Ask HN: What's your spectacular burnout story?

Looking at the answers here the common point is, expectedly, overwork. It is obvious why this causes burn out but there are a couple of reasons why you should not overwork that are not so obvious.

To handle stress and not burn out, you need:

1) A sense of self. You need to not just understand but to feel that no matter what happens at the office, and even if things go wrong, you'll be OK. You do this by having a life outside of work - friends and a social life not connected to your workplace or even industry, hobbies or side projects that give you confidence outside of your professional life, and people who care about you for non-professional reasons.

2) To compartmentalize. Work is work, and just part of your life. While it cannot be completely so, what happens at work shouldn't affect your outside life in too large a degree. Success at work should bring you some kind of satisfaction, and failure should make you reconsider your choices, but not to a too large extent. You can only compartmentalize if you have the things in 1); you need more than 1 thing that is important to you in your life.

If you overwork, you can't have 1) because you simple don't have the time or energy to cultivate it; you can't compartmentalize and leave work at the office, and work pressure will cause negative stress in all aspects of your life, resulting in burn out.

Even in high-level positions you should aim to stick to a 9-5 schedule as much as possible because otherwise you won't have the mental energy to be effective.

Social isolation could be the cause of your addiction.

I’d recommend going to a meditation retreat.

What's the longest amount of time you went abstinent -- from regular masturbation, that is? If you can't remember the last time that you, either willingly or by accident (without sustained, concerted effort), then you might benefit from treating your condition as you would treat the, let's call it "condition", of exploring an unfamiliar, new language like Rust, Julia or maybe SQL. That is, maybe you can treat it like something that can be conquered with concerted effort, and with a kind of topical "syllabus" or roadmap for expanding your familiarity with the "subject" and "practice" of being abstinent from auto-stimulation or masturbation.

Maybe you will begin to see this problem which has plagued you and many other alike since youth as what is really is: Many different problem-types, with which you can familiarize yourself through structured exercise, just as you would exercise familiarity with written composition, software design or design OSS or pet software products. That is, maybe you can steer into what you've been evading your whole life (or your adult life), and treat with more of a nonchalant, indifferent, bordering on optimistic temperament; give it a goddamned name, examine get to know explicitly what it's into, when and where it's available, and what's been motivating you to conquer it like you conquered that last big thing you can think of.... (But writing this out kinda feels like an armchair prescription for another visit.)

"This is Water" is a David Foster Wallace speech that isn't necessarily appropriate for this subject, but I suppose it is since, somewhere in it he says,

"How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out", then, "A slave to your 'Default Setting'", and ultimately onto, "[the] 'Truth' is about life Before death."

In it, he eventually lands on his theme, which is that we're not alone in regularly betraying our aspirations to each of our own "examined lives", and that there's something that's inherently insidious and subversive in our unexamined, reflexive thoughts, assumptions and beliefs. He likens this tendency of ours, this "Default Setting", to an ocean's Water, of which we should remain critical, and vigilant as we navigate and observe our reflexive thoughts and reactions. He suggests that we can avoid a kind of "Waking Death" through the resilient and continued practice of modest, critical awareness and acknowledgement of our subversive tendencies.

That's it. Talk of what happens to you wherever you can. You might be lucky to have someone heard about something similar.

Of course it's the Internet and every advice must be taken with a grain of salt. But you never know.

A close friend to my sister was getting more and more tired. She had multiples examination but her doctor could not find what she had.

First luck she had, her father is a doctor, so she could talk to hers more easily that you or I could.

Second luck she had, while one of those talks, another doctor passed by and heard them talking. It appears that she knew the symptoms from another patient she had in her own country and they finally could put a name on her illness (I can't recall what it was, and it's a very rare disease that explained no one knew about it)

Third luck she had is that it was about time. 2 weeks later she would have die.

So my point is, doctors are not as smart as they believe they are. And telling your story every time it's related to the conversation might result in a discovery like that.

Hope your health stays ok !