Burnout caused by chronic stress is widespread

- 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).

You have control over your reaction to things. And I think this is a key component of Stoicism, especially in the modern working world.

If you are acting (and reacting) true to yourself, then it is other's reactions to your actions that are failing. This goes a long way to reducing the amount of stress felt.

Thanks for the insights.

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