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Comment by dsirijus | Hacker News Reader

> there were times when I got completely burnt out as often as once every few days

Hm, maybe we call two different things a burnout. I had it twice, one ending in a visit to ER, the other one blasting a single song at max volume for 20h then crying and trying to quit my job.

I don't think the author actually had one, at least not by my definition of it.

That aside, my main cause of burnouts was working extremely hard on something and not finishing it, for a long time. Or always going after a moving target. Management and goal setting issue, really, and easy one to solve - break huge goals into subgoals, or even - don't have big goals at all.

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I would quit my job long before anything like that happened. A psychotic break may be something that burnout could lead to, but I'm sure that that's not a minimal requirement to say you're 'having a burnout' in most people's usage.

To be honest, that's just not the way I react to stress. I'm more likely to get a bit of insomnia and be overly critical towards my coworkers.

edit:

"The term 'burnout' was coined in the 1970s by the American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger. He used it to describe the consequences of severe stress and high ideals experienced by people working in 'helping' professions. Doctors and nurses, for example, who sacrifice themselves for others, would often end up being 'burned out' – exhausted, listless, and unable to cope."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0050545/

both of those sound like nervous breakdowns.

Which is what a bad burnout is.

If that's what you want to call it. I always thought of burnout as not being able or not having the desire to continue keeping up the professional pace that you've been keeping over a long period of time. It doesn't have to include any irrational element, or even explode into a cathartic moment to be burnout as far as I've heard it discussed.

'Succumbing to burnout' I get - 'having a burnout' is not a phrasing that I'm even familiar with.

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