Yea nice article and all, but let's be honest: This is pretty much backed into the cake of how we handle things currently as a society. People are seen as a means to an end. You are disconnected from what you do and the positive effects it might have at best, and, at worst, your work might not have a positive effect at all. You might in fact feel that the whole tech thing has become toxic.
And now we call this burnout? While in reality, it may just be exactly the other way around. Mass psychosis ousting those who dare to wake up.
Now, you can call me cynical, but I'd invite you to think about who's really cynical here.
As someone about a year into a sabbatical to recover from burnout, I tend to agree.
I had a series of expectations about the role of the break I was about to take, and how it would serve as a recharge to enable me to jump back in. Instead, it’s been a gradual process of waking up to the systemic reasons that led to the burnout, many of which had nothing to do with the (legitimately stressful) work environment I was in.
It’s hard to summarize this in a comment, and I’m currently working on an outline for an extensive series of blog posts exploring these realizations in depth. But a few of the big things were (and I should emphasize that the following points just scratch the surface):
1. I am not my thoughts or feelings. It’s surprising how far this one will take you
2. If work is your support system, your life exists on shaky ground
3. Personal struggles become work struggles and vice versa. You can’t draw a clean box around grief and loss, or pretend that work stress can stay at work
4. There were major gaps in my life in terms of social connections, time spent in nature, finding artistic outlets, etc.
5. Focusing on real self-care/improvement as one’s primary purpose in life open doors internally and externally
As I transition back to work, it won’t involve picking up where I left off, but something completely different and oriented around these deeper realizations about myself and helping other people find the same insights for themselves.
These things are nearly impossible to see while in the midst of a burnout state.
Now that I have ranted enough in the parent comment, here are my 2 maybe constructive cents:
1. Learn what it means to be relaxed again and make this your first priority. F** everything else, if necessary. Anxiety and stress don't have a chance if you aren't tense.
2. Go out into the sun and spend a lot of time in nature. If you can't get out of bed in the morning, make it a habit to go out first thing in the morning for an hour or so. Force yourself if need be at first.
3. When anxiety or self-blame start to emerge, feel it and focus on the feeling itself intensely. This makes it impossible for it to take over your mind.
4. Make fear a positive experience by using it for something positive, e.g. learning how to focus on your feelings or reframing it as thrill.
5. Try all methods you can find to cope. Everyone is different and not all methods work for everybody.
Hate to say it but depending on your long term objectives taking a sabbatical might have been the worst thing to recover from burnout. You want to reassociate effort with reward, and the best way to do that is to work on small things related to what caused your burnout that will "guarantee wins with low expectations". By pivoting to something different you reinforce the association of the previous form of effort with failure (in the negative space of rewarding yourself for not doing it).
> 2. If work is your support system, your life exists on shaky ground
This is why I despise it when the likes of Jack Ma, Elon Musk, et al try to promote a culture in which staying at work till 9pm or later and coming in on weekends is normalized, and tell everyone in their 20s that that's the only right way to live. It's horrible advice and incredibly short-sighted.
Then you have the likes of TikTok who have meetings late into almost every evening and blame it on the time zone difference between USA and China, when they could have planned better, drawn lines, and have more reasonably-planned meeting times that fit both time zones. Employees in their 20s who don't know better just drink this Kool-aid and get burned out.
Those people will never have time to make real friends outside of work, date healthily, or otherwise find a real support system that can emotionally support them without a conflict of interest with the workplace.
The way you find that healthy support system is precisely by having evenings and weekends to yourself so you can go to venues where you can meet people outside of work.
Me, I support one disabled family member near full-time, another one 4 days of the week, and another occasionally (neighbor, on-call).
I decided to give up alcohol a couple of years ago, got put into a weaning off of it over time (yeah, that rough). Every 18 months or so it flares back, now I am down to almost nothing (usually 2-4 shots every 12 hours, some days none(!)), and the past few months are very rough, worse than the past few years.
Full-bore burn-out every other day. Working on this, but considering going back to alcoholism.
> These things are nearly impossible to see while in the midst of a burnout state.
Yep! Whiteboards help, write when good, erase the other notes when better.
Can you clarify no 1? What are you if not your thinking and your feeling? I'm not trying to be snarky, i am actually legit curious about how to develop a sense of self that doesn't have to do with, y'know, sensing.
"When I start working again, it won’t involve picking up where I left off, but something completely different and oriented around these deeper realizations and helping other people find the same insights for themselves."
Such condescending drivel. The first "realisation" is what is commonly taught within the first 5 sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy. The fifth seems like a move in the right direction for a person who considers (2) and (3) to be so enlightening to justify teaching other people about them, but ultimately coming up with purpuses for your life and ranking them sounds like setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment once the inevitable days where such self-proclaimed purposes can't be achieved come.
Envisioning dedicating an entire blog to enlighten others about these "realisations" people generally have before turning 20 just makes you sound like a narcissist.
Absolutely. Just like the fact that companies will make as much profit as they can get away with - they will treat their workers with as much, or near to as much as they can get away with.
I'm not sure this really classifies as a "deep dive"...more like a brief overview into a complex psychological and physiological issue with relatively...unhelpful...remedies for people actually experiencing real burnout.
Burnout is not classified as a clinical disease per the latest International Classification of Diseases. It is clumped together with other environmental factors such as poverty, and thus does not as such qualify as a reason for paid leave - though national qualifications differ.
"Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is _not_ classified as a medical condition.
It is described in the chapter: ‘Factors influencing health status or contact with health services’ – which includes reasons for which people contact health services but that are not classed as illnesses or health conditions."
I personally do know the condition called nowadays as burnout does exist, but as current medical consensus, it is a cluster of symptoms caused by systemic faults.
i agree. send emails/chats whenever you want and it's up to the recipient to manage their notifications to prevent them from getting sucked in after hours.
- i'd rather log in at 9am and see a bunch of late night emails than logging in at 9am and then seeing a deluge of auto-sent messages flood my inbox at 9:01.
- there needs to be some 'core' working hours, but people may be in different time zones or may do their best work in different parts of the day. if you're a night owl, we shouldn't do anything to stop/discourage you from doing work at 1am.
If you really didn't want employees to answer email in the middle of their night, you would configure the company mail server to not deliver things in the middle of their night. Some companies actually do this.
Right. Article is from 2012 as well. The communication landscape arguably has evolved a lot since then.
With Slack, for example, you have so much fine grained control. I don't know if it makes sense to implement a blanket "shut off communications after hours" policy
I've burned out a few times. Every time was different. First time was the worst. It took me about one and a half years until I could work again. Long-term stress is dangerous. Toxic workplaces are dangerous. It's not worth it.
Much preferred this piece [0] on burnout, which actually details the models developed by those such as Maslach et al. mentioned in the OP.
Framed in terms of the Conservation of Resources model, my own burnout was illuminated and it gave me somewhere to start in how I move through and (hopefully eventually) out of burnout.
Sometimes I daydream about what I would say to a bunch of undergrads as career advice, and if I had to pick one thing, it would be: learn about burnout so that you can recognise the signs and act. For most of us, our careers are a marathon, and by letting my burnout fester, I'm doing the next 10km with a significant injury.
Listen, I've gone very very deep down this rabbit hole, let me summarise my lessons:
1. Fluffy pieces like this abound, and they are worthless. It may help you to draw similarities between articles espousing the urgency and importance of tackling climate change and the deafening silence of actions and consequences that follow. Why is this so? Because talk is cheap, and feigned concern is much cheaper than expensive change.
2. Why is there burnout? Because corporate incentives are antagonistic to human needs and corporations are more important than we are. This manifests every time some over-elevated micro-despot demands deadlines and urgency from their underlings. Much as banks lending against fractional reserves is the true source of money creation, emotionally stunted 'leadership' making misguided plans for the future is the true source of stress. Remember always that their goal is to be promoted into a higher strata of distance from effort, and your toil will be forgotten the moment that happens.
3. Gaslighting you into thinking more yoga will improve your working environment further increases the problem, as it recontextualises the problem from one of their making to one of your failing. If you're stressed or burned out, it's obviously your fault.
4. Meaningful change _was_ possible, but is likely no longer as the labour market has shifted back in favour of the corporations. Most people are currently more interested in keeping their job than causing a fuss. Unions are an obvious fix here but until they become more palatable by a) improving their significantly outdated image and practices and b) overcoming the stigma imposed on them by corporations, then they'll be forever waiting in the wings.
5. Cross-timezone work is fundamentally inhumane. There is no right to one's circadian rhythm but to suggest it's not important is a biological fallacy. However as corporations do not sleep it is inconvenient for their workers to do so. Conference calls from PT to India are common, no one is happy in that arrangement. This could be solved by partitioning work into same or very-similar timezones but that would be a burden to the leadership so it does not occur.
6. Work outside of working hours is entirely to the company's benefit and your personal detriment. A quote I read recently said it best "In ten years, the only people who will remember that you went above and beyond for your job are your kids.". If you are working for yourself or have a >10% equity then this does not apply, you do you.
6a. Given the above, your reachability outside of working yours is a direct attack on your life, yet we all install the corporate messaging app on our phone and check it like a drug habbit. Slack repackages your availability as a product and sells it. If any company was serious about work-life balance then they would simply turn off slack at the end of the work day.
I have more of course but these are probably the best.
Coda:
If you want to learn about the actual science, then I suggest listening to Dr. Maslach who literally created the field (and was responsible for stopping the Stanford prisoner experiement)
> 5. Cross-timezone work is fundamentally inhumane. There is no right to one's circadian rhythm but to suggest it's not important is a biological fallacy. However as corporations do not sleep it is inconvenient for their workers to do so. Conference calls from PT to India are common, no one is happy in that arrangement. This could be solved by partitioning work into same or very-similar timezones but that would be a burden to the leadership so it does not occur.
sigh
Yes, yes it is. That's made worse by companies that don't care about that at all, so you end up with meetings at 7AM and 11PM in the same day. It's pretty difficult to compartmentalize when your work has a follow the sun rotation.
> 6. Work outside of working hours is entirely to the company's benefit and your personal detriment.
If you are a 'salaried' employee in the US, the whole concept of 'working hours' is thrown out of the window.
On Slack: it can make an existing problem worse. I do prefer some quick discussions over Slack than being forced to check email threads outside 'working hours' to see if there's anything relevant to me. Or, worse yet, getting actual phone calls. Slack _can_ create entirely new problems, but it's usually just amplifying a bad situation.
>If you are a 'salaried' employee in the US, the whole concept of 'working hours' is thrown out of the window.
It depends? If the hours are enforced in the 'you must be here from x:00 to y:00' sense, then it should also be enforced in the 'no work/emails/etc from y:00 to x:00'. Flexibility with the former would make me willing to entertain some flexibility on the latter, but most developers don't work such rigid hours. However, I do and as a result I look at Teams/Mail outside of office maybe once a month for the most.
>3. Gaslighting you into thinking more yoga will improve your working environment further increases the problem, as it recontextualises the problem from one of their making to one of your failing. If you're stressed or burned out, it's obviously your fault.
This one sticks hard for me. Whenever I get hit with burnout, it's brutal, but all the articles make it sound like it's just being a bit bored with work or school. It's easy to end up thinking that there's something wrong with you, and that everybody else can handle unlimited stress just fine by taking a few minutes to relax every day.
To me school was a big culprit and can track the beginning of stress in my life. A lot of times it was just stress for the sake of getting used to it and I get that but it’s quite cynical
Of course! Long term family (or self) illnesses are devastating, especially anything degenerative. Thankfully those are mostly special cases, which I say as someone who's been through it.
Contrariwise, I've heard of people stress out about how large their Steam backlog has grown.
I've been feeling burnt out with my current job and this pretty much summarizes the reasons why. Number 2 especially, I feel like I've gotten to see how the sausage is made over the past few years and have become incredibly jaded about how corporations operate in general.
Fully agreed upon the cross-timezone work as well. I've been working on a project with people from an overseas team and even though they are great, it just doesn't work to only have an hour or so of overlapping working time each day that inevitably gets taken up by mostly pointless status update meetings rather than real discussions.
Recently I read the book "The Stress of Life" by Hans Selye and had this obvious connection that work is such a primary source of stress that it makes you more than what this article talks about. That it can make you chronically ill without you knowing because you're too busy trying to...survive.
GAS or general adaptation syndrome explains burnout quite simply. There's an alarm reaction that happens in us. Next a resistance phase where our bodies try to fight it off. Finally, an exhaustion phase where we let the stressor take its course(aka burnout).
“It is not stress that kills us, It is our reaction to it” - Hans Selye
Readit News
And now we call this burnout? While in reality, it may just be exactly the other way around. Mass psychosis ousting those who dare to wake up.
Now, you can call me cynical, but I'd invite you to think about who's really cynical here.
Just a thought.
I had a series of expectations about the role of the break I was about to take, and how it would serve as a recharge to enable me to jump back in. Instead, it’s been a gradual process of waking up to the systemic reasons that led to the burnout, many of which had nothing to do with the (legitimately stressful) work environment I was in.
It’s hard to summarize this in a comment, and I’m currently working on an outline for an extensive series of blog posts exploring these realizations in depth. But a few of the big things were (and I should emphasize that the following points just scratch the surface):
1. I am not my thoughts or feelings. It’s surprising how far this one will take you
2. If work is your support system, your life exists on shaky ground
3. Personal struggles become work struggles and vice versa. You can’t draw a clean box around grief and loss, or pretend that work stress can stay at work
4. There were major gaps in my life in terms of social connections, time spent in nature, finding artistic outlets, etc.
5. Focusing on real self-care/improvement as one’s primary purpose in life open doors internally and externally
As I transition back to work, it won’t involve picking up where I left off, but something completely different and oriented around these deeper realizations about myself and helping other people find the same insights for themselves.
These things are nearly impossible to see while in the midst of a burnout state.
Now that I have ranted enough in the parent comment, here are my 2 maybe constructive cents:
1. Learn what it means to be relaxed again and make this your first priority. F** everything else, if necessary. Anxiety and stress don't have a chance if you aren't tense.
2. Go out into the sun and spend a lot of time in nature. If you can't get out of bed in the morning, make it a habit to go out first thing in the morning for an hour or so. Force yourself if need be at first.
3. When anxiety or self-blame start to emerge, feel it and focus on the feeling itself intensely. This makes it impossible for it to take over your mind.
4. Make fear a positive experience by using it for something positive, e.g. learning how to focus on your feelings or reframing it as thrill.
5. Try all methods you can find to cope. Everyone is different and not all methods work for everybody.
This is why I despise it when the likes of Jack Ma, Elon Musk, et al try to promote a culture in which staying at work till 9pm or later and coming in on weekends is normalized, and tell everyone in their 20s that that's the only right way to live. It's horrible advice and incredibly short-sighted.
Then you have the likes of TikTok who have meetings late into almost every evening and blame it on the time zone difference between USA and China, when they could have planned better, drawn lines, and have more reasonably-planned meeting times that fit both time zones. Employees in their 20s who don't know better just drink this Kool-aid and get burned out.
Those people will never have time to make real friends outside of work, date healthily, or otherwise find a real support system that can emotionally support them without a conflict of interest with the workplace.
The way you find that healthy support system is precisely by having evenings and weekends to yourself so you can go to venues where you can meet people outside of work.
Me, I support one disabled family member near full-time, another one 4 days of the week, and another occasionally (neighbor, on-call).
I decided to give up alcohol a couple of years ago, got put into a weaning off of it over time (yeah, that rough). Every 18 months or so it flares back, now I am down to almost nothing (usually 2-4 shots every 12 hours, some days none(!)), and the past few months are very rough, worse than the past few years.
Full-bore burn-out every other day. Working on this, but considering going back to alcoholism.
> These things are nearly impossible to see while in the midst of a burnout state.
Yep! Whiteboards help, write when good, erase the other notes when better.
Such condescending drivel. The first "realisation" is what is commonly taught within the first 5 sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy. The fifth seems like a move in the right direction for a person who considers (2) and (3) to be so enlightening to justify teaching other people about them, but ultimately coming up with purpuses for your life and ranking them sounds like setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment once the inevitable days where such self-proclaimed purposes can't be achieved come.
Envisioning dedicating an entire blog to enlighten others about these "realisations" people generally have before turning 20 just makes you sound like a narcissist.
Deleted Comment
Burnout is not classified as a clinical disease per the latest International Classification of Diseases. It is clumped together with other environmental factors such as poverty, and thus does not as such qualify as a reason for paid leave - though national qualifications differ.
"Burn-out is included in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as an occupational phenomenon. It is _not_ classified as a medical condition.
It is described in the chapter: ‘Factors influencing health status or contact with health services’ – which includes reasons for which people contact health services but that are not classed as illnesses or health conditions."
Please see the press release by the WHO: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
I personally do know the condition called nowadays as burnout does exist, but as current medical consensus, it is a cluster of symptoms caused by systemic faults.
See e.g. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2207252
1. Turn off async comms outside of working hours. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16314901
Things companies actually do:
- i'd rather log in at 9am and see a bunch of late night emails than logging in at 9am and then seeing a deluge of auto-sent messages flood my inbox at 9:01.
- there needs to be some 'core' working hours, but people may be in different time zones or may do their best work in different parts of the day. if you're a night owl, we shouldn't do anything to stop/discourage you from doing work at 1am.
With Slack, for example, you have so much fine grained control. I don't know if it makes sense to implement a blanket "shut off communications after hours" policy
Framed in terms of the Conservation of Resources model, my own burnout was illuminated and it gave me somewhere to start in how I move through and (hopefully eventually) out of burnout.
Sometimes I daydream about what I would say to a bunch of undergrads as career advice, and if I had to pick one thing, it would be: learn about burnout so that you can recognise the signs and act. For most of us, our careers are a marathon, and by letting my burnout fester, I'm doing the next 10km with a significant injury.
[0] https://commoncog.com/g/burnout/
1. Fluffy pieces like this abound, and they are worthless. It may help you to draw similarities between articles espousing the urgency and importance of tackling climate change and the deafening silence of actions and consequences that follow. Why is this so? Because talk is cheap, and feigned concern is much cheaper than expensive change.
2. Why is there burnout? Because corporate incentives are antagonistic to human needs and corporations are more important than we are. This manifests every time some over-elevated micro-despot demands deadlines and urgency from their underlings. Much as banks lending against fractional reserves is the true source of money creation, emotionally stunted 'leadership' making misguided plans for the future is the true source of stress. Remember always that their goal is to be promoted into a higher strata of distance from effort, and your toil will be forgotten the moment that happens.
3. Gaslighting you into thinking more yoga will improve your working environment further increases the problem, as it recontextualises the problem from one of their making to one of your failing. If you're stressed or burned out, it's obviously your fault.
4. Meaningful change _was_ possible, but is likely no longer as the labour market has shifted back in favour of the corporations. Most people are currently more interested in keeping their job than causing a fuss. Unions are an obvious fix here but until they become more palatable by a) improving their significantly outdated image and practices and b) overcoming the stigma imposed on them by corporations, then they'll be forever waiting in the wings.
5. Cross-timezone work is fundamentally inhumane. There is no right to one's circadian rhythm but to suggest it's not important is a biological fallacy. However as corporations do not sleep it is inconvenient for their workers to do so. Conference calls from PT to India are common, no one is happy in that arrangement. This could be solved by partitioning work into same or very-similar timezones but that would be a burden to the leadership so it does not occur.
6. Work outside of working hours is entirely to the company's benefit and your personal detriment. A quote I read recently said it best "In ten years, the only people who will remember that you went above and beyond for your job are your kids.". If you are working for yourself or have a >10% equity then this does not apply, you do you.
6a. Given the above, your reachability outside of working yours is a direct attack on your life, yet we all install the corporate messaging app on our phone and check it like a drug habbit. Slack repackages your availability as a product and sells it. If any company was serious about work-life balance then they would simply turn off slack at the end of the work day.
I have more of course but these are probably the best.
Coda: If you want to learn about the actual science, then I suggest listening to Dr. Maslach who literally created the field (and was responsible for stopping the Stanford prisoner experiement)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQy1Zc37Bd0
Edit 2: Here's the timezone overlap between SF and Mumbai, in case you were not aware: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=...
sigh
Yes, yes it is. That's made worse by companies that don't care about that at all, so you end up with meetings at 7AM and 11PM in the same day. It's pretty difficult to compartmentalize when your work has a follow the sun rotation.
> 6. Work outside of working hours is entirely to the company's benefit and your personal detriment.
If you are a 'salaried' employee in the US, the whole concept of 'working hours' is thrown out of the window.
On Slack: it can make an existing problem worse. I do prefer some quick discussions over Slack than being forced to check email threads outside 'working hours' to see if there's anything relevant to me. Or, worse yet, getting actual phone calls. Slack _can_ create entirely new problems, but it's usually just amplifying a bad situation.
It depends? If the hours are enforced in the 'you must be here from x:00 to y:00' sense, then it should also be enforced in the 'no work/emails/etc from y:00 to x:00'. Flexibility with the former would make me willing to entertain some flexibility on the latter, but most developers don't work such rigid hours. However, I do and as a result I look at Teams/Mail outside of office maybe once a month for the most.
This one sticks hard for me. Whenever I get hit with burnout, it's brutal, but all the articles make it sound like it's just being a bit bored with work or school. It's easy to end up thinking that there's something wrong with you, and that everybody else can handle unlimited stress just fine by taking a few minutes to relax every day.
Family situation, school or even internal stress that you create for yourself because you have 100 hobby projects can all cause a massive burnout too.
Contrariwise, I've heard of people stress out about how large their Steam backlog has grown.
Fully agreed upon the cross-timezone work as well. I've been working on a project with people from an overseas team and even though they are great, it just doesn't work to only have an hour or so of overlapping working time each day that inevitably gets taken up by mostly pointless status update meetings rather than real discussions.
Question is, what can we do about it? Thats where I really start to feel powerless, the challenge seems insurmountable.
GAS or general adaptation syndrome explains burnout quite simply. There's an alarm reaction that happens in us. Next a resistance phase where our bodies try to fight it off. Finally, an exhaustion phase where we let the stressor take its course(aka burnout).
“It is not stress that kills us, It is our reaction to it” - Hans Selye