
Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread - howard941
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/from-moms-to-medical-doctors-burnout-is-everywhere-these-days/2019/03/29/1cea7d92-401d-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html
======
kartan
> Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

We are making employees lives miserable to reduce the need of planning for
companies. Quite often management lacks the emotional maturity needed in their
positions that hides normal mistakes that are part of the job, push for
unrealistic schedules and sometimes even get into bulling as a way of getting
what they want.

8 hours plus commute time, that has increased as cities have grown, does not
allow people to have time to attend their families, their own finances and
have time to relax.

When it comes to human management in companies we are closer to the middle
ages than to the current knowledge about human nature.

~~~
escapecharacter
Crazy idea: what if management was a licensed, regulated career, like
traditional engineering, or being a nurse. Like if you have more than 5
"direct reports", you need to get a certification?

~~~
aynsof
I don't think there's any link between certification and competency.

Here in Australia we're going mad for certifications. I had a friend who
looked after kids in an after school program. A minimum wage job, but one that
she loved. She'd been doing it for nearly 20 years. The government mandated
that she needed a $2500 certificate in order to continue to do the job she'd
been doing for two decades.

I don't believe there was anything that this certification could have taught
her that she didn't already know. Heck, she should have been the one teaching
the course. Instead it was being run by an organisation that specialised in
running these kinds of certification programs, but certainly didn't specialise
in the subject matter.

If we were to mandate certification for managers, my concern would be that -
at best - it would end up as just another piece of paper. At worst, it would
actively exclude the people who were most qualified and competent, like it did
with my friend.

~~~
mb_72
Your friend sounds like an outlier in these circumstances; the certification
is more likely to be of benefit to those fresh to the field, and in the field
of child-care (and aged care also), I think some bare minimum requirement of
capability is warranted.

Professional training organisations may not have direct experience with the
subject matter, but given a good curriculum prepared by someone who DOES have
experience, I don't see why they couldn't deliver a reasonable result. I agree
that any "Q and A" sessions, or questions along the lines of "What is it
really like working as a..." would not be that useful, though.

~~~
jammygit
Certification is just a moat to protect jobs and stave off regulation.

------
patient_zero
What I find sad about this (and other articles like this) is when the time
comes within the article to lay out how to avoid burnout and stress, the list
nevver includes ways to spend less time working. It's almost like an unspoken
rule. I know that to recommend that is to take a chance with your livelihood
but I really hope that we can at least stop blaming ourselves for the
ridiculous work/life ratio we currently must shoulder to live.

Off the top of my head, there should be a moratorium on requiring email
responses for non-essentials outside of office hours. I'd like to get rid of
most salaried positions and get people paid by the hour. I've a sneaking
suspicion that all the crazy hours that are currently "required by the times"
would miraculously evaporate once employers were charged for the time they
demand of their people.

~~~
alkonaut
I consider myself “paid by the hour” even if I’m not formally paid by the
hour. I log my time and have a bank of hours that can’t go outside +/-20
hours. If I did 41 hours last week I’ll do 39 next week. I’ll _never_ take a
position where I do more than 40h on average. There is no amount of money that
will be compensation enough for regular 45h weeks.

~~~
wutbrodo
Yup, exactly.

Excluding those that are very low on the income scale, for whom everyone
agrees life is difficult, I simply don't understand the claims of inescapable
demands on skilled white-collar workers' time. If you're making any sort of
non-negligible surplus above the basics, then you're at some level making a
conscious choice of that surplus (usually for consumption) over a lower-stress
job.

I have a friend who's a quant at Goldman Sachs, whose work life is miserable
but who makes a good 150k more than me. His labor isn't (currently) valued at
more than mine: I could get a similar TC with little effort and a much
_better_ working environment, but I have absolutely no interest: I'm
consciously trading off compensation consumption for a better work-life
balance. The flipside is that he's consciously trading off quality of life for
more compensation, for whatever his personal reasons are. It's bizarre to me
to claim that it's a bad thing that that choice is presented to him (or to me
for that matter).

I get that this sounds like a general-purpose argument against worker
protections, but there's a key difference: in the absence of a robust, UBI-
like safety net, we as a society have accepted that coercion can include
nominally consensual actions taken to avoid bumping up against a lack of
whatever we've defined as the basic necessities that everyone is entitled to
(food, shelter, etc).

But the work burnout problem is, statistically, almost entirely a middle- and
upper-class problem[1], and these are precisely the people who have the comp
surplus to consciously choose to trade off compensation for a better quality
of life.

I know as always the dimmer readers of comments like this will pattern-match
this to the victim-blaming buzzword, but you can simultaneously bemoan the
state of a culture and work to improve your lot within it. In this case,
there's a fairly simple, concrete solution: perform worse at your current job
by putting in less hours or get a job that isn't so rigid as to require a
number of hours above what you find to be your healthy level.

[1] the job-related woes of lower income people tend to involve not being able
to get enough employment and thus enough income to live off of

~~~
mratzloff
> perform worse at your current job by putting in less hours

Citation needed.

Edit: So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the
mere suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your
job.

~~~
wutbrodo
What on Earth are you talking about? For the cases where your job requires
longer hours even when they don't track productivity, the part of the sentence
that you conveniently left out was "..by putting in less hours or get a job
that isn't so rigid as to require a number of hours above what you find to be
your healthy level."

For the cases where your work doesn't blindly want longer hours but measures
your productivity in a saner way, if you can perform better at your job in
less hours (which is totally plausible in many situations), then OBVIOUSLY you
should be doing it already.

The fragment of a sentence that you quoted is narrowly referring to a
situation where 1) you're still getting productivity out of your marginal hour
and 2) your work doesn't arbitrarily require absurd hours as detached from
productivity.

> So self-evident is this equation to some people that they down vote the mere
> suggestion that working longer hours does not make you better at your job

I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time
feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug
about disagreeing with them.

~~~
mratzloff
> I can't even imagine what would drive someone to spend their weekend time
> feverishly imagining statements that no one is making so they can feel smug
> about disagreeing with them.

I'm sorry my comment upset you. It wasn't my intention.

My point was that in many cases people are inclined to work longer as a result
of social pressure when it has no positive impact on productivity. In that
case, are longer hours "required"? Or is it strictly a choice? My
interpretation of what you said was perhaps more binary than you intended.

In those cases, one can simply work less, shrug off the social pressure, and
perform at the same level. You allude to this (sort of) in your second
paragraph, but this is not as obvious to many people as you state and, I
think, benefits from saying explicitly.

------
org3432
What exhausts me is the people, the politics, the engineering egos, and the
endless tolerance of companies to spend months of time working through
previously obviously poor decisions and no tolerance for fixing the attitudes
that created them. You’re called perfectionist engineer, regardless of how
little effort or time it takes to correct the long term trajectory for your
project. There’s little connection to clear organized thinking and the
enjoyment of the work, it’s like everyone has gone mad and can’t see the
obvious right in front of their face at times.

~~~
scruple
Do we work for the same company? It's _infuriating_ to watch the same people
make the same mistakes time and time again. Where is the accountability? Where
has the integrity gone? Was it all a lie? What exactly is the _point_ of this
charade?

~~~
ravenstine
It's indeed a charade. Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but it inevitably
becomes a charade once a company reaches a certain age and size.

What happens is that, once a company is reliably making money for everyone,
the need to "innovate" and make things more "efficient" is dramatically
reduced. At the end of the day, most people want to just show up to the
office, do what they're told(what they don't actually want to do), and then go
back to their lives with their money. If some young engineer shows up with
_ideas_ about making things "more efficient", that can only mean people's
daily routines get disrupted or they are made obsolete. Nobody really wants to
make things better, including those who are _running the business_ since their
joy is in being in charge of lots of people(whether they're well-meaning or
not). Accountability and integrity gets thrown out the window because, in
order to maintain them, _someone has to get mad at someone else_ , and these
days people aren't interested in being the person who has to scold people or
let them go.

As much as I care about my craft as a software engineer, I realize that
_every_ company suffers from this syndrome to some extent, and the most
healthy thing to do is to accept that people don't want you fucking with their
cash cow. I don't take seriously claims companies make when the talk about
"excellence" and "innovation", because once they've got more than 10 employees
and their growth pattern has a definite upward trend, those values really go
out the window.

And you know something? There's nothing wrong with that. Most people aren't
working because they want to. Think you can make things better? Go start your
own company.

~~~
mratzloff
Often these young engineers don't understand the whole context. They make poor
assumptions and don't ask the right questions, and their obviously superior
ideas, while well-intentioned, are not actually superior. They come across as
arrogant.

The problem is that no one takes them aside to explain any of this, so they
become frustrated and eventually cynical. Correctly channeled and nurtured,
these engineers can do a lot of good in an organization.

That said, sometimes it is the organization itself. The key to understanding
is identifying the right people to ask, and asking the right questions.

------
scottlocklin
I remember sitting in rapture listening to a retired Chevron executive
describing the way white collar work used to be. You basically got hired at a
megacorp for life. If things didn't work out after the first couple of years,
you were gently taken aside, given nothing new to do, and given a salary and
an office for an entire year to find a new position. I was flabbergasted. Only
professors with tenure or certain government workers have this kind of job
stability, but the entire upper middle class had it at one point. Sure, none
of them won .com lotto; they arguably had much better lives on average.

My dad was working class and in the union -he had a different kind of
stability.

~~~
Gibbon1
I talked to a Chevron Exec while stuck on a ski lift 30 years ago. Back then
if they canceled or finished a project they just redeployed the workers to
other projects. Vastly different than the current system where they just lay
everyone off at the end. If things weren't working out bosses would just
transfer employees to a role better suited to them.

You'll get arguments this is more efficient cause free markets blah blah.
However I know one semiconductor company in the valley that bucked that trend.
Everyone went home at 5-6pm. Didn't work weekends. They just moved people
around instead of firing them. And they totally crushed their competition over
20 years.

~~~
Spooky23
100% agree with you. The modern organization is so short term focused and so
dedicated to purging that they do not develop leadership and cannot handle
failure.

The cult of metrics breeds dumb. A big company is more like a Soviet
enterprise than a functional business.

~~~
pm90
I am very interested to know what you mean by the cult of metrics?

~~~
sgt101
"What gets measured gets managed" \- corrosively applied by establishing
metrics that don't directly reflect business performance and are not under the
control of the accountable people (NPS for example) and then directly and
blindly using them to determine people's tenure or advancement.

BUT! the development and use of metrics like this is helpful in many ways; the
problem is that when really dumb people are asked to do this they use them in
really dumb ways and this bit (the lack of capability and brains) is the big
issue.

------
manmal
Chronic stress sets you up for so many diseases, where burnout is just an
early warning sign in comparison. Cancer, heart disease, stroke - you name it,
chances are way higher that you get it if you are under chronic stress. Being
a freelancer with 2 little kids, I‘ve had my fair share of stress (and
burnout), but I‘m doing quite well nowadays. So, here‘s my personal anti-
stress toolbox, from most effective to least effective:

\- Stoic philosophy. Accept that you have control over nothing (only the
chance to influence) and eventually that feeling that you carry the world on
your shoulders will disappear.

\- Stoic philosophy (just to reiterate how important it is)

\- Near infrared radiation - improves mitochondrial function and releases NO
(a radical caused by cell stress) from the mitochondria. There are plenty of
options, i have a device from redlightman.

\- CBD - I vape it regularly. It’s legal where I live, but it’s illegal in
some countries and US states. It believe it had a tremendous effect on me,
even increased sociability.

\- Blue light blocking glasses - Staring at my laptop screen for longer
periods stresses me out, and using f.lux all day improves this a lot. But
using the blue blockers is something different entirely. Sometimes I put on
the glasses in the early afternoon and am more focused and relaxed as a
result. Sleep also got much better, sometimes I fall asleep while coding in
the evening. Take care to use the really yellow/orange ones, as the only-
slightly-tinged ones don’t filter heavily enough.

\- Sort out family problems, ASAP. Don’t feel stuck - if you do, just do
_something_, even if it’s dumb. Feeling stuck kills you. You need to feel
accepted by the people you are close to. You need someone you tell your
(supposedly) darkest secrets without them condemning you.

\- Find a job or position where your „boss“ values you and your work. For me
as a freelancer this means I only work with clients for whom the project is
important, or even vital (not just a cost-factor).

~~~
bigbigs
stoic philosophy is no good for the mind. actually feeling your emotions is
healthy. it's stuffing them down that makes people crazy or likewise numbed
out. this is a difficult truth to understand.

vaping is a poison - clearly. addictions just keep you on the cycle.

real acceptance is powerful but it comes from a place of being connected to
yourself which means your emotions. trying to suppress them isn't living since
you are suppressing your very nature.

~~~
manmal
In a healthy mind, there is a causal hierarchy: Reality > your perception of
reality > emotions (strongly simplified!). You are suggesting that stoicism
means manipulating emotions, at the bottom of the hierarchy. What (to me) it
means is manipulating the perception of reality. I agree that shoving aside
emotions won’t do you much good, except in the short term (e.g. not punching
the boss in the face). Long term emotion suppression will make you depressed.
Stoicism doesn’t tell you that you must not be angry. It tells you that your
boss is actually not in control of the situation herself, and also does not
control your own destiny - her bad decision is suddenly only an annoyance, and
not a life-threatening event. And your emotions will adjust accordingly.

Vaping nicotine 20 times a day is obviously a bad idea and might lead to
cancer. Vaping 2 draws of CBD (a non-addictive substance) 2-3 times per week
might also have a negative long term effect, but I’ll take it. I don’t use
propylene glycol, but only vegetable glycerine to minimize risk.

~~~
dragonwriter
> In a healthy mind, there is a causal hierarchy: Reality > your perception of
> reality > emotions (strongly simplified!).

That's certainly the conceit of rationality, but realistically the last two
have a complex two-way relationship where often, perhaps most often, the
reverse order of those two elements dominates.

~~~
manmal
I agree that, short-term, emotions change perception of reality. Or at least,
past trauma and other experiences from the past feed heavily into perception.
But my own experience is that the link from perception to emotions is more
profound and effective. A few words, formulating crucial information, can turn
around your emotions 180 degrees. „I‘m pregnant“, „You have cancer“, „I‘m
sorry“, etc. The other direction seems way more subtle to me.

------
randomacct3847
Burnout for me wasn’t about too many hours. It was more that, especially in
the SF tech scene, as an employee you’re expected to drink the Koolaid and not
only do your job but be 100% _emotionally_ invested in your company too. The
expectation of emotional attachment is, at least for me, what makes working in
that kind of environment overwhelming, and recently decided for myself that it
isn’t sustainable after 4-5 years in it.

~~~
reasonablemann
The forced emotional attachment is a way of manipulating you into a lower
salary.

------
bsenftner
I have an entire adult life that has been one burnout after another,
continually driven by unrealistic expectations by immature management. As
early as '83 being a dumb teen burned out by Apple being an unpaid beta tester
for the Mac. Working on the original Fractals team with Mandelbrot and
Devanny, I ended up in the hospital from the demands. Then again working at
Philips developing video CDs, again at 3D0/EA making their failed console's
OS, again at Sony making the PSX OS, again at EA develping during the EA
Spouse era, again during the dotcom era developing early IP streaming video,
again working in feature film VFX, again at my own startup, and yet still now
working facial recognition. Technology kinda sucks, as if you're good they
take advantage and bully your good will, mentally manipulating one. I am yet
to see any organization without this disease.

------
cracauer
It's not just companies driving to more productivity.

For example, those open office layout are about putting more people per square
foot. No matter what they say otherwise. Nobody "communicates" in an open
office layout and they know it.

This is an example where per-employee productivity is sacrificed for other
goals (getting more people into one building). And it is directly affecting
stress and burnout.

~~~
prestonh
Huh? People communicate about work all the time in my office and having the
ability to initiate conversations fluidly means more efficient collaboration.
Fewer meetings, and easier to keep all parties in the know.

~~~
mamon
There is such thing as too much communication. In my previous company the
whole 10 person team sat together on the open space. The result was that my
coworkers (sitting 30-40 ft from me) would shout a question to me, because
they were too lazy to check project Wiki page to know which environment they
should deploy to, for example. Or they would shout totaly useless
notifications, like "I've just created pull request, can you review it?". Open
plan offices encourage this type of pathological behaviour.

------
RandomInteger4
I've been experiencing a type of burnout for the past 7 years that is mostly
mental in nature. I get plenty of exercise and while my sleep schedule is
abnormal, I still get normal amounts of sleep.

Where the burnout comes in is when I get back the motivation to learn and
program, and everything is going good, but then I start talking to recruiters
and applying to jobs, and the farthest I get is the phone interview. I haven't
been able to land a technical interview for the past 5 years about. Then it
turns into a feedback loop, where my lack of motivation comes back, I let my
skills wane, and then I just burnout for a few months.

Each time I try to get back at it, the wall to climb seems higher; like I
seriously struggle to just sit down and read an article about this or that
topic. It's also difficult to know where to jump back in to brush up on my
skills. My ability to think programmatically is still solid, but I forget
things like the specifics of setting up webpack or whatever.

 _shrug_ oh well. I think I've been getting that motivational tingle back, so
maybe this time will be successful? In the mean time I just want to be hired
for anything; not even getting calls back from minimum wage job applications.

~~~
isoprophlex
did you talk to a professional? a psychologist, or an employment counsellor? a
personal trainer?

I'm sure you can find some kind of professional that's trained to help people
in your predicament?

~~~
Tempest1981
Some schools provide kids with 3 free sessions with a counselor.

I wish tech companies did the same... that it was just a "normal" thing for
our mental health. We focus much more on physical health, whereas mental
health is taboo.

------
titzer
What I find absolute f'in sucks is living/working in Europe and interacting
with Silicon Valley. The time difference between CET and PST is 9 hours. That
means the European workday is essentially over when SV starts waking up and
piling on the emails, bugs, requests, meetings, etc. So you either end up
staying an extra hour or two to do meetings/chats and handle issues, or go
home and check email periodically in the evening. Worst when there's a fire
alarm and shit hits the fan at 9pm...

Even if you do manage to disconnect, there's wreckage leftover for you to pick
up the next morning. Have that happen about once a month and you'll be a
frazelled mess, knowing every evening something could go horribly wrong.

Just say no to timeshift!

------
graeme
Pretty sure I burned myself out three years ago, while launching a big thing
for my business. Basically, I ran a live course, and it happened right after
some travel that had already been scheduled, so I had no downtime. It was all
rush, rush, rush for 2-3 months straight.

This basically set me up for the next several years in business, and I'm glad
I did it, but ooof was the penalty high. This makes me think 1. Good heavens,
most people burning out don't even get this upside, and 2. If I had just
structured things somewhat differently or canceled the travel, I probably
could have gotten the benefit while avoiding years of fatigue

Watch out, because it's hard to know what will break you until it does break
you. And what breaks quickly takes longer to fix. I generally try to cultivate
a high degree of slack in everything that I do: I ignored it once, and paid
for it.

Symptoms were:

* Messed up sleep

* a sort of "deadening" where I felt less joy in regular things

* A constant sense of being overwhelmed

* Worsened digestive troubles

* Less ability to tolerate caffeine (I ended up quitting it)

* More muscle tension

* Lack of focus, tendency towards distraction

* More short term thinking

And other stuff I can't remember now. It's basically all fixed, and I feel
great. One quibble with the article:

"Burnout is caused by chronic stress, not stressors, the Nagoskis say in their
book. It’s important to differentiate the two. Stressors are external: to-do
lists, financial problems or anxiety about the future. Stress, on the other
hand, “is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body
when you encounter [stressors],” the Nagoskis write.

To fix burnout, people need to address the stress itself. They must allow
their body to complete its stress response cycle. Instead, people tend to
focus on stressors. “They assume their stress will go away if they’re on top
of things, if they’re accomplishing things and constantly checking things off
their to-do list,” Emily Nagoski says."

\--> I found that _removing_ stressors by addressing them and getting rid of
the source of the stressor was extremely helpful.

But not in a "do the whole todo list" sense. Rather, thinking about what leads
to repeat stressors in my life, and eliminating that. Could be as simple as
decluttering the house, improving sleep, changing cooking habits, etc.
Anything in the daily routine that eliminates a pressure and lets your system
cope better with the remaining stressors. Also a big part of it was working
less.

~~~
save_ferris
Thank you for sharing this. I've been experiencing these exact symptoms for
several months now and I've struggled to understand it.

I don't like talking about it at work because I don't want to be seen as
damaged/ineffective, but it's really weighing on me these days.

~~~
graeme
No problem. It can be a hard and long problem to solve, but it gets better
with time and space.

Everyone's experience is different, but one thing I can say is this: the size
of a problem is not necessarily proportional to the effect it will have on you
in this state.

For instance, I had a reduced ability to multitask. Multitasking is one of
those things where holding even three simple things in your head can be hard.

So, don't beat yourself up if an apparently simple situation is causing you
stress. What seems simple may not be, given how humans are wired. And you have
a reduced capacity while burnt out.

What you can do is look for things that trigger situations. Then see if you
can reconfigure things so that the trigger is eliminated.

It's also helpful to look for physical signs. For example, in my case, I would
get a tension in my neck, when inhaling. This happened after a stressor.
Paying attention to this let me identify stressors and deal with them.

I also was able to work on it from the other end. Basically, my system was
identifying minor threats as larger threats. So, I did something called square
breathing. Basically: Stressor --> awareness --> hold breathe, count to 4 -->
exhale, then inhale --> hold breathe while inhaled, count to four. Repeat if
necessary.

It was like a pattern interrupt. The body wanted to go "minor stressor --> red
alert!!!!!!". The breathing interrupted this and demonstrated to the body
"see, no threat. Cancel the alarms".

After doing that for a few weeks I basically no longer have to do it, except
in rare cases. Though that was some time in to the burnout, so some other
stuff may have fixed itself in the meantime. YMMV, including with the specific
way in which you do breathing.

Another thing: sleep as if your life depends on it. Good sleep helps every
other thing and especially burnout.

I recognize that saying this can make the problem worse. So: if you are awake
at night, and can't sleep: don't sweat it. Don't sweat the one offs. Instead,
look for causes and solutions.

I improved my sleep by working on light exposure. I wrote more on that here a
couple of days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507938)

Working on the general environment helped fixed my sleep. I still have
occasional off nights, but the rhythm is better.

Sleep may not be your issue. The point is, to the extent you're able, get
outside of a situation, analyze it, look for stressors, and consider the full
rational situation. Basically your job is to teach your body to align its
(presently damaged) threat response systems to the actual situation, which is
presumably not an acute threat.

Some or much of this may not apply to you, so take the bits that do apply. And
good luck!

------
jdorfman
It's real. In 2014 I was on medical leave off and on for 9 months from burnout
and severe depression. No one has super powers. Take care of yourself.

------
fastbeef
I took a different approach to this - I started my own company a offer
contracting services. I tell my clients "I work 40 hours a week, including
communting. If you want ass-in-seat, that's ~30h/week. Want more? Let me work
from home." (I tell them this in my most sale-sy, honey-dripping voice).

None have objected. I now work on average 6 hours per day, 30 minute lunch,
2x40min train+walk commute where I space out with music or podcasts. I make
more money, am happier and in better shape then ever. Can highly recommend.

------
jammygit
This topic is important, but this article is weak. They cite a statement about
doctor burnout, and a single study about employer statements about the topic.
Most of the content is anecdotal, and in that sense they're just going for an
'I hear you' reaction instead of adding anything to the discussion.
Disappointing imo.

------
gerbilly
If you don't like job burnout, then:

1) Take on as little debt as you can. This means you'll have more control over
what job situations you will be forced to tolerate. Don't fall into the trap
of 'rewarding' yourself for your hard work with expensive vacations, cars
toys, whatever. Debt is slavery.

2) Leave your work phone in a drawer at work on Friday night, or turn it off.
If they bug you about it, tell everyone you went on a camping trip, or went on
a multi-pitch rockclimbing expedition or whatever. Keep your work stuff off
your personal phone too.

If you have the kind of job where you are truly expected to be available all
the time, start looking for another one. It's not worth your life.

And if you're wondering why the boss doesn't seem to burnout even though he's
always there and works weekends, it's be cause he has control over his work
hours. If you don't, then look for a way to either change that or get out.

These kind of work conditions can seem innocent enough, but if you keep that
up for six months or a year and you are likely to burnout.

------
2sk21
I'm reminded of this great quote from "Soul of a new machine": He went away
from the basement of Building 14 that day, and left this note in his cubicle,
on top of his computer terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will
deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

------
ImaCake
I cannot overstate how useful an emergency fund is in the event of serious
burnout. Being able to quit your job and escape from that one huge stressor
can be incredibly useful for recovery.

------
jammygit
If one was a founder who wanted to have their startup succeed without crushing
your teams mental/physical health, how would you do it? I understand the
founder accepting it as a cost themselves, but when the company's existence
depends on speed, how do you balance the push with survival?

Are there any good case studies?

~~~
Falkon1313
\- It's understandable that you're super-excited and willing to work 18-hour
days to make your business a success. Probably not healthy, but
understandable, because it's your baby. Don't expect that from others, because
it's not their baby. They have their own babies (and hobby projects,
friendships, etc.) that need their attention.

\- Consider an employee with 4 kids in different schools, each with different
after-school activities, a spouse who also works, and an ailing
parent/grandparent who needs care and won't be around much longer. Try to
target your expectations for workload and time available to be appropriate for
that hypothetical employee, in such a way that they can still live their life
and care for their family while also being an effective and valuable employee.

\- If you're in software, plan for zero-downtime deployments from day one.
Architect and develop for it from the beginning. Don't ask your employees to
stay up all night doing deployments and maintenance during a 'quiet time'
window in the middle of the night. It's not hard to do daytime deployments
without taking the system offline if it's designed for it from the start, but
it can be a major challenge to retrofit that ability.

\- Continually reassess your deadlines and priorities. If your deadlines are
actually hard due to external factors, consider what can reasonably be cut to
make the deadline. If they're soft, consider focusing more on priorities of
what is most important rather than deadline dates. Seek to relieve pressure
rather than creating it, by focusing on what's most important.

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neonate
[https://outline.com/cHyZVa](https://outline.com/cHyZVa)

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EGreg
And what’s more, our society is unwittingly taking the side of corporations
and try to push more of it on another 50% of the population, which is already
overworked:

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286)

------
p0nce
There is a well-known burnout measurement test from Christina Maslach, who
gave an interesting overview of job burnout in this video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPBkCW0R5E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRPBkCW0R5E)

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TomMckenny
There is no way to reduce workload and still generate enough income for the
employer and revenue for the employee given current urban land valuations.

And more generally, raise inequality and one group will have increased stress
while the other has reduced stress. That is the point of wealth.

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stuaxo
Should we stop calling it burnout and just say depression ?

~~~
sorryforthethro
If it's work-induced I think a separate label helps the discussion.

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lalalandland
I have found what works best for me to recover from chronic stress is light
training, like walking, and mindfulness meditation, specially body scan.

~~~
dredmorbius
That seems to work very well, for some, until it doesn't.

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gist
Another thinly sourced article with the intention of plugging a book (nice PR
work to the firm behind that).

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naveen99
if some people weren’t burning out, the bean counters would continue squeezing
everyone more and the people currently not burning out would start feeling
pain also. Some burnout keeps the balance... it’s like if you always succeed,
you aren’t achieving your potential.

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a_random_name
I wonder if unionization could be a solution here.

~~~
bsenftner
It would have to be global.

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Gnarl
Pssst... Its the WiFi
[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.10...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/15368378.2015.1043557)

