I’m burnt out, not from stress, but from being “forced” to do a bunch of stuff that I don’t care about with a bunch of other people I don’t really care about for a company I don’t care about, but if I stop at any time the money stops coming into my bank account so I just have to keep pretending I care for years just to keep the game going. The actual work itself varies from stupid easy to relatively challenging, but again, I just can’t bring myself to care beyond ensuring my team doesn’t think I suck at my job so I can keep collecting my paycheck. All I’m doing is running out the clock every single day.
I have a similar feeling, sometimes. It crops up whenever I stop coding on the side, for fun, for more than a month. The playfulness just gets lost over time.
Last week my motivation went to almost 0, and it took me a while until I discovered the why: I had been stunned by the SwiftUI demos, and wanted to get my hands dirty. But I hadn't had ANY time to dabble around because I had overburdened myself with promises to various customers. What I did felt very far away from what I actually wanted to do, and it got worse every day.
When I finally understood what the problem was, motivation started to come back. I played around with SwiftUI for only 5 minutes yesterday, and feel so much better already.
Do you have a side project that you would love to spend all your time on? (doesn't have to be coding)
This kind of stuff just makes me feel worse in the end. I try out all this cool stuff in my free time then I'm stuck doing monotonous work with same tools at work. Or I learn something cool and just never get a chance to apply it. I feel like what's the point beyond satisfying some curiosity.
You just put in to words what I've been feeling for the last 3 years that I have spent hours of therapy trying to find a way to verbalize for myself.
The only phrase I had that came close was referring to my current situation as wearing golden hand-cuffs. I feel constrained and unhappy a lot of the times, but boy are those hand-cuffs pretty to look at.
This is Marx's theory of alienation. Textbook example.
For me, when I realise this I quit and move on until the cycle repeats itself. I'm currently working for myself though so it's a bit different!
I think all the cool libraries that occur are a form of release valve for alienation. Engineers working in alienating jobs can at least do something of personal interest.
I recently listened to this podcast and found it very clarifying. The main point is about how to organize life around a central, organizing purpose in order to find joy and happiness.
That's not a very nice thing to say. I am in the position where I could take your advice but for many folks there is no plausible solution. Sure, anyone could fuck off to the woods, open a fruit stand, and tell their spouse and children to suck it up and college is overrated anyway. But what if your spouse doesn't want to live behind a fruit stand in the woods? What if you have to support a family and the pay ceiling for your profession doesn't allow you to save enough money to retire early? What if you're already closing in on 50? It's easy to tell people they just need a plan, but everybody has their own unique problems and it's a bit rude to imply that it's their own fault because they didn't work hard enough. GP could have made a plan to retire at 35 and sail around the world, pinched their pennies, and saved up a million bucks, then their child got cancer or something else equally horrible. Or maybe you're right and they spent all of their discretionary income on magic the gathering cards. Point is, we don't know and it's not nice to tell random strangers on the internet to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Please don't cross into personal attack. I'm sure you meant it as a gesture of help, and maybe that tough-love approach can help in person, but on the internet it just comes across as a slap. Previous explanations if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
For me, burn out was not a consequence of the demands of the job, but a belief that nothing I did could possibly have any impact, that nothing I said would ever be listened to, that every moment I spent in that fucking place was an absolute waste of time.
This wasn't how it started, I took a vital yet buggy and unmaintainable piece of software and got it to a point where new features could be cleanly added and new bugs were a very rare event.
And yet, every time I tried to make any significant change - generally intended to further improve the maintainability of the project - I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else.
> I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else.
Sole aim of some people is just to have power over others, force subordinates to commit their mistakes, and to replace subordinates with others who are increasingly zealot, obedient, and desperate. I have no idea how to defend myself in such situations, usually I just quit.
"Professional managers" (persons being managers and leads from the beginning of their career), and overeducated people joining the workforce late in their lives and straight from or shortly after the academia are the two profiles from whom I observed such behaviour.
I would add one category: pump and dump freelancers. The type that never have to live with the consequences of what they implement or develop. This correlates closely with CV-driven development.
In order to sniff these people out, all you need is a five-minute conversation where you challenge them on something innocuous. You'll find they have no arguments, overuse authority arguments and blindly follow the gospel of well-known programming books. Once at that point, quietly extricate yourself from the conversation and start sending out CVs.
These kind of people will fuck your shit up if you let them or can't find a way to limit your interaction with them.
Honestly, as silly as the book and most of the philosophy behind it is in my eyes, "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene can be quite helpful in playing the game with overtly controlling people. Often the correct path is just to quit though. Provided you're a skilled professional you'll likely be finding a job in what is a buyers market, so there's little to lose in leaving and a lot to lose (sanity included) in staying.
Sounds a rotten situation, hope things are better for you now. Your example highlights how toxic the softer/environmental aspects can be, not just challenging technical factors.
Personally I find I am happy to deal with technical challenges - that's what the job is about, IMO - but political and otherwise artificial challenges are a massive turnoff which I look to either get removed or extricate myself from one way or another.
Looking out for the latter and dealing with it somehow before it escalates/accumulates is a great way to avoid getting stuck in a position where burnout can develop.
I spent too long believing that technical competency would breed trust in my ability to produce and execute a sound road-map.
I left too late, having lost a lot of the joy that I previously took from software development.
One thing I'd love to know is how leaders who have faced incredibly stressful situations for sustained periods manage to push through.
Hannibal the Carthaginian general for example spent nearly 20 years fighting the Romans on their own turf in Italy. He had a string of victories and also suffered incredible losses including the loss of an eye to infection.
Despite that he led his men and was incredibly popular. After laying waste to the Italian countryside for two decades he was reluctantly recalled back to Carthage where he served as a statesman for several more years.
He was then exiled and a price put on his head and he made plans to ally himself with other leaders of the day - honestly his life goes on and on. The guy's resiliency is incredible and he isn't the only one of his age. There are numerous examples of similar people from the history of the time.
I suppose your modern day cases like Musk or Jobs are what we'd think of today. The former's challenges are well documented but the latter had just months to turnaround a sinking Apple and restructure the company before it ran out of money. He'd been through many ups and downs and again displayed a resiliency which is pretty remarkable.
I think that everyone's ability to handle stress varies. What I'd love to know is why some people can suffer incredibly and not only survive but thrive and if there is some way in which we can learn how to suffer the everyday arrows slung our way and bear our burdens better.
Because Hannibal did not have the six factors of burn-out: lack of control, insufficient reward, lack of community, absence fo fairness, conflict in values, work overload.
Arguably Hannibal:
- is in control (he's leading),
- he's probably rewarded through pillaging, (I feel that reward is absolutely key to continue pushing through)
- there is probably a sense of community while they are laying waste,
- as a leader he probably get "fair" shares of reward for himself (cf. the Iliad, opening list of treasures)
- the work he's doing is probably aligned with his own values (unlike Xenopho who was hired as mercenary in terrible conditions), as we can see he didn't want to stop campaigning
- work overload is probably there, as campaigning men have little sleep and work a lot (cf. Cesar)
Conclusion: Hannibal is less at risk of burn-out than men serving under Hannibal.
At risk of being nitpicky, Hannibal's reward was probably more in terms of defeating/killing Romans, as his entire life was more or less focused on hatred for Rome and a wish to destroy it.
I only bring this up because rewards can be (and in my opinion the best ones are) immaterial, the type of things that would fit into the self-actualization part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I think this type of reward is much more critical than material ones for being able to endure those conditions for a long time.
>Because Hannibal did not have the six factors of burn-out: lack of control, insufficient reward, lack of community, absence fo fairness, conflict in values, work overload.
This makes burnout sound incredibly similar to "Learned Helplessness." Tweaked, I suppose, to the problems of a workplace.
But in all these stories there's a huge selection effect. We only hear about the great generals, not enough about the disastrous ones. We hear about the refugees who persisted, not the ones who gave up.
You're assuming that continued high stress is enough to induce burnout. What causes burnout requires high stress but also a lack of reward and relaxation, and a mismatch in personal values.
Great leaders probably do not suffer from self-doubt and honestly believe in their own righteousness. I am often amazed by how the executives I meet genuinely seem to lack the ability to self-criticize and admit wrongdoing, even in personal settings. For great leaders, the worldly rewards and affirmation in the form of praise are never ending. This makes individuals highly resilient to external stress.
Not only that, but they know to delegate. Especially in the military; a general doesn't command the troops, they command the people one or two ranks below them, who then distribute the load.
I see a lot of 'flat' organizations where there's one person having to manage 50+ people, which IMO is just too much responsibility, especially if they have multiple roles (financial, personnel, strategy, etc).
The first thing that anyone needs to learn if they grow into a leadership position is to be able to delegate instead of doing things themselves / micromanage. That is difficult for e.g. software developers because doing the work itself (writing code etc) and doing it well was what got them there. In a lot of cases.
I think that stress causes constant stress hormones like cortisol to flow. Rewards and relaxation (or exercise) interrupt the flow with positive hormones. But without that, you physically alter your brain chemistry in negative ways from constant stress, literally producing psychological problems such as burnout, anxiety, anger, depression not to mention physiological ones, such as high blood pressure and other health issues.
I think it can get as bad as a form of PTSD induced by constant low-to-mid level stress rather than one major upfront trauma.
John D. Rockefeller was managing global oil monopoly and occasionally in the letters to his wife he raised concerns about his "mental strains".
By reading [1] it seems to me that the way he very efficiently coped such immense amount of pressure was through strict sandboxing of his work-vs-personal life and proper delegation to his lieutenants; it gave him ample time to spend with his wife, children, in-laws, his church and his hobbies.
[1] Rockefeller's biography "Titan" by Ron Chernow
I think it boils down to energy. Much more than ability.
If you don't have enough to handle an issue, you need to be around people who do. They need to be interested in the same issue and you have to give them reasons why you need to be on their team.
There are lots of people who handle stress well one time. There are very few who can handle it as it piles up. They can't do it without others around them absorbing some of it. 'It takes a village' and all that. Niall Fergusan's book the square and the tower talks about the networks of people behind famous personalities and stressfull events. It's very interesting to understand how those networks emerge.
The village props up the endurance athletes. Because that give the village the best shot.
Having agency (aka being in charge) definitely lowers my stress level. Not that those examples weren't amazing people, but most people are not in charge, and that's more or less why they're stressed out.
> At its core, burnout emerges when the demands of a job outstrip a person’s ability to cope with the stress.
Having witnessed multiple burnouts first-hand I'd say this description is only half-way helpful. In my lay-man experience a burnout occurs when the aforementioned precedes several days without sleep. Lack of sleep over a prolonged stressful period must be avoided, especially from ages 30-40, otherwise damage will highly likely occur, similar to blown fuses in the brain, which takes many years to recover from (if ever, completely).
Many people that reach this stage of stress unfortunately acquire a tunnel vision that convinces them they are invincible and can do anything (except take care of themselves and their loved ones). It is one of the scourges of modern life, and a tragedy that people are not properly prepared for this in school, especially in industries that are susceptible to it, like ours.
Exhaustion leads to serious problems and, in the airline industry, that often leads to disasters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407). Hence the legislation for limiting the number of hours a pilot can fly in a month. There's a lot of science behind that decision - for good reason. It's a mature approach to managing the human resource (pilots) that seems to be absent in other industries. I really wish there were more studies regarding the level of concentration needed to solve software problems and how long that level of concentration can be maintained (weeks? months?) before exhaustion sets in - swiftly followed by burnout.
You are right in that lack of sleep is never healthy. It also has a bidirectional relation with chronic stress: lack of sleep can decrease performance and increase stress. And insomnia and sleep issues are a symptom of chronic stress. Insomnia is often more symptom than cause though.
I suffered from insomnia and chronic stress and it creates a negative feedback loop: You sleep bad because you're stressed out and you stress out because you're tired on the job.
It has to be noted that a bidirectional between insomnia and burnout specifically relationship with burnout has not been found [1].
I guess the insomnia I'm thinking is of a special kind: the kind where one tries to compensate for lack of efficiency due to exhaustion by working ever longer hours, which causes insane levels of cortisol (=sleeplessness) in the body, and ultimately a "burn out" of the very severe and traumatic kind that I have experience with. I'm sure there are many different kinds, and not all may follow this pattern, which could be the reason for the relative low correlation between insomnia and burnout in the study cited (if I read it correctly)
The bidirectional aspect (if burnout also causes insomnia) may be of some interest, but it's not the one I urgently want to convey to people in that may find themselves in this situation. IMO, in short; they should see a physician after one sleepless night maximum, and in the slightly longer term do some serious reevaluation of the work and family balance, or risk physically "blowing a fuse".
It really concerns me that many people on this trajectory don't believe it can happen to them, or that the burnt out condition even exists for real.
Ok so the damage I mention is like "blowing a fuse" in the brain and it happens over the course of a few days and it revolves around long term (many years) diminished functionality in several core cognitive functions: ability to concentrate, loss of memory function, ability to do several things simultaneously, and inability to muster stress at all, the latter usually a positive quality in the face of problems. There are other symptoms, like a state of constant exhaustion, a reduced immune system and a profound sense of loss, which given the above would seem only natural.
I realize this is only anecdotal evidence, but I've seen enough of it in people who are diagnosticized with burn-out to be frustrated that these aspects are not given enough coverage. The description I often hear is that of relatively mild symptoms, bordering on simulation.
As for "from 30-40": I don't think I've encountered people with (this kind of) burn-out younger than that. I believe it is because younger people are stronger and more resilient physically in general. That's not to say young people should over-use their resources at will: if they have acquired that habit then they will be at serious risk when older I think.
There are probably as many different reasons and dynamic behind every single burn-out as there are people. The thing I wanted to point out was my own observation that the kind of brain damage that I seem to detect among burn-out victims has always been preceded by several consecutive nights without sleep because of stress. It is not not backed by large cohort studies (as far as I know), it's just my observation.
Good for you. I’ve tried working twice as much once for ten days, and I am never doing that again. Not even for a one-off with one hundred thousand dollars/Euros/whatever after-tax overtime pay.
Another thing I would like to know is: how is stress associated with damage vs. relaxation?
Is it: 1 day stress means you need 1 day of relaxation and 40 days of stress means you need 40 days of relaxation? Or is the relationship quadratic or some square root or log?
e.g.
stress_in_days = days_of_recovery^2 or
stress_in_days = days_of_recovery or
stress_in_days = ln(days_of_recovery)
Related: I find it interesting that they write about the HPA-axis as I've learned that the HPA-axis was a biological explanation for depression. To be fair, the way burnout was described in the article, it didn't seem to be all that different from depression.
Edit: seems I was right, depression and burnout don't seem to be all that different [1]. I do think the name burnout describes more accurately what depression is than the name depression.
(I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this)
Slightly tangential: anger, created by the violation of one's values, releases cortisol, the "stress hormone", which is very impactful on the nervous system, destroying neurons to carve neural pathways fast in order to learn that something is dangerous.
1 min of anger generates enough cortisol for the immune system to work for 1 hour in order to clear the whole thing. Imagine the damage of time spent reading (and possibly responding to, even if it's only in one's own mind) a random thread of enraging comments on the Internet.
Imagine the impact of having one's values constantly challenged in a professional setting, generating inordinate amounts of anger 8 hours a day.
It's really no wonder that this quickly generates constant, taxing fight-or-flight reactions due to abnormal anxiety, leading to irrational decisions and ultimately burnout and depression, where the untamed beast feeds unto itself in an uncontrolled feedback loop, even when the initial source of stress is removed.
This short, funny (yet well researched) video about emotions has been enlightening.
Take as an analogue a strain injury — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_(injury) — a first degree strain can heal quickly with minimal invasiveness; a third degree strain might never fully heal even with surgery and rehabilitation.
Some of stress is happening on a biochemical level — if your hormones get sufficiently out of balance, and especially if it leads to a downward spiral of short-term behaviors (alcohol, junk food, etc) then you might wind up in a seriously diseased state that takes a serious regimen to recover from. On the other hand, if you never get above some threshold of unhealthy biochemistry and avoid downward spirals of behavior, recovery should be expected to be quicker.
There's so so many variables that it's heavily confounded and hard to math out, but the relationship for sure has to be non-linear.
In Western Europe, general practitioners are instructed to prescribe relaxation and not working starting with 3 months up to 6 or 7 months. Six months of non-activity seems to be the average recovery period prescribed after burnout.
However, every person is different. External factors such as family, lifestyle and responsibilities can aid or halt recovery. Same goes for personality and internal factors. I know of cases of burnout turned depression where the person took 2 years to start working.
There is no universal function for how long a person suffers from chronic stress and the recovery duration.
Obtaining such a function entails fully understanding and measuring all factors and dimensions involved in burnout. And that would merit a publication in Nature.
I find that the best thing to do is to reassociate labor and effort with reward by doing lots of low-risk primary reward work after a high risk, high effort push (doing refactorings, code cleanup, etc), and that resting after high burnout risk made recurrence more likely due to rewarding not laboring; I haven't burned out at my primary job as a result (can't say I haven't periodically burned out in other pursuits like dating lol) in several years.
Apparently, negative experience affects us roughly 5x more than positive experience. So if the burnout is caused by accumulation of negative experiences, then I gather, you would have to take 5x as much non-stress days than stress days.
But whether the day is stress or not depends on your emotions, not on what the day is objectively. You can have a no-stress day which is really busy or even under pressure. I had some of the most productive days at work when I was solving a critical customer issue, simply because of the excitement (you can't do that everyday, though).
> For example, a comprehensive report on psychosocial stress in the workplace published by the World Health Organization identified consistent evidence that “high job demands, low control, and effort–reward imbalance are risk factors for mental and physical health problems.”
I think a key phrase in there is "effort–reward imbalance" — everything I've found in both research and personal experience seems to show that burnout-type effects are much more likely when you're not getting enough of what you want and value.
As an example, think of two sports teams that both gave their all in a championship game — the winning team is much less exhausted, they're jubilant and bouncing around and celebrating. Both teams presumably expended similar levels of energy, stress, etc — but the winning team is full of celebration and joie de vivre; the losing team is licking their wounds and questioning everything.
There's still limits to the amount of physical and mental stressors we can handle, but winning helps a lot with processing and recovering quickly from stress.
I’m not sure if it helps so much as allows you to perpetuate a cycle by providing occasional positive feedback.
I should have left my business years before I did, but it was the winning (contracts, technical coups) that kept me on. You end up like an addict, stumbling through the nightmarish days until the next dopamine rush (and crash) comes along.
Stress and burnout don’t just have mental impacts - they can have severe physiological impacts. I didn’t realise, acknowledge, or recognise this until my third hospitalisation, and years of increasing illness, made it impossible to continue writing off as “just food poisoning, again”.
It’s been nearly three years since I left, and while I’m physically better, and no longer spending half my life puking and delirious (it took six months for that to subside), I still have occasional anxiety attacks. My mother asked me about what I plan on doing for a career over dinner a few weeks back and I out and out fainted.
Never used to have any of this. I was the resilient one, the one who could carry the world on his shoulders - or thought he could. Broke me.
We live in a time when it's more difficult to switch off than ever before. I was burned out for a couple of years for sure until a major life threatening illness forced me to take stock.
I've made some important and very useful changes:
- I've started saying "no" to others including clients, business partners, friends, family etc. Every time I do this, it is saying "yes" to myself
- I've blocked all social media and news websites from my phone (both apps and via Safari)
- I've gotten rid of all work emails from my phone too
- I have an alarm clock by my bed instead of my phone which sleeps in another room
- I start every day using the 5 minute journal method
- I journal (almost) every day before I start my work
- I no longer work weekends and evenings
- I've made peace with the fact that my business isn't going to grow as quickly as I want it to.
We do have choices at the end of the day. Check out the 5 balls for life speech by Bryan Dyson, former CEO of Coca Cola; work is a rubber ball that you can drop and it will bounce back, the rest of the balls that we juggle (health, friendships, family etc) are all glass balls which may shatter if we drop them.
> Maslach received an incredible outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who were grateful to find out that they were not alone in their experience of burnout.
got me thinking how important it is for us, humans, to compare and match our own experiences with the societal "averages". It's usually a relief to learn you are not alone in something that's happening to you, despite that it can be truly worrisome. But at the end of the day it's all relative to the averages and norms. And norms change over time, too.
Not saying burnout and depression can become a norm, just pointing out what it means to be a "social animal". Something bad happens to you and suddenly it's not as bad because you are not unique.
Readit News
That’s why I’m burnt out.
Last week my motivation went to almost 0, and it took me a while until I discovered the why: I had been stunned by the SwiftUI demos, and wanted to get my hands dirty. But I hadn't had ANY time to dabble around because I had overburdened myself with promises to various customers. What I did felt very far away from what I actually wanted to do, and it got worse every day.
When I finally understood what the problem was, motivation started to come back. I played around with SwiftUI for only 5 minutes yesterday, and feel so much better already.
Do you have a side project that you would love to spend all your time on? (doesn't have to be coding)
The only phrase I had that came close was referring to my current situation as wearing golden hand-cuffs. I feel constrained and unhappy a lot of the times, but boy are those hand-cuffs pretty to look at.
For me, when I realise this I quit and move on until the cycle repeats itself. I'm currently working for myself though so it's a bit different!
I think all the cool libraries that occur are a form of release valve for alienation. Engineers working in alienating jobs can at least do something of personal interest.
https://youtu.be/B1rNtdfOpNY
Now, will you b1tch about it for the rest of your life or are you going to find a solution and work to achieve it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This wasn't how it started, I took a vital yet buggy and unmaintainable piece of software and got it to a point where new features could be cleanly added and new bugs were a very rare event.
And yet, every time I tried to make any significant change - generally intended to further improve the maintainability of the project - I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else.
Sole aim of some people is just to have power over others, force subordinates to commit their mistakes, and to replace subordinates with others who are increasingly zealot, obedient, and desperate. I have no idea how to defend myself in such situations, usually I just quit.
"Professional managers" (persons being managers and leads from the beginning of their career), and overeducated people joining the workforce late in their lives and straight from or shortly after the academia are the two profiles from whom I observed such behaviour.
In order to sniff these people out, all you need is a five-minute conversation where you challenge them on something innocuous. You'll find they have no arguments, overuse authority arguments and blindly follow the gospel of well-known programming books. Once at that point, quietly extricate yourself from the conversation and start sending out CVs.
These kind of people will fuck your shit up if you let them or can't find a way to limit your interaction with them.
Personally I find I am happy to deal with technical challenges - that's what the job is about, IMO - but political and otherwise artificial challenges are a massive turnoff which I look to either get removed or extricate myself from one way or another.
Looking out for the latter and dealing with it somehow before it escalates/accumulates is a great way to avoid getting stuck in a position where burnout can develop.
Hannibal the Carthaginian general for example spent nearly 20 years fighting the Romans on their own turf in Italy. He had a string of victories and also suffered incredible losses including the loss of an eye to infection.
Despite that he led his men and was incredibly popular. After laying waste to the Italian countryside for two decades he was reluctantly recalled back to Carthage where he served as a statesman for several more years.
He was then exiled and a price put on his head and he made plans to ally himself with other leaders of the day - honestly his life goes on and on. The guy's resiliency is incredible and he isn't the only one of his age. There are numerous examples of similar people from the history of the time.
I suppose your modern day cases like Musk or Jobs are what we'd think of today. The former's challenges are well documented but the latter had just months to turnaround a sinking Apple and restructure the company before it ran out of money. He'd been through many ups and downs and again displayed a resiliency which is pretty remarkable.
I think that everyone's ability to handle stress varies. What I'd love to know is why some people can suffer incredibly and not only survive but thrive and if there is some way in which we can learn how to suffer the everyday arrows slung our way and bear our burdens better.
Arguably Hannibal:
- is in control (he's leading),
- he's probably rewarded through pillaging, (I feel that reward is absolutely key to continue pushing through)
- there is probably a sense of community while they are laying waste,
- as a leader he probably get "fair" shares of reward for himself (cf. the Iliad, opening list of treasures)
- the work he's doing is probably aligned with his own values (unlike Xenopho who was hired as mercenary in terrible conditions), as we can see he didn't want to stop campaigning
- work overload is probably there, as campaigning men have little sleep and work a lot (cf. Cesar)
Conclusion: Hannibal is less at risk of burn-out than men serving under Hannibal.
I only bring this up because rewards can be (and in my opinion the best ones are) immaterial, the type of things that would fit into the self-actualization part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I think this type of reward is much more critical than material ones for being able to endure those conditions for a long time.
This makes burnout sound incredibly similar to "Learned Helplessness." Tweaked, I suppose, to the problems of a workplace.
But in all these stories there's a huge selection effect. We only hear about the great generals, not enough about the disastrous ones. We hear about the refugees who persisted, not the ones who gave up.
Great leaders probably do not suffer from self-doubt and honestly believe in their own righteousness. I am often amazed by how the executives I meet genuinely seem to lack the ability to self-criticize and admit wrongdoing, even in personal settings. For great leaders, the worldly rewards and affirmation in the form of praise are never ending. This makes individuals highly resilient to external stress.
I see a lot of 'flat' organizations where there's one person having to manage 50+ people, which IMO is just too much responsibility, especially if they have multiple roles (financial, personnel, strategy, etc).
The first thing that anyone needs to learn if they grow into a leadership position is to be able to delegate instead of doing things themselves / micromanage. That is difficult for e.g. software developers because doing the work itself (writing code etc) and doing it well was what got them there. In a lot of cases.
I think it can get as bad as a form of PTSD induced by constant low-to-mid level stress rather than one major upfront trauma.
Robert Sapolsky elaborates on them comprehensively in his Stanford lecture about depression[1]
[0] http://www.psychiatria-danubina.com/UserDocsImages/pdf/dnb_v...
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
By reading [1] it seems to me that the way he very efficiently coped such immense amount of pressure was through strict sandboxing of his work-vs-personal life and proper delegation to his lieutenants; it gave him ample time to spend with his wife, children, in-laws, his church and his hobbies.
[1] Rockefeller's biography "Titan" by Ron Chernow
If you don't have enough to handle an issue, you need to be around people who do. They need to be interested in the same issue and you have to give them reasons why you need to be on their team.
There are lots of people who handle stress well one time. There are very few who can handle it as it piles up. They can't do it without others around them absorbing some of it. 'It takes a village' and all that. Niall Fergusan's book the square and the tower talks about the networks of people behind famous personalities and stressfull events. It's very interesting to understand how those networks emerge.
The village props up the endurance athletes. Because that give the village the best shot.
Having witnessed multiple burnouts first-hand I'd say this description is only half-way helpful. In my lay-man experience a burnout occurs when the aforementioned precedes several days without sleep. Lack of sleep over a prolonged stressful period must be avoided, especially from ages 30-40, otherwise damage will highly likely occur, similar to blown fuses in the brain, which takes many years to recover from (if ever, completely).
Many people that reach this stage of stress unfortunately acquire a tunnel vision that convinces them they are invincible and can do anything (except take care of themselves and their loved ones). It is one of the scourges of modern life, and a tragedy that people are not properly prepared for this in school, especially in industries that are susceptible to it, like ours.
I suffered from insomnia and chronic stress and it creates a negative feedback loop: You sleep bad because you're stressed out and you stress out because you're tired on the job.
It has to be noted that a bidirectional between insomnia and burnout specifically relationship with burnout has not been found [1].
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12529-010-9107-8
The bidirectional aspect (if burnout also causes insomnia) may be of some interest, but it's not the one I urgently want to convey to people in that may find themselves in this situation. IMO, in short; they should see a physician after one sleepless night maximum, and in the slightly longer term do some serious reevaluation of the work and family balance, or risk physically "blowing a fuse".
It really concerns me that many people on this trajectory don't believe it can happen to them, or that the burnt out condition even exists for real.
In my experience, lack of sleep is not required to induce burnout. The progression can be very gradual.
I'd be really curious to see more details here. What sort of damage do you mean? Why 30-40 in particular?
I realize this is only anecdotal evidence, but I've seen enough of it in people who are diagnosticized with burn-out to be frustrated that these aspects are not given enough coverage. The description I often hear is that of relatively mild symptoms, bordering on simulation.
As for "from 30-40": I don't think I've encountered people with (this kind of) burn-out younger than that. I believe it is because younger people are stronger and more resilient physically in general. That's not to say young people should over-use their resources at will: if they have acquired that habit then they will be at serious risk when older I think.
There are probably as many different reasons and dynamic behind every single burn-out as there are people. The thing I wanted to point out was my own observation that the kind of brain damage that I seem to detect among burn-out victims has always been preceded by several consecutive nights without sleep because of stress. It is not not backed by large cohort studies (as far as I know), it's just my observation.
I thought this was just the industry norm now and was going to factor it into my salary when I start looking for a new job
Honestly, isn’t it safe To assume the company is underreporting the workload and instead calculate Salary at an average of 60 hours/week?
Is it: 1 day stress means you need 1 day of relaxation and 40 days of stress means you need 40 days of relaxation? Or is the relationship quadratic or some square root or log?
e.g.
stress_in_days = days_of_recovery^2 or
stress_in_days = days_of_recovery or
stress_in_days = ln(days_of_recovery)
Related: I find it interesting that they write about the HPA-axis as I've learned that the HPA-axis was a biological explanation for depression. To be fair, the way burnout was described in the article, it didn't seem to be all that different from depression.
Edit: seems I was right, depression and burnout don't seem to be all that different [1]. I do think the name burnout describes more accurately what depression is than the name depression.
(I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this)
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30087493
1 min of anger generates enough cortisol for the immune system to work for 1 hour in order to clear the whole thing. Imagine the damage of time spent reading (and possibly responding to, even if it's only in one's own mind) a random thread of enraging comments on the Internet.
Imagine the impact of having one's values constantly challenged in a professional setting, generating inordinate amounts of anger 8 hours a day.
It's really no wonder that this quickly generates constant, taxing fight-or-flight reactions due to abnormal anxiety, leading to irrational decisions and ultimately burnout and depression, where the untamed beast feeds unto itself in an uncontrolled feedback loop, even when the initial source of stress is removed.
This short, funny (yet well researched) video about emotions has been enlightening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DakEvdZWLk
Quick take — it 100% can't be linear.
Take as an analogue a strain injury — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_(injury) — a first degree strain can heal quickly with minimal invasiveness; a third degree strain might never fully heal even with surgery and rehabilitation.
Some of stress is happening on a biochemical level — if your hormones get sufficiently out of balance, and especially if it leads to a downward spiral of short-term behaviors (alcohol, junk food, etc) then you might wind up in a seriously diseased state that takes a serious regimen to recover from. On the other hand, if you never get above some threshold of unhealthy biochemistry and avoid downward spirals of behavior, recovery should be expected to be quicker.
There's so so many variables that it's heavily confounded and hard to math out, but the relationship for sure has to be non-linear.
However, every person is different. External factors such as family, lifestyle and responsibilities can aid or halt recovery. Same goes for personality and internal factors. I know of cases of burnout turned depression where the person took 2 years to start working.
There is no universal function for how long a person suffers from chronic stress and the recovery duration.
Obtaining such a function entails fully understanding and measuring all factors and dimensions involved in burnout. And that would merit a publication in Nature.
But whether the day is stress or not depends on your emotions, not on what the day is objectively. You can have a no-stress day which is really busy or even under pressure. I had some of the most productive days at work when I was solving a critical customer issue, simply because of the excitement (you can't do that everyday, though).
I think a key phrase in there is "effort–reward imbalance" — everything I've found in both research and personal experience seems to show that burnout-type effects are much more likely when you're not getting enough of what you want and value.
As an example, think of two sports teams that both gave their all in a championship game — the winning team is much less exhausted, they're jubilant and bouncing around and celebrating. Both teams presumably expended similar levels of energy, stress, etc — but the winning team is full of celebration and joie de vivre; the losing team is licking their wounds and questioning everything.
There's still limits to the amount of physical and mental stressors we can handle, but winning helps a lot with processing and recovering quickly from stress.
I should have left my business years before I did, but it was the winning (contracts, technical coups) that kept me on. You end up like an addict, stumbling through the nightmarish days until the next dopamine rush (and crash) comes along.
Stress and burnout don’t just have mental impacts - they can have severe physiological impacts. I didn’t realise, acknowledge, or recognise this until my third hospitalisation, and years of increasing illness, made it impossible to continue writing off as “just food poisoning, again”.
It’s been nearly three years since I left, and while I’m physically better, and no longer spending half my life puking and delirious (it took six months for that to subside), I still have occasional anxiety attacks. My mother asked me about what I plan on doing for a career over dinner a few weeks back and I out and out fainted.
Never used to have any of this. I was the resilient one, the one who could carry the world on his shoulders - or thought he could. Broke me.
I've made some important and very useful changes:
- I've started saying "no" to others including clients, business partners, friends, family etc. Every time I do this, it is saying "yes" to myself
- I've blocked all social media and news websites from my phone (both apps and via Safari)
- I've gotten rid of all work emails from my phone too
- I have an alarm clock by my bed instead of my phone which sleeps in another room
- I start every day using the 5 minute journal method
- I journal (almost) every day before I start my work
- I no longer work weekends and evenings
- I've made peace with the fact that my business isn't going to grow as quickly as I want it to.
We do have choices at the end of the day. Check out the 5 balls for life speech by Bryan Dyson, former CEO of Coca Cola; work is a rubber ball that you can drop and it will bounce back, the rest of the balls that we juggle (health, friendships, family etc) are all glass balls which may shatter if we drop them.
> Maslach received an incredible outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who were grateful to find out that they were not alone in their experience of burnout.
got me thinking how important it is for us, humans, to compare and match our own experiences with the societal "averages". It's usually a relief to learn you are not alone in something that's happening to you, despite that it can be truly worrisome. But at the end of the day it's all relative to the averages and norms. And norms change over time, too.
Not saying burnout and depression can become a norm, just pointing out what it means to be a "social animal". Something bad happens to you and suddenly it's not as bad because you are not unique.