What definitely does not help is using stimulants to try to push through. I feel like I’m seeing more and more social media posts from people who deepen their burnout by trying to use excessive caffeine intake (or stronger prescription stimulants) to try to ignore the warning signs and push on.
It is like overclocking your brain. Sometimes it is what you want, but it comes at a cost.
The main fixes I’ve found for myself are:
- Get a lot of exercise and sunlight (if possible) to counteract the caffeine’s effect on sleep.
- Resist the urge to have more caffeine than usual when tired. It works well as an enhancer to a well-rested brain, but when used to compensate for sleep deprivation, it’s counter-productive.
Eventually I figured out that a solid blast of cold brew in the morning and none the rest of the day worked better —- almost like medicine. Like you say, if I feel I need more then it’s a lifestyle problem.
i think a lot of people drink cups and cups of coffee because the first one just isn't strong enough. get a strong buzz first, get your shit done, and then let it coast down. probably why many europeans start with a strong espresso and asians drink less-caffeinated tea throughout the day. drinking coffee all day long seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Because for me stimulants have helped against the symptoms that are described for burn out. By that I mean things like lack of motivation, helplessness, frustration, anxiety, incapability to feel pleasure, cynicism, sense of failure, self-doubt, etc.
While stimulants have a withdrawal period, I prefer to have an option to be productive and motivated for a certain amount of time and then when I don't have to do anything, it's fine to comedown as opposed to being constantly fogged up.
Because stimulants remind me that it's possible to feel motivated, essentially. Otherwise I would never feel motivated. It would be a constant grayness.
On top of that both anger and anxiety attacks, you know all the fun stuff.
Of course this is different for almost anyone but I’ve spoken with some folks who’ve had similar-ish symptoms.
Related: see also Ballmer Peak[0], which is particularly funny because the effect is, to a degree, real.
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[0] - https://xkcd.com/323/
So each month I have a period of a little over a week of break.
RE my break, I maybe had only a day of "withdrawal" that was more of a little panic mode, that lasted until I realized I'm really managing just fine, only maybe slightly less so. Week later, I was still managing fine - though everything was noticeably harder, and I was only compensating with habits developed since starting the treatment (and perhaps novelty of such long break itself).
The key distinguishing what I felt with burnout from just being mentally tired is that no problem, no matter how hard it was to solve (or even if I failed miserably at solving it) has ever caused me to instanteously feel 100% mentally exhausted. By contrast, when burnt out, even fairly trivial work tasks would trigger this.
So in the meantime, I'm kind of just putting in the minimal effort at work, not doing any side projects, and going on lots of really really long walks. That seems to be slowly helping.
I have read more about being able to use short and long term disability, which might help, or be a viable part of a strategy. If you do this, I'd recommend having your own insurance and not using your state or companies disability insurance.
What I found helps is spending as much time outdoor as possible, preferably in the sun and in the wild nature, especially if they're light hike. Try to do that at least half a day every weekend.
Hope you get better.
I did once have an experience with nitrous oxide where I heard something similar and subsequently had a pretty major shift in my thinking process for awhile.
It has been a little over 2 years since I left my job from burnout, now I am doing something completely different and a lot less intense. But I don't think I could ever go back to what I once did. I have permanently blowen out half my cylinders. ;)
I’m paraphrasing, and I don’t remember the specific episode. But look it up because it might help start turning it around for you.
I've been pondering changing my job, but I worry that I'd be just a low performer in the new place.
Changing the problem from having to figure the simple but tedious thing myself, to having to review someone else's solution, is like switching to a less obstructed track. > 50% of the time, ChatGPT is wrong in some way. But it's also close enough, and/or mentions some magic phrase or a hitherto unknown to me library function, that it's both interesting and motivating.
1. It lowers the activation energy of getting started; for me motivation tends to come after action, and it gets me to that point.
2. It taps into the intense drive of "someone is wrong on the internet!" as per https://xkcd.com/386/
3. It's a new and different way of working so it doesn't trigger the same mental scar tissue.
4. It's vaguely social and high-status (delegating tasks, correcting and reviewing), as opposed to feeling solitary, so it tickles different reward centres.
5. More gets done for the same effort, so the cost/benefit equation is better and the feedback loop tighter.
I consider this a feature not a bug. Now go focus on important things in life: money, sex, and exercise. Don't overthink. Learning another state management method in new generation of Angular, unwinding a mess created by CV-driven FOMO hysterics, acrobatics in Java design patterns... they're all not worth it.
not that easy is it
Nobody really noticed. My raise this year didn't keep up with inflation. I could have let the project fail like it should have, rather than burning myself out. Maybe I would have received some of the blame, but chances are I'd still just be making the same amount of money if I had just cared less.
You've gotta toot your own horn. Relying on others to do it for you is a surefire recipe for disappointment and disillusionment. Think of it like a business. If the business does no marketing, what's going to be the result? Bankruptcy.
I've known many bitter people who did something great, and nobody knew about it because they thought it was unseemly to write papers about it, present about it at conferences, etc.
It's often necessary to make sure they notice, by telling them. A good method is to email your manager a weekly summary of what you accomplished, including extra hours you spent on it. This is especially worth while if you're working remote.
Now, if only I had the space for it…
And here's an example of an apartment woodshop, you can get started with many less tools than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybvuuVRlSWc
r/handtools is another good place for questions/information on that.
Cringe
Your body learned that 'working really really hard for this resulted in very little tangible reward' and then probably concluded 'i will not work very hard for long periods of time without seeing reward'
Probably the hardest part is understanding that 'i made a number in a database increase' is not actually a reward.
Counterpoint: this is like considering various peculiarities of software from 1980s to be features in 2020s. Yes, our bodies are well tuned. To an environment we've lived in until our ancestors, thousands of years ago, boarded a metaphorical rocket ship, and left it flying under constant acceleration.
In certain aspects, we're quite far from the environment we evolved in, and evolution has lost the ability to keep pace some time around when it granted us with ability to develop a language more complex than a few grunts.
It's true this kind of thing can crop up even under the best labor conditions, but much much less frequently. Startup founders do run into it and they own their work product.
Still if workers get a significant share of the total value they produce and have good control of their working conditions (and can change projects easily), I suspect this will get a lot better.
this reminds me of the men in black scene [1] where Will Smith moves the table. you get to decide what kind of person you are
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijVbM9DpxU&ab_channel=Creep...
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[0] - Related concept: "society is fixed, biology is mutable". The flip side of the well-known (if annoyingly overused) adage, "you can't fix social problems with technology" is that if your problem is a social one, you've already lost. Social problems are unsolvable by direct approach; literally anything else is easier than getting people to coordinate at scale, when it means enduring a short-term personal loss for a long-term distributed gain. If you have that kind of problem, pray there's a way to medicate, industrialize, capitalize, code, or CRISPR your way out of it.
[1] - Unique at the scale we're talking about. There's a huge gap between us and the next animals best skilled at adapting themselves or the environment.
I read this list as: requires stable employment, requires stable employment, is torture. The first two items... are not something I can focus in lieu of my job, they're literally the point of it (I long ago gave up on the idea of Finding Fulfilling Work That Is Also Your Passion And That Is Net Good For The World).
For me, I needed(/need - this is not a solved problem) to find a way that works for me, and also take it in the tiniest of little bites.
I tried for years to get into running. Never worked. I hate running. I tried to go to the gym, but all the classes went way too hard for me and my local didn't do "just show up and lift", only classes. I tried riding a bike, but I could never find a way to do that where I wasn't dodging cars, rain, hills and heat.
Finally last year I bought a rowing machine and a heart rate monitor. I put my headphones on, listen to a podcast, and focus on keeping my heart rate in a specific zone for a certain amount of time. If it's hot, I turn on the AC. If I get sick of it, I stop. I dont have to dodge cars, so I can completely dissociate and listen to the podcast so long as the number is where I want it to be.
It's great and generally not torture, which is nice because apart from team sport it's literally the only way I've found that isn't.
For me, all common forms of exercise feel like torture when doing them, or when thinking about doing them, or both. Most of it isn't even for physical reasons, just a combination of anxiety, procrastination, and the kind of general sports aversion you develop when you get prescribed glasses when you're 7 y.o. and thus go through 10+ years of schools not being able to effectively participate in team sports during PE classes...
As for buying a machine, I highly recommend going to a gym during a quiet period if you can find one that will let you do a trial or a day pass. Then you can try all the machines and find the one that you think sucks the least. Rowing is good because it does loads of muscle groups, but ultimately that doesn't mean anything if you hate it.
E: the thing that changed the game for me was a good hr monitor. Smart watch was full of crap, and just listening to my body made me go way too hard too fast.
The sun is too hot, the wind is too cold. The puddles are a twisted ankle just waiting to happen. I don't want people to see me running - it makes me self conscious of every part of my body and my running form. I don't want to check the little free library during my exercise - that's a break in my flow.
On a machine, I don't have to worry about any of that. I just go, and when I reach my time goal, or I don't feel like it anymore, I stop. I can close my eyes if I want to without worrying about falling over. I can make all the exertion noises I want to if it's hard. I don't have to walk all the way home if I go too hard too early by mistake and get a stitch.
And the best bit is that your way and my way are both totally valid ways of exercising. The important bit is not how we exercise, the important bit is that we exercise.
Meanwhile, I go to kung-fu training and get pretty annoyed when I have to skip a class once. Sports can be wayy more fun and I wouldn't worry about the social aspect so much - adults can behave better than teenagers.
Of course, I run in quiet areas where my mind can drone off and think about interesting things.
The point is, I mistook my dislike of running, cycling and HIIT for a dislike of exercise for basically my whole 20s, and it turns out that's not true at all. I just had to figure out the version that worked for me.
One should avoid running on concrete pavements. Consider alternatives such as grass or tarmac.
Increase your cadence to at least 170 strides per minute. More if you can. This forces you to lower stride length. Overstriding is a main cause for shin splints.
Also try to think about your hips when you run. An anterior hip tilt will put excess stress on shins and quads. Tense your glutes when running to keep hips level. Imagine you are carrying a bowl of water in your hips and try not to spill!
Also weak glute medius will cause knee pain and potentially shin splints. Try strengthening up the glutes and shortening stride length.
Good luck!
These are great tips! I've had issues with weak / under-activated glute medius for years, but I didn't think about that causing the shin splints. I'll give the 170 stride a minute tip a try.
Thanks!
Sarcasm?
Not all forms of burnout results in trauma responses, but they all require extended recovery. Burnout is preventable, but once it has been reached, the damage has been done and rest is required. No joke: 3-6 months is the usual recovery time.
Paths to occupational burnout: - No mental rest from work. "Taking it home with you." Often skipping breaks to keep focused. - Jobs that require high amounts of mental processing for long periods (customer service, development, troubleshooting, multitasking, urgent-response).
"Brown out" is the stage when you're still capable of functioning in spurts, but your brain/body is sending warning signs (that we have been taught to ignore).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_burnout?wprov=sft...
also at 6 months im trying to get back to work and the interview process and job market sucks so im feeling miserable again haha
Oh and in terms of ChatGPT, I just meant it's something fun that I use for other interesting projects due to how flexible the composability is (LangChain, etc)... not so much directly as a therapist-bot if that's what you were asking.
Interviewing sucks.
My email is in my profile if you want to chat. Good luck with the return to work.
There was no specific point when I felt like: Ok, I am out of this mode, but the transition was visible.
Don't wish this feeling on anyone - its a terrible terrible place to be.
Sometimes I wonder whether "burnout" or "occupational burnout" describes something I have experienced in college. It was not a spectacular or intense thing, just losing interest in my subject completely and avoiding getting started with exercises, even though I was decently good at my subject and loved the hours and hours I spent studying.
> Sometimes I wonder whether "burnout" or "occupational burnout" describes something I have experienced in college. It was not a spectacular or intense thing, just losing interest in my subject completely and avoiding getting started with exercises, even though I was decently good at my subject and loved the hours and hours I spent studying.
The fact that you use the past tense means you got past it? If so, I'd appreciate any advice
I'd love to give you advice so much, however I forced myself through it and started to work in a different carreer.
Perhaps if you can get out in the real world then you will find real problems and those will likely motivate you (if you are anything like me, anyway). The most motivated students I recall were already working, and they picked and chose relevant academic focus that could help them with their design work (i.e. they could get some value from the academic system). Even though work is often depressing in itself (varies on a huge number of factors).
Ideally, try and discover what really motivates you. I like this idea, although I haven’t tried it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29912252
Edit: perhaps relevant: I was depressed due to a relationship. She ended the relationship with me, and the next day I was long-term happy. Turns out situational depression is a thing, and that it is entirely different from clinical depression (which doesn’t fix itself in a day - exception fast bipolar?). If you feel unhappy, sometimes you have the ability to fix the situation that is making you unhappy!
Good luck.
Or that without fundamentally changing the set and setting of one's life, one can expect, on average, approximately the same metrics now as tomorrow, and so on and so forth.
Therapy and medication help, for some people, some of the time.
But if burnout is trauma, is taking a break from work really enough to resolve the trauma? I ask because that seems insufficient in the case of other traumas, e.g. undergoing sexual or emotional abuse, violence, etc.
Apparently it isn't, much like in case of physical trauma. GP mentioned people switching careers.
I know a person who got burned out when their boss tried to make them do 2D and later 3D design for the company, on top of their normal assignments, because he didn't want to hire a new graphics designer after the last one quit. Said person gained basic proficiency in some CAD software, Photoshop, Corel, and then burned out on 3DS Max, to the point of having strong physical reactions at the very though of it, even many years later. It's a psychological wound that can't heal, and it closed off 3D graphics as a line of work for that person. Trauma is one of the words we used when talking about it over the years.
See e.g.:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18979198/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mitochondria-may-hold-keys-to...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This guy is giving out mental health advice based on not understanding what he is talking about. I think that is dangerous and isn't a place for being polite.
I get the guidelines for inconsequential topics, but pretending something is valid when engaging with something that could be harmful seems like its elevating its legitimacy. In this case there is plenty of reading to do on the topic of burnout causes.
I guess the simplest answer from you would be the answer to this question. If i posted something encouraging people to not take vaccines, how does that discussion get handled? Does every comment and thought really get treated equally with curious responses? I guess to me it seems fair to, be short direct and point out the misinformation even if it appears to be flaming
Anyway stuff like this https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_causes_of_...
is why suggesting taking supplements to cure burnout and dropping an irrelevant link to a study about mental illness is uninformed.
I'll hit report in the future then, thanks for the back and forth and explaining.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/luck-based...
The above advice is solid, but I would add number of others. CoQ10, C in multiple forms, ALCAR, D, Bromelain, concentrated fish oil, etc.
I am also convinced they do not work for me, because of the premises.
If you could fight deficiency with a mind, we would not have deficiency disesases.
> If you could fight deficiency with a mind, we would not have deficiency disesases.
That is so true. The thing is, a lot of diseases get treated as a deficiency disease.
Science is important. In accute phase response deficiency is the norm, as one example.
And/or nasty interactions with prescription drugs when you do it incorrectly.
I’ve taken a break off work for ~7 months but it seems that wasn’t enough to get back to the level I was used to before.
While this sucks, I’m kind of happy I’m apparently not the only one that experiences this
While I am not full luddite (I mean I am on here!) - I fell into a similar funk. I just do not really care for the higher level stuff of computers and technology any more. I love the potential of what we can do with computers but I am also starting to feel that we need to make that connection between the higher mental state of pure information that we use them for today and move more into a state of them interacting with the real world in simple fashion.
This is probably a part of my Stallman streak in me but am also more in line with Jaron Lanier. See the potential and then get disappointed by the results.
But I am so much more into my cooking, premaculture, just chilling with friends or even by myself down by the river. Yeah, I still have a 9 to 5 job but that whole 'tech' angle is just gone. There are occasional little sparks of interest but they rarely last longer than a half hour.
To bring it back to tech in the real world, the idea of a computer monitoring and controlling a little glass house out the back of my house is really cool. But this is something an Ardiuno could do. A lot of things I want to see tech do in my own daily life can potentially be done on an Amiga 1000. I am still into tech but the lens through which I use it has changed a lot.
> Singing my life with his words
> Killing me softly with his song
In you know that you're describing a feeling not trivial, but especially not unique.
I think the key is to take an extended break from work or whatever caused the burnout. Other things may be helpful, but for me this is the only thing that really helped.
A stressful gauntlet of trying my hardest, only to be met with failure, which generated self-loathing and hopelessness, eventually resulted in an emotional "snap". It wasn't gradual; I think I felt it the minute it happened. It was sudden. It was, "Oh, suddenly I can't bring myself to care anymore." It was like dropping a heavy load onto the ground and finally being free.
It felt exactly like "a defense mechanism has been installed in my brain preventing me from hurting myself like that again". From then on, I had much more self-compassion, regardless of how things turned out, and I felt emotionally decoupled from my performance or self-perceived intelligence. (Disappointing people still hurts when it hinges on those things due to the personal connection, but impersonal metrics like grades or money or whatever ceased having an effect.) I couldn't work or focus as hard as I did before, when I self-flagellated myself to with shame and insecurity. That seemed like a potent fuel source, like coal or gasoline: powerful but dirty/unhealthy long-term. ;p
I don't feel like I have that anymore. I can't really "push through" using it. But I'd say I'm only debuffed like 10 or 20% -- not by a HUGE amount, and what motivation I marshal now feels a lot more sustainable and grounded in my actual, day-to-day well-being. I think learning and striving from a place of self-security and self-compassion feels a LOT better, even with that debuff. (Compared to from a place of "OH GOD I GOTTA DO THIS OR I'M NOT AS GOOD AS THAT PERSON OR GOOD ENOUGH FOR THIS OH GOD OH FUCK[0]".)
So, oddly, for me, it felt (and feels) great.
>When I have to think hard about something for work I have to push past that and then I feel an intense dissociation while I do.
I don't even feel capable of pushing too far past beyond my boundaries. I simply don't. It's kind of a like high-functioning depression for me, where the "can't get out of bed" factor kicks in at like "175% of your typical day's workload". I still "work hard" on things, and people regularly say I do or say that I'm working all the time, but I only hit like 150% max.
For me, it's also been several years while only a year for you, however. Maybe that changes things!
Also, the "coal" and "gasoline" of insecurity were probably coming from ego. I think that's what broke: my ego. If your starting point wasn't "I have to do this because my ego tells me I should be able to so my self-image is completely wrapped up in it", like mine was, that might also change things.
0: https://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/367/603/ab...
I've found something as simple as a daily calm stretching routine goes a long way towards keeping the mind+body on board with everything else I call on it to do.
Not that I'm some new-age meditation and yoga solve all problems type at all.
But stretching in particular is a surprisingly mind+body exercise because there's all these safeguards in place to prevent carelessly damaging your muscles and joints. When you increase your flexibility and condition your mind+body to allow reaching these extended positions, it's like you're earning the trust of the system. It's not purely a physical flexibility thing, there's a huge mental component.
That seems to translate into greater self-trust elsewhere, be it pushing physical limits of endurance/strength or constant long coding sessions.
Luckily I had a friend who knew I was capable of it and pushed me a bit to get through it, but it was exactly like a trauma block. Well doing quantum chemistry research as an undergrad with a crazy Russian professor will do that to yah.
Years later I've largely recovered, but I still shy away from basic arithmetic in front of others. However, I was able to get back to where I can solve math problems and even find it fun on the rare occasion I get to.
In some ways I have a deeper intuitive understanding than I did as an undergraduate, despite my faculties not being quite as "quick". Actually I rarely need to solve an equation to get enough of the answer I need to solve many problems.
It doesn't feel good.