Are you suffering from burn-out?

I wrote about my experience with burnout on a HN comment earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1508844

I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of burnout jacquesm mentions.

A compulsion to prove oneself:

This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.

Working harder:

My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.

Neglecting one's own needs:

At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.

Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress):

Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost entirely my own fault.

Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed):

It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life and I killed all hobbies.

Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent):

-- See displacement of conflicts

Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression:

I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but during this period of my life, I did.

Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very productive.

I'm still trying to figure out if the 'fast foot' restaurant was a mistake or a pun in relation to life being a marathon ;)

That's an excellent point though, and if life is a marathon then being burnt out is probably best compared to having to sit out a part of the race because you can't run any more.

I'm all for tackling all kinds of stuff, sometimes more than what you can naturally expect a person to do, as long as it doesn't leave any lasting marks (or at least none that are disfiguring) I say go for it. But keep an eye on the limits. When I was 23 the wife of a friend told me I'd be dead by 30 if I didn't slow down. So far so good. But I do understand now that there are limits to how much you can do without paying the price for it, and in some ways (in terms of missed opportunities and lost friends) the price was pretty high indeed. If I had slowed down just a bit somewhere in the early 2000's I'm fairly sure my life would have been quite different compared to what it is today.

You are spot on that it is all about learning yourself, your rhythms and values, that's exactly what it is. The machine called your body does not come with a list of 'do not exceed' parameters, and they're different for everybody, so only experience will tell you what you can and what you can't do.

I tend to live like a cat nowadays, either extremely lazy or hyper focussed on some project for a while, and then I take a break again. It's worked well in that I can still push myself to achieve something when I have to (and those lists really help), but at the same time I've learned that there are limits and that there is more in life than a keyboard and a screen.

I fully agree with this one. By simply switching my blackberry to not buzz me when emails came in felt like a vacation. I realized at that point that I was close to burn-out.

Did working manual labor help you figure things out? I am seriously considering working a job such as the one you described part time to pay the bills after school while I try to build a freelancing business.

Absolutely, I think it kept - and keeps - me sane. Physical stuff is great in that it keeps your body in shape and at the end of a day you can literally touch the result, you can see it, it is solid. Virtual work is much less satisfying in that sense, you could be programming the stars from heaven but if it is business logic internal to some application you'll be happy if some maintenance programmer sees it 10 years down the line.

I think that's a big part of what drives the open source movement, programmers getting appreciation from other programmers about their work in a way that 'closed source' will never give and money can't provide.

The last couple of weeks I spent on two tracks, the one is building a small RV (just drove it to the other side of Europe, so I guess that worked out well :)), and a web project that I hope to launch sometime later this year.

When I'm tired of the one kind of work, I switch to the other, it seems to work better that way.