I've never been burnt out(yet). What does it feel like?
Much like depression, but specifically work related.
I've been there, and come back there at times when I overwork myself and don't get outside enough. Not fun.
That part of you feels dead. You can barely convince yourself to get out of bed. You just feel numb. Tired all the time, but unable to get enough sleep to feel better.
It's not the same as depression, though if you put enough of your self-worth into your ability to be awesome, it can lead to depression.
It probably is related to just being under-slept, but it requires about 2-3 months of good sleep (probably longer if you can't take that much time off work and really relax) to recharge your brain.
It also may be related to the psychological concept of "ego depletion." [1] At least that's how it has felt to me.
Looking back I was in that spiral for too long, I spent months not doing much of anything. I'm not sure at what point it started getting better for me, it seemed to just gradually get better very slowly. Eventually I shook up my life by taking a job in an entirely different country and the difference in daily life was enough to invigorate me again.
Burnout for me feels like the third day of that all the time. A fatigue so deep it's almost an ache. The thought of booting up your IDE feels like the equivalent of sitting through a lecture after that third day of little to no sleep. Sure, you can do it, but it just seems like such a chore.
That's burnout. It takes the things that invigorate you and turns them into chores. Then it breaks both your legs. Have fun getting your chores done.
This part of your description was much better than my whole post.
One thing I always avoid is depriving of enough sleep which will cause physically burned out and it's hard to recover as other people mentioned. It may cause long term negative effect. If it happens in a short term, make it up quickly to fully recover yourself and come back to the energy level soon.
Psychologically if we are burned out for a certain task, we can switch to some other type of tasks instead of doing nothing productive. But sometimes, it's hard to keep the engine running without burning out of fuel. For most of the startup teams, after reaching a certain milestone, it will be followed by a lot of lip service or brain storming before they gear up towards a new target.
Yes, once it happens, we have to turn around and do something else which is also productive. Give yourself enough relax both physically and mentally, then go out and talk to more people, you may get some positive energy and idea to make yourself refreshed.
To me, coding is like playing game. It's part of the language we use, but just talk to the machine instead. Somehow, I think programmers are really less superior, just like we are in the eye of the business people. We can do a good job to talk to machine, but may not be good to deal with people and make money. On the other hand, we are proud of us that we can make machine work according to our idea, we can create program to do whatever things we like, it's more or less like God created the world.
So trying to be God is not easy. Let's take a breathe and go further.
That's ignoring the random bouts of crying for no particular reason and things like that, because I'm pretty sure they're unique to each individual.
Burn out - for me - means a shorter temper and less productivity.