I am depressed and burned out for quite some time already, unfortunately my brain still couldn't recover from it.
If I summarize the impact of burnout to my brain:
- Before: I could learn things pretty quickly, come up with solutions to the problems, even be able to see common patterns and see bigger underlying problems
- After: can't learn, can't work, can't remember, can't see solutions for trivial problems (e.g. if your shirt is wet, you can change it, but I stare at it thinking when it is going to get dried up)
Take care of your mental health
I just focused on getting MY stuff done and that was it. I stopped taking on other's people work. I stopped taking on more work once I got my stuff done. I would do exactly what a Sprint called for. Nothing more, nothing less. If I finished early with my tasks, I would stretch out the time and just tell the scrum master I was close, but not done yet, but always finished on time. I basically just did what was required of me. I wasn't out to impress anybody, I just became "Mr. Dependable" on any of the teams I worked on.
This was the approach that changed everything.
Now, some ten years later? I'm never too high or too low. I still do the same thing, I still just do what is asked of me and that's it. 5pm every night? Laptop gets turned off. Friday at 6pm? Laptop is off for the entire weekend. I turn it back on right before my meetings on Monday. Separating my personal life from my work life with a hard delimiter was paramount.
I found out that if you don't protect your sanity and your own well being, people will take advantage of you and your time and it will never end. Once you break the cycle and get that time back for yourself? You'll make sure you never willingly give it to someone else ever again.
Protect yourself. Protect your sanity. Once you lose it, like OP said, it's very, very hard to get back.
I hope this helps someone else struggling to break this cycle.
I'm a self taught dev with 2 young kids. I've always had a healthy approach to work, but now I'm feeling quite a lot of pressure to learn new things on my own time, whether to make sure I'm prepared for the interview circuit if I get laid off, or to patch my skills that are needed at work.
I'm starting to feel burnout creep in, getting an hour of study in the morning, taking care of family, and then working 8 hours.
I appreciate your insight.
Your brain only has so many truly 'on' hours in a day, and it's already less than 8. Trying to burn even more in the pursuit of complex knowledge isn't just robbing Peter to pay Paul, it's eating the seed corn and wondering why your harvest failed.
It's a scary thing to realize, and can be hard to stick with. But limits are real, and respecting them gets more work done in the long run than not.
It’s a frustrating position to be in, and you can feel quite helpless.
In my experience, it’s less about “do only what’s asked”, and rather “say no”.
I.e. explain “I can do X, but if I do that then Y will suffer, and Y is a priority”. (Y being another company priority, or even your own mental health). Stated in these terms, it’s easier to negotiate your time with your coworkers.
I did this but I was surrounded by coworkers who were stupidly running straight into burnout themselves and said yes to anything.
Well, upper management felt I wasn’t doing enough in comparison and pressured/harassed me. Ultimately, I were the first to burn out.
Of course, in hindsight, I should have left way before it happened, but when you are in, you have no hindsight. Sometimes you can’t grab the surrounding toxicity before being hurt.
But, I did all that and more in my 20s as IC and 30s as a leader. I helped 3 startups go up and now 2 of them are unicorns (That was pure luck but doesn't change my view).
My point is, there is a time for everything. I've hired a couple of JRs at my startup nowadays, and I tell them: what you lack of experience, I want you to cover by will.
Guys at 20s want to eat the world. The energy and motivation is amazing. Those are the years to run and hustle like a demon. However, I would never do that in a big Corp environment (like Goog, IBM, MS, etc) because you will only be abused by middle manager.
But as 1st, 2nd or 3rd engineer in a startup. I'll do it all again.
So I have always had such a nice (some would say epic) work-life balance as far as "hours" and "availability" go. After a (forced) break from work, and exploring health related help professionally, I came to know I was clearly burnt out. I was told high number of "hours" working or "visible or quantifiable work load" don't necessarily have to be present for a burn out. There are other factors at work which cause stress/etc and they are often more insidious than the typical "load" (not to reduce the ill effect of the typical load^). And were those signs abundant in my life and work!
It was quite shocking. I always used to think that with my kind of work-life balance at least burn out was never going to be a problem.
^ It was added by them - those typical load/etc almost always cause mental health damage so I should not consider them okay all.
That sounds like a good philosophy for work-life balance. I sometimes work evenings or weekends, but it might be a bit different since I don’t work at a company but at a university, so my work hours are a bit flexible. I have had burnout before, especially during Covid home office.
A big improvement for me was:
- Regardless what’s going on, have at least one day per week when I don’t work at all (usually Saturday) and never pull all-nighters (no work after midnight);
- Stop syncing work email to any mobile devices, and close the mail app on my laptop outside standard working hours. (This does wonders for destressing.)
- Track the amount of time you “try to work” (e.g. how long you have your work laptop open). Note that this is not the same as tracking e.g. “focus hours”. Keep an eye on it and don’t let it accumulate too much per week.
Why are you working during the weekend and after work hours?
It was a revelation for me when I realized I could tell people “no, I’m swamped right now” and they’d be “ok, no problem”
A PM at my company told me a few weeks ago "if you finish your work early, we can always find other things for you to work on" and I told him "you understand that my incentive is not to do that, right? If working faster only gives me more work to do, then why would I work faster?" He told me that fast workers are repaid with bonuses, promotions, etc., but I don't think most people believe in that kind of upward mobility anymore. I certainly don't
And your sanity is only yours to keep, protect it at all cost.
This is my reason for burnout, opposite of your example. There's a thin balance doing more work because you enjoy, and doing it because managers are pushing you to do it. And now that I JUST do my job and what I'm asked to do, I have lost a lot of the drive that I loved about being a developer and engineer, making life kind of dull. Weird thing is that it is the job description that put me into this place, with no room for growth, and the search for new jobs has been dry, year after year of searching.
I traded my sanity for a big chunk of my life's enjoyment. That ain't great either.
If your "do the minimum" is having complete control over a module and implementing features as slow as you can without pissing anyone off too much, you're going to have a great time.
If your "do the minimum" is picking up the bare minimum number of Jira cards in a sunshine and roses "teamwork makes the dream work" team where everyone is responsible for every line of code but nobody knows more than 5% of the codebase, your mental health is going to go straight down the toilet, because nothing is more stressful than working with over-complicated code you didn't write, and the less cards you pick up, the less code you're going to understand.
"Will the fight for our sanity, be the fight of our lives?" - flaming lips
I don’t know why this is a revelation to so many people.
Who cares about you more than you do? Nobody — especially not anybody at work.
I transitioned to software development in the age of ~30 and am based in Austria, Europe. The way I did is was to work on a project in my free time, and use that to a) LEARN, b) demonstrate that I can aquire skills myself and c) can stay motivated and push through. I wanted to show that I'm worth being given a chance. It worked flawlessly, I got hired on the first try.
Just try it, what's the worst that can happen? :)
I've got the feeling good software engineers are a bit more rare here, though, and Whiteboard interviews are not a common thing either.
I have been through really rough periods and as my health took a big toll, the only means I had to recovery was to move away from crazy startup life. Gradually I understood that, maybe, there is a better balance. I still want to learn, grow, solve problems, dream big.
Instead of making 3 year plans, I started making 10 year plans. I started taking care of my health, like it is the most important thing. I unplugged for a couple years, lived in cheap places to lower my financial burden.
Now I live in a small village, have built a work routine that has no deadlines and I am happy, very happy. I have a hostel I run here, I write software I love, I am planning a product. I just setup a camping spot, it is lush green around here, a slow and simple life (all shops close at 20:00 for example).
I sacrificed those magazine cover dreams but in return I got a wonderful life and I am building again, just at 0.5x speed. I hesitate to think about accelerators like YC. I know I will panic so much when it comes to all those metrics, money and everything else I cannot process anymore. But that is OK.
I still got burn out at my last job because I let the pressure got me. Now I'm recovering while coding small projects and I hope that I'll find a better balance in the next job, or maybe one of my projects will take off.
Definitely better since i can hand our in a forest or work in my garden though...
Mechanics: it seems easier to get in to burn out but far far longer to get out of.
I know what I wanted to do but could not bring myself to do it.
Though not always, gut health (or the lack of it. My burn out coincided with my IBD episode) could be an early symptom to back off the throttle a bit.
Subjective: I've learnt to remember that look on someone face who's heading down burn out wall.
In long distance cycling, in order to not 'bonk', you must fuel and hydrate sufficiently and consistently over time. With burn out, I feel the same dynamics apply, but with different 'fuel' and 'hydration'. And every person is so different that the rate of replenishment needed should and have a wide variance.
What really helped me get out was, ironically COVID, when I couldn't do anything about my startup and I had to stop it and rest. The bleeding with my IBD just went away during the peak of lockdowns. Started to build and buy stuff, for leisure, that I enjoyed and had postponed away in my hustling years.
On hope: The human body and brain has a remarkable capability to recover and heal itself. But one does need to give it the right input: hanging out with wholesome or wise people, exercise, eating well, getting medical intervention when needed etc.
Getting that all sorted is like an insane nootropic. I'm smart again and can work real fast.
I’ve obviously heard of burnout and experienced it before, yet somehow I failed to recognize what was happening until then.
So thank you for posting this. Hopefully it’ll help someone out there realize they’re burned out and start addressing it.
In my hardest semester at college, I wound up spending a somewhat unreasonable amount of time in nature. I would walk 3-5 miles a day and up to 20 miles on the weekend. I had a wetlands preserve across the street (well, highway) from my apartment, and a great state park about 10 minutes away. My workouts got more intense as I was more stressed as well.
It all seemed to balance out and I've been trying to get back to that sort of balance of activities since I graduated.
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/ecotherapy
> The Cornell study found that after a month of reduced stress, these effects disappeared.
I do not believe I will ever be able to experience “a month of reduced stress” until the day I die. But maybe that’s just the burnout talking.
At which point I guess at least you will not be able to do whatever stressed you any more.
But then also there's no (complete) coming back from burnout, even after years of reduced stress :
https://web.archive.org/web/20230607211423/https://www.econo...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234937
Read your sentence again, so you can see how ridiculous it is. What do you have to do that is so incredibly important that you have to throw away your entire life for it?
I’ve always been an eloquent speaker in meetings but recently it seems like I can’t respond at all, I have these thoughts and then when I go to speak nothing comes out. I’ve began to doubt my skills and abilities even though I’ve been a senior dev for almost 20 years.
The past several weeks I get in front of my screen at work and just stare, sometimes for hours… it’s as if I have waking sleep paralysis or something.
Everything feels fake, like I’m observing myself from the outside and the person I’m seeing is someone else.
PSA for anyone who might have the same situation — if you've experienced anything that resembles hypomania this may be worth investigating. The average time from first bipolar depression to diagnosis is 10 years, and I mistook several depressions for burnout while doing plenty of damage to my career and personal life during that time.
This is one of the best books on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Depressed-Recognizing-Managing-Bipola...
The huge challenge with diagnosing type 2 BPD is that it basically needs a historical time series of data to be detected properly, so either you or someone close to you needs that data. It's believed to be a lot more prevalent in the population than officially diagnosed, which sucks because it results in consistent, increasing depressions that don't respond to treatments for "unipolar" depression (major depressive disorder), which are actually dangerous as they can trigger mania.
I was lucky that the first medication I found worked really well with no side effects, and I basically went from "random 3-6 month depressions every 1-2 years" to "normal person", which removed a huge debuff, in video game terms.
I am extremely over Zoom meetings multiple times per day, every day, and what-feels-like-constant Slack interruptions. I usually love meetings, too!
Tech consulting is what I love doing, but all of the small consultancies are getting hoovered up by the big 4 or WITCH firms, and all of the big firms make you wear business casual and have strong money/sports/golf cultures, which sucks ass.
Going back to engineering and spending all day pairing on Zoom and dealing with petty politics isn't the way either.
Work just isn't exciting anymore; the last four years have felt like different takes of the same job (despite me changing jobs a few times! ). But going back to the office in a world where half of the folks there don't want to be there isn't fun either.
Also, all of the energy in tech is going towards AI, which I couldn't give less of a shit about. Startups are hella exploitative, but big companies prevent you from getting anything done.
I don't know.
The traditional approach of treating burnout primarily through rest and recovery is overly simplistic and may not address the root causes of burnout. Newer models, such as Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), suggest that addressing psychological and existential needs, rather than just biological ones, can lead to more effective recovery.
Burnout treatment should not only focus on rest but also on helping individuals reconnect with what gives their life meaning, addressing feelings of fear, shame, and high self-demands, to achieve a more comprehensive and lasting recovery.
If you aren't 100% happy with your situation, and not getting out of bed every morning with a smile on your face, do your best to address it before things get really bad.
I did it on my last job for a year at least. Good project, learning, good direction for the team, etc. (and of course "more important" things like a salary, friends, family, etc was all in balance).
It was not an easy job though, sometimes I was tired, exhausted by the end of the workday. But it felt like being tired after a good exercise session: feeling of accomplishment.
I left the job when the smile disappeared (non-technical reasons). Then I realized that the smile in question was a really important thing to me :-)
I did for may years after my career change into the high end CAD world.
And more recently I am doing it again working with people I love on a startup (manufacturing related) I believe in.