Ask HN: How are you getting through (and back from) burning out?

They're paid to listen to you and help you figure out your problems.

It turned out it was the hour and a half commuting on ridiculously crowded trains every day, the total lack of privacy I had in my open office, and management which wasn't flexible about my hours.

So I ran away to Europe for three months and when I came back I landed myself a remote job.

I love the product, management is very handsoff, and I'm basically left to myself most days.

I get tons of work done because it's so easy to focus.

I'm never on a super crowded and long commute (or at least not daily).

Everyone in my company is always happy to hear my updates which I post here and there as I work.

And sometimes I take a nap for thirty minutes during lunch.

Life has never been better for me. I've eliminated the bad (commute, bad management, lack of privacy, inability to focus in a crowded office environment) which lets me focus on the parts I love (delving into a problem and solving it, letting myself be tired when I'm tired, not bounded by hours but instead by output).

It's not for everybody, and I love seeing my coworkers in the office, but I have enough of a social life I can make sure I'm not ending up a loner.

So in the end, I recommend identifying exactly what it is that's burning you out. For me it was the aforementioned issues, for others it might be something else. Once you can solve for X, Y can be less burnt out :-).

For me, my image of success was buying an Alienware and playing games all day, so the long hours of a startup took me away from that after a certain level of wealth.

I find the cure for burnout is not doing nothing, but rather expending energy towards something where you have progress. If you like to play games, play competitively for a while. Go for some exercise, learn a new language, pick up martial arts. Something that's quite tiring but gives you rapid progress.

My first major cure was going from tech to a 14-hour shift barista job. Second cure was teaching programming to students, two months on the road. Third cure was picking up a CTO job to rescue a dying startup. Fourth playing and winning a major multiplayer game. Fifth was two back to back weeks of corporate training and startups.

YMMV, but I've had year long rest breaks which didn't help. It was the tiring jobs that cured me.

This is a bit of a plug but checkout Jamis Buck. I interviewed him about burn out and I learned a lot. It can be a slow process to rekindle things after burn out so give yourself time.

https://corecursive.com/025-burn-out-and-recreational-progra...