
Ask HN: How do you know if you’re burnt out? - stonedge
It was clear to me that, by the start of December, I was burnt. Yet I felt that I didn’t deserve the status of Burnt Out because it was a 5 month period, averaging 45 hours a week. The difference is that the pressure was higher than usual.<p>How do you define burnout and how do you know if you’re there?<p>And then what steps do you take to recover?
======
ThrowawayP
The diagnostic criteria for occupational burnout are pretty well standardized
and can easily be found online (e.g.
[https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-
resources/resource...](https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-
resources/resources/burnout-syndrome.pdf)) and, based on my personal
experience, are pretty accurate. What about these common lists of symptoms do
you disagree with?

You mention average hours worked per week being not unreasonable and not
feeling you "deserve" to be labeled as burnt out, so I'll also note that,
although severe overwork is a risk factor for burnout, it's only one of a
variety of risk factors.

------
gshdg
Burnout isn’t defined by a certain number of hours. It’s defined by how you
feel. The difficult thing to disentangle it from (especially because they feed
off one another) is depression.

