How to Recognize Burnout Before You’re Burned Out

I was planning to write under a throwaway, but I guess I don&#x27;t care anymore.<p>When most people talk of burn out, they usually have spent years in the industry or probably have been probably working 12 hour days for a long period of time. For me on the other hand, I kind of managed to get burnt out (depressed) two years in the industry. I loved CS back in college, but my job felt like a punishment. The worst thing was I couldn&#x27;t get myself to figure out what was wrong. The lack of a support structure for &quot;emotionally exhausted&quot; developers is surprising. But anyway once it got worse enough I just decided to quit, wasn&#x27;t worth the toll on my health. Got back to the basics - started learning some ML and webdev. Built and shipped a side project. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discoverdev.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discoverdev.io</a> - A daily list of interesting engineering blog posts.<p>Even now I have anxiety pangs, but at least I&#x27;m not depressed :) I realised I liked learning and building stuff in a collaborative atmosphere - it&#x27;s something that just makes me happy. Currently I&#x27;m working on creating a platform for people like me - who just want to get together and make things.

My whole life I was a boredom-driven person.<p>This means that, for every productive action I&#x27;m taking, I have to &quot;roll a morale check&quot; and I fail that one more often than not, and stop doing whatever I wanted to accomplish. I consider myself talented but my output thus is inherently constrained.<p>It was very shocking for me to discover that many many people don&#x27;t work like that: instead they need to roll a check to ever stop working, otherwise they don&#x27;t, eventually burning out (but in process, earning e.g. good grades which was always unreachable to me).

The Rock method of waking up 6 days a week, doing 30 mins of heavy cardio and then lifting weights and pull ups is the only way I&#x27;ve found where you can keep an insane schedule without burning out. As soon as I hit a pillow I sleep no matter what I&#x27;m thinking&#x2F;worrying about, and I wake up without any back pain or other problems where before I started this routine I always woke up with little pains and stiffness. I have energy all day, and the cardio seems to help with focus.<p>Something else I do for sanity is on Saturdays I work in a medical lab at a local university for a few hours designing and testing algorithms. It pays a joke salary, but it&#x27;s intellectually satisfying work and you get access to PhDs to leech their knowledge. This can get stressful as mistakes can blow the results and ruin their research grant but it&#x27;s something I look forward to doing every week outside my usual job of just adding features and putting out fires. If you can I highly recommend looking at your local university research position pages and seeing if there are any open on the weekend or in the evenings. For some reason local students here never take these.

But even given that I&#x27;m burned out. What am I going to do about it? I can&#x27;t just up and quit my job. There&#x27;s no other jobs that won&#x27;t have me just as burned out in a few months, and the idea of searching for one is tiresome already.<p>How do you get out of that funk?

&gt; five-minute breaks for every 20 minutes spent on a single task, or sitting at your desk<p>As a software developer, yeah right! In 20 minutes, I&#x27;ve barely even gotten a problem into my head, and a five minute break would mean starting over.<p>Also, working remotely is not necessarily a cure for burnout. I&#x27;ve been burned out while working remotely and it had a lot to do with the additional stress of having to be self disciplined, the lack of boundaries between leisure and work, and the lack of emotional support from co-workers.<p>Other than those two points, there was some good stuff in this article.

One of the earliest signs usually goes like this:<p>Hmmm I wonder if I’m burned out. I should Google about it.<p>By the time you’re thinking you might be across the line, you’re already past it. Your subconscious is trying to tell you things.<p>That’s how this subconscious health stuff usually works. If you think you might need a break, you do. If you think you might be tired, you are. If you’re thinking whether your job is a drudge, it is. If you’re thinking about food, you’re hungry.

I have a story for young HNers: if you want to learn about burnout, I propose to you a dangerous thing to try out (note: I did warn you). I did it myself (note: I did warn you twice).<p>What I tried out was studying as much as possible for the longest period of time on university. Do this as long until you either (1) cry yourself to sleep at night from exhaustion or (2) start to feel emotionally numb. This has to be combined with the condition that you see yourself having a reduced output&#x2F;productivity.<p>I expected to get (1) but instead I got (2). I then went to the wikipedia page on burnout and looked at the checklist [1] and saw I had almost all of them, except for the most severe ones. I took on half the amount of study work (which was still more than most students would do) and since it was the end of the second semester, the summer holidays arrived. The next academic year I was fine.<p>Why did I do this? Simple: I recognize that I am a person who wants to work hard. So I knew I&#x27;d get a burnout sooner or later in my life. It&#x27;s better then to be acquainted with it, so that I can see the warning signals. Also, it&#x27;s easier to experiment with this on university than in a working environment, since it&#x27;s easier to take uni a bit less seriously than work -- for me at least. Also, I prefer to make deliberate mistakes as young as possible when I know there&#x27;s a high likelihood I&#x27;ll make them down the line anyway.<p>Note: I did warn you thrice. It is a dangerous experiment, but so is any experiment where you want to look up your limits. Knowing your limits, however, can be very beneficial.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20150413145539&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Burnout_%28psychology%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20150413145539&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikiped...</a>

If only managers could understand that putting the screws on workers leads to worse results. More bugs, more staff turnover, more absences, more arguments.

If you are stressed at work just leave. No amount of tricks will make you feel better in a toxic enviroment. Also, why would you help a toxic company by staying, when you could help another company that respects people. Because people stay at toxic companies it why there are so many of them and not enought of sane companies. People don&#x27;t respect themselves first.

The article appears to point out that work-related stress is the main reason for burnout, which might be the case for some, but personally, I found that the lack of challenge and meaningfulness in my work were the main predictors for burnout. In short, be more selective in the projects&#x2F;jobs you take, and focus on the ones you actually care about. I do realize that it&#x27;s easier being said than done of course.

My mother has a saying: &quot;No is a complete sentence.&quot;<p>In North America, we live in a &quot;default yes&quot; sort of work culture.<p>We say &quot;yes&quot; to every request at work until we&#x27;re overcommitted and then we burn out.<p>Why do we say &quot;yes&quot;? Here are some reasons I detected in myself:<p>* Afraid to rock the boat, to appear uncooperative.<p>* My own ego. Sometimes I think I have a a super clever way to solve a problem and I say &quot;yes&quot; so I can show off.<p>* Not thinking it through. Sometimes I say &quot;yes&quot; before thinking the problem through, and the problem ends up being way bigger than it first seemed.

I guess burnout means different things to all of us, and is probably caused by different things, too. What I&#x27;m about to describe probably wasn&#x27;t the start of burnout, but I ended up there all the same.<p>I&#x27;m currently looking to get out of programming after 17 years because I&#x27;m tired of politics and bureaucracy. But anyway, on to your question...<p>I can&#x27;t tell if these were signs of an on-coming burnout, or if I was already gone by then and just didn&#x27;t realise what it was. But for me, I started to get angry and frustrated, quicker and easier. Sprint meetings annoyed me, daily stand-ups seemed pointless, interruptions always came at the wrong moment. I started to believe my own hype and went days without doing any work what-so-ever because I knew I could still do more work than my colleagues if I wanted to. I used to moan about my employer all the time and would often find myself saying things like &quot;this fucking company...&quot;.<p>All of those symptoms probably have nothing to do with burnout per-se, and were almost certainly a result of a complicated relationship with a co-worker and a lack of credit and respect by my employer. Nevertheless, I believe that period changed something fundamental in regards to my thinking about programming, the industry, and perhaps life in general, which has led me to want to get out (of the industry, not life) as soon as I can.<p>I think what I&#x27;m trying to say - and having some trouble conveying - is burnout can come as a result of some other thing that starts you on the road of questioning if this industry is really what it&#x27;s cracked up to be. So perhaps instead of looking out for potential signs of burnout, look instead for changes in your attitude. If your attitude is becoming more negative, you need to change something quickly or you’ll probably end up “burned out”.<p>Or maybe I’m just rambling about something that most people wouldn’t describe as burnout…

&gt; A trusted mentor at work with whom you can discuss and strategize other ways to deal with work-related issues.<p>Sorry but this <i>never</i> works. Once one starts &quot;sharing the concerns&quot; one have couple of months left in the workplace.

Ah the two malaises of our age...<p>- &quot;OMG! I&#x27;m so busy. Stressed. Burnout!&quot;<p>- &quot;Oh no! AI is taking our jobs&quot;<p>There&#x27;s a certain irony in that some of the most overworked people in the world are those bringing AI to the market.

Thankfully, SV has solved the issue of having both a demanding job and little children by offering egg freezing as a perk. (Phenomenally disruptive! Uber for asynchronous human reproduction!)

I feel desperately burned out every night when I go to sleep at 2am or 3am but when I wake up the next morning at 7am, I feel completely refreshed and I want to keep going.<p>I think that having an open source side project can be rewarding in that way.<p>Financially, I&#x27;m broke as a camel&#x27;s back but open source work does give me a sense of satisfaction. At least for now.<p>I think it&#x27;s vitally important to have some social recognition for your work otherwise it&#x27;s very easy to feel burned out.

For me: writing code is my job, writing code is my hobby, writing code is what drives and comforts me. I hear about a great new tool or language, I just have to try it out - usually on my own time.<p>Doing this has served me well in some cases, but there have been times I have woken up in the morning not caring if I ever use a piece of tech again. This has been a pattern throughout my life: to focus on something to the point where I may be a bit obsessed, start to get really good at it and then burnout hard and transition to a new focus.<p>Luckily with tech I have learned moderation to a point. I still almost hit that wall sometimes, but recognize pretty quickly when I am about to and take a short break from the tools or issue at hand.

I write and distribute a &#x27;weekend update&#x27; just about every week and send it to my team on Sundays. It serves two purposes:<p>1. Clearly communicate project progress and near-term goals to everyone involved, including non-technical people. I outline the features &#x2F; issues &amp; resolutions in fairly technical detail while tethering it to more accessible concepts. If things were truly easy or exceptionally difficult, I note that. This has helped Sales and Marketing better manage expectations. The times I&#x27;m most stressed are when Sales and Marketing have underestimated the difficulty of something they&#x27;ve promised a client. It&#x27;s typically not frustrating because it&#x27;s hard or there are time constraints, it&#x27;s frustrating because they&#x27;re prioritizing something that may not be aligned with technical or user priorities. Pile several weeks of this and it can be exhausting. The &#x27;weekly update&#x27; has helped that.<p>2. The process of writing the update offers reassurance that whether the week felt productive or not, progress was achieved. This is the piece that makes sitting down to write it feel like a fun activity rather than a chore. My mind may be saying, this week wasn&#x27;t productive, but by 15 minutes into composing the update, I&#x27;m finding things I had already forgotten about. The week may have been less productive than expected, but it&#x27;s almost always more productive than the mind gives credit, and writing the update forces the mind to acknowledge these small achievements.

I think there are two very helpful skills when it comes to preventing burnout:<p>1. Being able to know where your limit is<p>2. Being able to tell your boss were your limit is<p>Many of us try to be good at their job and are not afraid to give constantly 120% but while focussing on the task at hand we put aside our physical needs. And telling your boss you have enough work for the next days and that any additional tasks will have to wait, is something many people are afraid of. Often they fear to give the impression that they are not enthusiastic about their work.<p>In my opinion, everbody who tells his boss about his or her capacities cares about the efficiency of the company.

I couldn&#x27;t make sense out of the &quot;Common Work Stressors&quot; chapter -- who is the target population which served as a base to establish this list? People lifting heavy things usually have predictable schedules. Also, that, as well as exposure to the weather, becomes more problematic with age, exactly when interacting with people becomes easier... Etc.<p>If this is rather an open-ended list -- why not a word about how companies lay off people based on age? Isn&#x27;t that a common source of stress to many?

Has anyone dealt with being burnt out while enjoying their job at the same time?<p>I started a new job and although its very interesting (I like the technologies used, the project domain and the competence of my teammates) lots of symptoms mentioned in the article apply to me. I just feel so stressed out all the time its affecting every aspect of my life.<p>Not really sure how to proceed right now. Honestly I don&#x27;t feel like pushing through will help but I don&#x27;t want to quit my current job so soon.

I used to think I occasionally suffered from work burnout, but then my SO became a medical resident, and I realized &quot;oh, that&#x27;s what burnout is.&quot;<p>What I used to &quot;suffer&quot; as a programmer was the ebb and flow of productivity. As described by books like &quot;Drive&quot; and &quot;Flow&quot;. This state-of-mind was perhaps best described for me by my colleague (also a programmer) in this public essay, &quot;Find the right routine to surf productivity&quot;[1].<p>What my SO suffers as a medical resident is <i>true</i> work burnout. They work 6 days per week, nearly 80 hours per week, for weeks (or months) on end. Their work is not only challenging intellectually, it&#x27;s challenging physically and emotionally. Their work also buckles under the weight of administrative bureaucracy, which removes their sense of agency.<p>Recently, after my SO got off a 5-week &quot;night float&quot; block (where she worked 6 days per week on an inverted 6pm-6am night-time schedule), she finally got a day off. It was really a day to re-adjust her schedule back to working &quot;normal&quot; daytime 6am-6pm hours. During that day, she said to me, &quot;Can we look up Maslow&#x27;s hierarchy of needs?&quot;[2]<p>Looking over that diagram, we realized her work had her floating around in the first couple levels of that pyramid, whereas in my work, I was very much at the top. My &quot;burnout&quot; feelings were really &quot;not feeling perfectly self-actualized&quot;. Her &quot;burnout&quot; feelings were actually &quot;not having access to basic physical needs (e.g. sleep) and emotional support (e.g. daylight, friends, family).&quot;<p>I am very much in favor of Jason Fried style &quot;Calm Companies&quot;[3], and I think in software&#x2F;tech, we actually have the ability to &quot;work hard&quot; without burning out, usually hovering around the &quot;self-actualization&quot; level in the pyramid. One of the wonderful things about software engineering, in particular, is that since it is the art of automation, we can actually save ourselves labor, and think carefully about the notion of employee leverage. That is, one employee&#x27;s code can do the labor of hundreds or thousands.<p>It&#x27;s really sad to me that the medical profession, at least during its training period for new medical school graduates, there is an epic contrast: the near-guarantee of burnout, with basically no recourse for residents except to &quot;suck it up and power through&quot;.<p>For those of you who feel your are in jobs in tech where managers &quot;put the screws on you&quot;, you should recognize that you have all the power in the world to change job. Employers in tech should be fighting over you, ensuring you feel fulfilled, productive, <i>and</i> balanced. &quot;All of the above&quot; is possible; this isn&#x27;t a &quot;pick two&quot; engineering trade-off. If you don&#x27;t feel that way, it&#x27;s bad management or bad culture -- period. In medical residency, it&#x27;s &quot;pick zero&quot;, and even worse, there is no way for those folks to change jobs (at least, not without derailing their entire career).<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifehacker.com&#x2F;5955115&#x2F;find-the-right-routine-to-surf-productivity" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifehacker.com&#x2F;5955115&#x2F;find-the-right-routine-to-surf...</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;timvandevall.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;Maslows-Hierarchy-of-Needs.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;timvandevall.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;Maslows-H...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.signalvnoise.com&#x2F;the-calm-company-our-next-book-d0ed917cc457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.signalvnoise.com&#x2F;the-calm-company-our-next-book-d0...</a>

&gt; Feeling alienated by your colleagues and bosses, feeling constantly underappreciated, or feeling ostracized by them.<p>Lol. I find it funny I got attacked and censored for describing that and then being told it isn&#x27;t related to burnout lol.

When you are too busy to make time for doing something you love like readimg or trekking

I was close to being severely burned out.<p>Changed my role at work<p>Now everything is great.

I am burn out ... sleeping 3 hours a day... if I stop working I lose my visa

As a side note, it should be &quot;Ms. Seppälä&quot;. As a Finn, I always find it a little weird how most media can&#x27;t be bothered to handle Nordic characters.