Hey folks! Daily social media is part of my routine to spread the word about what I'm working on. It's awesome to see everyone's wins—it lights a fire under me. But then I hit overdrive and burn out. Takes me weeks to feel normal again. Does this happen to you? How do you keep up your energy?
I've quit my job from burnout multiple times and on the 3rd iteration, it's been even more difficult to get back to a non-burnout stage. So I would try to focus on a long term strategy as opposed to bursts of productivity.
I've had to slow down. This means reducing all the things that distract me. It means coming to grips with "missing out".
I've leaned into some life hacks like:
- Designating social media time to just after work but not after dinner (includes HN).
- Leaning into meditation. Not just 10min via an app but a walk to and back from my favorite cafe every morning without my phone or any headphones.
- Going to bed early and waking up early. The quietest, non-distracting moments are in the early morning.
- Using a pomodoro timer. For both work projects and personal projects.
- I try to spend some time focusing on activities that are intentionally slow like writing poetry and personal essays.
I like my audiobooks during my morning walk, but other than that I'd subscribe to this suggestions.
I think you hit the nail on the head with "dealing with missing out".
The vast majority of what happens is irrelevant and trying to keep up with, say, the latest tech drama, the latest framework, the scandal du jour, the currently popular TV show.. it feels important but it's not, and giving up is hard but not harmful.
Not being flippant about it, but my current requirements to pay the mortgage and support my wife and kids tend to push any sense of burnout down the priority list. I simply decide to keep plugging away, because if I stop to "find myself" things can get bad for lots of other people quickly.
That's not how it works. If burnout is indeed looming over you, it does not care how far down you push it on your lists. It will get you. And then you and your dependents are proper fucked.
The only thing to do is to meet it on your own timeline, not its.
Sounds like a bad time if the burnout actually comes in full force and you have dependents + mortgage. All the more reason to actually research what burnout is and how to avoid it if you ask me.
What you wrote is like saying "well, I'll just work through the pain" when someone asks about avoiding heart attack. That's not how heart attacks work, and that's not how burnout works either.
All due respect, this isn't burn out. This is boredom or being uninspired. It can be a drudge, uninteresting, and procrastinated, but actual burnout is a very different beast.
I have mortgage, wife, kids also and continue to plug along, but know the difference.
I had that, for years. That's not too say that I hated my job and was suffering. But it was stressful and I had collected to many unpaid extra responsibilities over years in a startup. But my number one goal was paying off my mortgage, becoming debt free and saving a nest egg, so I didn't really think about whether or not I really loved my job.
I got to my goal through a combination of good luck, hard work and other life choices (eg we have no kids, no car and are frugal for co² emission reduction). I also predicted the house prices crash of 2008 (not the whole thing, but definitely within my country) and waited for years while my friends bought vault overpriced properties way out of town. Then I watched the house prices tumble to decades low prices before grabbing an absolute bargain. That was one part of the luck. The other was the startup being acquired, but I got fucked on the stock, so it only just about covered my remaining debt. So I kept working and building a nest egg.
I did switch companies after a while and I spend another 2 years helping to build another startup. But one stressful day in the middle of a fundamental disagreement with my CTO, I just blurted out "I'm sorry, but think I quit!" I talked it through over the weekend with my wife, and confirmed it on the Monday.
After 20 years of unbroken employment I took 6 months off. I had all these plans for what I'd do (mostly tech side projects that I didn't have time for) but only achieved 10% of it because I was having so much fun doing DIY, gardening, running...
Up to that point in my life I was soooo tech focused. But after realizing that I could "insta-quit" at any time and do zero tech, I did worry that I had broken myself. But strangely enough I found myself working with another startup and absolutely loving it.
I realized that I need other people to need my expertise. Even though I love what I do, I find that I can't do it simply for myself. Work is a necessary "evil" that allows me to have my tech hobby. I just approach it differently now. I'm careful about who I work with and what they're building. Oh, and I also work 3.5 days a week now, so no more burnout.
That let me pay my mortgage early, which became a multiplier on my ability to save and invest. At this point, 3.5 days per week pays me enough to live comfortably on. When I was negotiating my last offer I asked for shorter working hours instead of more money. They accepted.
This is like saying you won't change the oil, because the car is important to you. On the plus side, whatever burnout you're experiencing hasn't yet reached the later stages where one's functioning is super degraded or just halts. And, to be honest it sounds like it's not yet affecting your family life either, or you're not aware of it yet. Good place to be. An especially good place to look at prevention too. Recovery from advanced stages of burnout takes years. And if an episode catches you unawares (meaning you don't yet have a habit of recovering while functioning from a severe episode) it can bulldoze you for months. Do you have a financial buffer for that?
It's a Buddhist concept that says that to achieve tranquility (end of suffering) you need to have what you value, what you think and what you are actually doing aligned and going in the same direction.
When you're feeling lost, ask yourself these 3 questions:
Hey, so I've got a few thoughts here that I'll word. I'm sure other people are going to say it better, but here we go:
* Remember that Social Media is the place that everyone shows 'their absolute best' - even a fake version of their best. It doesn't show their times of down, their stress, and so on.
* the social media that you're using may connect thousands or hundreds of thousands of people together. There's only 365 days a year, and even if each person only has one good day a year that they show off, 273 people (out of 100k) would share each individual day. It'd look like you're going slow.
* As other people have said, life is a marathon, not a sprint. You've got a whole lot of years left and you want to be able to function in them, too. Burnout can absolutely ruin developers, and has, many times in the past.
* As other people have said, "work to live", don't "live to work". Now, I get the feeling that this is your personal project or your business you're running at. That's awesome! You still need to give yourself space between a singular project so you can recuperate from it. How often do you look at code you wrote or things you worked on when you were at a fever pace and go "wow, what was I thinking?"; or, when you couldn't solve a problem for days, go to bed and then hey, the solution is right there! Give yourself the space so that those events can happen - and they happen because you're getting away from the work, you're getting rested, you're relaxing.
Your health, your life, the connections you make are of incredible value and as you get older, they get harder to train, recover, grow. Make sure you're tending to yourself like you should in ways that are completely disconnected from your work.
Make sure there's more to your life than only work. Work to live, don't live to work.
I used to think this was bs, but, after scaling back on work hours and filling them up with time for my own hobbies and side projects all not work related, I think I'm even more productive at work than before
I have been unable to make this strategy work. If I lean into hobbies and things outside of work, I completely stop caring about my job, and my performance goes way down.
I did burn out. One day I decided I had enough, I lost my temper at the douchebag CTO, I had a “talk” with the CEO and laid myself off after. Spent six months unemployed, and I don’t give a shit. Honestly quitting was the best decision I ever made. Life is to precious to waste on idiots.
I quit my job due to burnout over a year ago, and now I’m bumbling around Europe, living hand-to-mouth off small bits of freelance work. This life is infinitely better than the one I was wasting behind a desk 8 hours a day.
I don’t see the point making $150k a year if I’m literally exchanging my life for that money.
“Unemployment” is a dirty word, I think by design to keep people producing for the economy. It’s impressive how much of a stronghold this concept holds over people. How many people who already have more than enough, who could live out the rest of their lives literally doing whatever they want, instead continue to remain employed in a job they don’t like due to an irrational fear of unemployment?
There are a lot of people who want to get software built, but have no idea how to go about it.
I’ve been around for a while and I’ve got 10 years of networking under my belt. Someone knows someone who knows someone who needs something built, and my name comes up. When I was working full time, I turned down a lot of projects, but invited people to contact me at a later date. This worked in my favour as many of those people ended up contacting me again years later.
So just put yourself out there. Tell everyone you’re taking on random projects. Anything goes. It may lead somewhere.
For me it’s various things these days - static sites, small apps, ecommerce builds etc. Solo work, and perhaps not the most sexy or exciting. However, the flexibility is unparalleled. I pick my hours, location, and timezone. Most “remote-first” companies aren’t this flexible.
I constantly feel like nothing I do is ever going to work out. Even if I built something in the best way possible, the best that exists, it's not going to be enough to succeed. But even though I know 100% deep in my soul that everything I do is going to fail, I can't stop myself from trying. It does take a toll though. What helps me is to let off steam by complaining non-stop. I complain to my family members and strangers online. Unfortunately, my condition means that I can't see friends regularly because it's difficult for me to NOT complain for even 1 hour straight and most fellow westerners just can't handle that. Every deep conversation I have devolves into some horror story about the ills of society and how everything is rigged.
I believe that you are indeed in not only burnout but also in severe stress and in situation where your hands are too tied and hence feel both immensely helpless and deceived. This is the vicious cycle which will cause not only mental health issues but also feed constant burnout.
I was also in similar situation and I indeed complained a lot, like everyone called me the most pessimist person in existence and some of my friends intentionally avoided me.
While I got some therapy which immensely helped, it is also important to find out about why you feel helpless and if something bad or regretful happened to you that left you scarred(took the therapy to realise and distance myself from that abyss…).
Rather than complaining, I eventually came to accept that the world is not just(read about just world fallacy) and everything is the way it is and will continue to devolve into more degrades state due to constant chaos nature of everything. All that is left to do in power is to enjoy myself with my family and friends and not try to save the world to enlighten others about obvious issues of the society and everything(believe me most everyone also sees and knows this but tends to be busy with their own life and tomorrow instead of getting down about the sinister nature of the world).
I recently learned a cognitive behavior technique where when you notice that you're demonizing something, you make an effort to find something good about it. As in, "I dislike this situation very much, but it's a nice learning opportunity", or "I miss a loved one that's died, but I sure have a lot of great memories with them". It can feel like gymnastics the first time, but then it clicks. The goal is to remember that each entity is multifaceted and complex, without putting on rose-tinted or doom-tinted glasses. Closing yourself off to that complexity that's inherent in everything is not worth it.
I feel the same way. I have managed to cut down on doomerism and actually start cultivating friendships again.
I got a lot better at life when I started studying deep and ancient history in detail and figured out that there's been multiple worlds before this one. Many systems have been exercised and they all have a life cycle and eventually collapse.
Much like living beings, societies are born, mature and wither. It is inevitable that ours will collapse eventually. It isn't good or bad. It just is.
I've since embraced the roll of researching these life cycles.
The metaphor I use to think about burnout is imagining your energy as a lithium ion battery. You can occasionally charge it to 100% and run it down to 0% without any real degradation, but if you start doing that every day it won't hold a useful charge after a while. Keep your charge between 20% and 80% if you can.
Also helps to maintain pretty firm limits on work time and not-work time, or even just having a small window of your waking day where you're on Do Not Disturb.
If possible, I would highly recommend going part-time. I wasn't close to burn-out, but my mental health and stress levels are much better since I made the switch. Worth it for that alone, even if it wasn't the best move for my career. In any case, I'd also recommend cutting down on unnecessary screentime and spending more time in real life - walking outside, talking to people, doing hobbies, and so on!
I don't have an answer for you, because I haven't found it myself.
I have been struggling with burnout for a while now, but I was unable to really put my finger on what was wrong. Maybe it was the job, maybe it was the management, the colleagues, maybe it was the lack of autonomy, maybe it was /me/, etc. I changed jobs a few times, tried my hand at another function in my line of business, became an independent contractor, etc.
Not any of it did anything to relieve the nagging feeling. The mortgage, the family, my progressing age had locked my mind in thinking that the only way out was incremental change, tweaking my career here and there.
But that line of thinking was perhaps too small, and I now believe that this business is just not for me. It has been quite cathartic to at least imagine myself going into another profession entirely, even though carrying out such a transition is anything but straightforward.
To me by far the best thing is to have an enduring, joyful, worthwhile, good purpose in life, that drives everything else (including maintaining one's health, proper balance etc), about which I have written a lot at my simple site (no JS etc; in profile; for example one can click on "Things I want to say", then "Life Lessons", then "Everyone needs a direction in life. Centering on pleasure, possessions, power, or attention, harms us, others & the earth, & cannot bring lasting happiness."
Also, some related prior discussions. Note that this is an attempt at collecting useful comments that could relate, NOT at an insinuation that the OP is lazy, a procrastinator, or other. But some comments were good, like finding balance, direction, etc.
Don’t tie your success to social media, SEO etc is another avenue
I only work on my side project on rainy days, never when the suns out
Are you actually money driven? I’m not, I’m passion driven, so I work on passion projects. Money is just a part of the picture, it’s not the main driver.
Work less hours if you can too, if your finances allow it
Yes. I know. This is controversial for a lot of people, but I know it is true for me: working 40h on a computer with mentally-draining tasks is not, and never will be, sustainable.
I worked very hard on many jobs, I always get praise, until I get tired and suddenly it doesn't matter how good I did in the past: I am shown the door or get mistreated so bad that I find the door myself.
So my best solution so far has been to move into freelance/part-time. It is a different world, with different challenges, but nothing beats being able to keep a sane mind.
This might be a hard pill to swallow, but no amount of “life hacks” will fix an issue with the ownership of your time.
If you're doing that for marketing purposes, try automating it or hiring someone. If you're doing that because that's the content you keep consuming, you're addicted to productivity porn and need to revisit how you think about that kind of content: https://calebschoepp.com/blog/2022/productivity-porn/
This. Hiring someone for $3000 to manage my brand, has been the BEST ever choice. I should have asked someone to manage my personal brand earlier; but for my small company, she does the support and marketing, and since she posts on LinkedIn, I receive regular compliments from long-forgotten people saying:
“So, I seems to kick ass at work, doesn’t it?”
Best. Investment. Ever. At least people have news from me, I used to work in the dark, now people know what I’m doing.
There's ways to manage it in the short run (increasing caffeine intake for me) but it's not a good idea to ignore the signs too often. If you need to take a rest, take it. No matter what others say, you know your mind/body best. You'll be surprised how little people around you care that you're not releasing features as fast.
For me, social media platforms are on a scale that goes from negative to positive values. The negative side is energy-burning, the positive is energy-adding. One side inspires me. The other makes me feel drained.
I have to keep on the positive side of the scale - Hacker News, some great YouTube channels about things that really interest me. Sometimes, I can venture to the slightly negative side, like "funny" videos about people farting in public and cute dogs... but this is like diving - it is fun for a short while, but if you stay too long, you run out of air and die. And I know from experience there are depths of the negative side where I cannot go - TikTok, Twitter, those crush my soul (subjective thing, I'm sure some find those inspiring).
Also, like with everything else, moderation is key. Even with things on the positive side.
I do my best to avoid going into something too much.
The main things I've found that burn me out is boring work, working too long and no end to the work. Usually it's enough to just leave or stop after my normal hours and do something else.
Being able to choose to do other things (even if it's stare at a wall) helped me a lot
Sometimes you can go a long way by addressing external factors like matching control over outcomes with responsibility (high responsibility paired with low control is bad).
But, my two cents is look at cognitive behavior therapy with a specialist. Especially, if you've been experiencing some degree of burnout for years.
How it might go: you learn to observe your thoughts when you're in burnout; you notice that they're unhealthy; you learn to notice them earlier and earlier; you start to detect increasingly more fundamental behaviors and thoughts that lead to burnout; then you start implementing various strategies to change those behaviors/thoughts/habits.
That said, I still struggle with burnout, so do weigh what I say accordingly.
I have many other interests/hobbies that are unrelated to work. I do my 8 to 5 and almost never think about work outside of it. Having a healthy workplace that encourages this helps a lot, I realize it might not be possible for everyone.
Every individual is different. I recently learned about the DISC personality model. It basically says that there are four basic personality traits. Your personality is dominated by one of the four types or a mixture of them.
Each personality type thrives with different working styles and working conditions.
It helped me a lot to know what type I am. Now I know what my strength and weaknesses are. It's surprising how accurate this simple theory seems to be in my case.
Apart from that
- I have clear priorities (family first, health second, work third)
- I always have something that I look forward to. If nothing is on my schedule, I schedule an activity that I can look forward to.
Could you elaborate? Did the training help you in any way to prevent burnout? Do you have sources that show (ex)military have lower incidence rates of burnout or psychological distress?
I also struggle with this. Not social media, per se, but overstimulation which leaved me unable to unwind and prevents me from sleeping well.
This is probably one of those things like weight loss where you know the "simple" answer (burn more calories than you eat, reduce stimulation and practice good sleep hygiene) but the actual problem is lack of will to do these things, which can be reinforced by the apparent problem itself, leading to a spiral.
The trick, I assume, is to put what energy you have into setting up structures (ideally involving other people) that make it easier to do the things you know you need to do.
For me, 3x 20 minutes meditation helps a lot. In the morning, around mid day, and in the evening. Why? It gives me the chance to go from active thinking mode, to passive “observer” mode - and only in that state, I can process all the emotions and stress that pile up during the day.
Then there are much bigger benefits of meditation (depending on which type one practices). But the stress processing benefit alone is already fantastic.
The times I’ve burned myself out, it usually happened after I started to compromise on my daily meditation minutes.
Just listen to the voice in your head that you’ve been ignoring. You already have an intuition about your limits, but you probably dismiss it because that doesn’t fit the outcome you want.
I don't keep going. I stop. Recovering from burnout is riskier and a lot more expensive than enforcing a reasonable work schedule.
If social media is pressuring you, unfollow people or quit it altogether. You don't need that in your life. You just need to keep your job and cover your bills. Everything else is extra.
Pay attention to the work culture around you. Heroics are not rewarded where I live, and neither is being married to your job. There's a lot less pressure to reach burnout conditions. That's how it ought to be.
In my experience, it's best to accept these things come in waves.
For most of us, it's not realistic to maintain maximum creative energy for an extended period of time, just as it's not realistic to maintain maximum happiness for an extended period of time. Sometimes you'll feel sad, sometimes you'll feel tired, and, every now and then, you'll feel like you can take on the world.
For now, embrace the pain, let it wash over you, and trust that your energy will return again one day soon.
Your time is finite on Earth so you need to make decisions about how you allocate that time. As you get older you'll probably live to regret decisions made on things like social media. It is a time suck that doesn't provide happy outcome for most. Also, don't work more than 40 hours a week.
At the moment I'm trying to remove any source of "artifical" dopamine: no tv, no youtube, no music, no news, no podcasts, no reddit, no social media during the week and minimal over the weekend. I've just started a week ago and it works pretty well, my mind is a lot calmer. Silence is gold.
Do you have an outlet for your expectations? Is that outlet also the people who are adjacent to your burnout? Are you sure your model of what is asked of you is not excessive compared to what they were asking? Is there a way you can negotiate a better prioritization of efforts?
Time management - I allocate some time to work, some time to research, and the remainder to my hobbies and pleasures i.e working on my Rust side project or going out for biking. You need "fun times" to recharge from the "boring" times.
What does “burn out” mean to you? Everybody has their own made up definition for this and for some people it means, “tired this week” and for some it’s “couldn’t work for 2 years.”
I've had to slow down. This means reducing all the things that distract me. It means coming to grips with "missing out".
I've leaned into some life hacks like:
- Designating social media time to just after work but not after dinner (includes HN).
- Leaning into meditation. Not just 10min via an app but a walk to and back from my favorite cafe every morning without my phone or any headphones.
- Going to bed early and waking up early. The quietest, non-distracting moments are in the early morning.
- Using a pomodoro timer. For both work projects and personal projects.
- I try to spend some time focusing on activities that are intentionally slow like writing poetry and personal essays.