit for conspicuous consumption, modern mega-bloated bureaucracy and busy work
I think we all have this sense that life should be nothing but personal fulfillment, and anything getting in the way of that is a problem. And maybe it’s even true that that’s how things “should” be, but I really don’t think it ever has been.
Most of our jobs are not meaningful. They'll carry no impact beyond our tenure, the company's existence, and so on. Most don't help society in any form or fashion, sans generating revenue.
someday you'll be stuck untangling a giant muddy ball of legacy code to help a company solve a problem that you don't care about (or even arguably makes the world worse). but just re-scope your expectations and realize that "hey, i made life a little easier for some of your coworkers by fixing some annoying things
There are obvious myriad and complex reasons we’ve arrived where we are, but it’s an interesting topic to ponder. I’ve also thought this shift could be responsible for other societal phenomena: it’s fairly well known that some portion of people are pretty awful to the people working in shops or restaurants. Is this perhaps a behavior that only really develops in a world where people rarely visit owner-operated businesses (where they might face consequences for treating the owner poorly)?
I get to show up and give them a helping hand. In just two years I've met so many people and made so many friends.
It helps to feel like I'm doing something valuable to society and not just fixing the validation on an input form for the 1000th time. I feel deeply connected to my neighbors now in a way that I never would have imagined.
It also breaks up the day to get to run down for a call, and not just be stuck behind a keyboard all day. Sometimes I'll go work from the station, which has great AC and WiFi.
That's not that abstract to me, and it certainly feels meaningful.
I feel that is not a logical conclusion. What if someone paid a hitman to kill their boss because they got into a fight with them and they aren't emotionally stable enough to have a discussion?
Yes, an extreme example, but consider this: not every increase in perceived value is necessarily good.
I direct interested readers to David Friedman's _The Machinery of Freedom_ for some worked examples of how capitalism might minimize such actions from taking place.
Hunter Gatherer: collect nuts, tubers, kill some bison.
Modern Man: get the money, collect some skills, fire some underlings.
Maybe our brain has adapted those base instincts. And modern burn out is more equivalent to what early man would experience in a famine, during times of scarcity.
If you can't get the money, you starve.
Burn Out is the Modern Man equivalent to the stress the Early Man would feel in a harsh environment and near starving.
Imagining bears and deer just hitting trees left and right because they don’t move is absolutely hilarious.
Moving - eat or fight
Not moving - go around it
And if you stand still they avoid you as if you were a tree trunk?
If a tree moves, they will also investigate, maybe there is something to eat hiding inside. Bears typically live in forests, so there's not a lot of movement of trees on ground level. If a lot of trees move violently, they will go to their burrow to wait it out.
Dogs for example, have an instinct to hunt on things that run. Plenty of my friends have been bitten while running. I always start walking when I see a dog, and never been bitten.
Don't underestimate instincts in both humans and animals.
EDIT: It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have been (and still am) convinced I will never be able to work again, in any job, at all
Of course, now I am going to abandon academia, which is very painful, since it is my entire life so far, but I clearly cannot make it work even though I have tried extensively. I need to be in work where you actually are a part of a team, getting feedback, talking to people. As my contract comes to an end I will be forced to look for a job, but of course I'm completely terrified because of the burnout: I've never had a "real job", and when I tried to do some programming work for my stepdad, even though it went well, I felt terrible when doing it and I felt burnt out with that too.
My strategy was of course to seek mental health services, since at the beginning of the burnout my mental health was much worse (suicidal ideation, depression, etc.) and I found my therapist. I won't go into detail about the therapy because it is a kind of psychotherapy that is common and supported by insurance in Europe but that is controversial in the US.
Of course, the therapy has helped hugely. I no longer have thoughts of suicide and I don't have depression anymore. However I am still terrified of work and am almost completely convinced I will have all the same feelings of apathy, disappointment, and lack of motivation when I try.
First step, I need to convince a company that I don't have these fears, and lie to them about my motivations, and hope they believe me.
EDIT: I can no longer reply to any more comments since /u/dang set harsh limits on my account
You'll get there.
1. meaningful
2. high impact
3. high authonomy
4. safe (low pressure, stress, etc.)
5. creative
And counterbalance it with lowpay to please market dynamic, something like a work for people with disabilities or requiring special assistance (which is done quite good in EU). I did try open source/own project, but the pay isn't guaranteed and I would like to pay the medical insurance/state pension and some basic (minimum wage) income to simply have peace of mind.
Or, “high impact” could be spread over the long term. So, unknown-payoff R&D. It would need to be an “invest and ignore” strategy and require a lot of institutional trust.
it made things so much worse because it turns out that when you go to a low-paying job the quality of the org and coworker talent drops a LOT. this lead to a highly dysfunctional workspace which added so much more stress because a) dysfunction is stressful and b) you could see how that dysfunction directly harmed the meaningful thing you were supposedly working toward.
if i could have taken 6-9mo away from my job to do my "meaningful work" and then come back, i would've much preferred that to just outright leaving. i imagine that that'd be a great employee retention tool for the tech co as well.
There is some stigma around "diy sabbaticals" (leaving job without new one), my fiance and family was quite surprised and frustrated for proposing to leave a "high paying job where I don't have a lot of work/stress" without new one in toughy developer market with lot of layoffs.
We can learn to push through hard times, but not forever. You need connection, exercise, good food, and nature.
After burning out, I relaxed for a while. Then, I focused on things that were under my control and didn’t depend on others. Exercise, losing weight, etc.
Better to find something more entertaining to do with your time... than get jettisoned with a product lifecycle.
After a few years, everyone burns out eventually. =)
It it one reason why the churn rate is abnormally high for techs. People can only expect 110% for so long until a team starts dropping like flies.
"A change is as good as a rest" as they say...
Have a great day, and I'll see you at the hot-springs friend =)
no matter which execuses we find, we know that our job is meaningles. KPI's OKR's Jira tickets.. does not mean jackshit to our self.
I've jumped on programming/tech since i got my first computer, i loved how hacking/building something that works and learning new stuff along the way feels. But at the end of the day, this is just another white-collar job, some shits needs to be done, most of the time with coorporating with other people.
If the article defines burnout correctly, i think it is inevitable due to the alienation[]