Ask HN: Burned Out. What Now?

Consider any of the following they all count:

* Hiking in the woods or parks

* Dancing lessons

* Running, Walking, inline skating, long boarding, bicycling, and really anything remotely similar

* martial arts in a dojo / club

* Strength training doing calisthenics at one of those outdoor gym things.

Keep in mind traditional strength training is great[1] for a number of reasons, but it's not the only way to get exercise.

[1]: dare i say superior due to it's muscle preserving and bone density effects? but getting overly picky about optimality can be a source of burnout in of itself.

Not every business is a startup fighting to survive or grow like hell within a year. Some businesses have been around for decades and are in a comfortable place, they can very easily ramp up or down the amount of work they have to accomplish to keep talent happy.

And how can you manage hundreds of engineer?

I've personally found Rock Climbing to be extremely rewarding in highly varied ways - it is a very mental activity, problem solving, but in a physical and personal way that is not in conflict with relief from a cognitive job. It's physically one of the most balanced activities for the body. It can take you to truly awesome places and make you appreciate nature more. It has many sub styles, some with their own interesting mental challenges and techniques. You get a sense of adventure like no other... it's also just inherently damn fun to do, it's not unreasonable to say we have somewhat evolved for climbing - so it makes sense that we find it fun.

It's also a lot more accessible than it used to be. The easiest way to start would be indoor bouldering gyms (these have a fantastic social element too), and then indoor sports climbing gyms... just remember there is much more to be had from it than plastic, the outdoors awaits.

I have a contrarian opinion (that I have also posted here several times) that burnout is not merely a symptom of overwork but actually a symptom of missed behavioural prediction error: Your brain has taught itself that effort => failure, and so the motivation to put more effort into things is decreased.

The first step to understanding and overcoming it is a root cause analysis -- identify when you started putting in extra effort, what you thought you'd get out of it, and what you thought you'd get out of it that you didn't get. It might have been a promotion, a pay raise, a bonus, or social validation. Or, if there was a negative reinforcement that succeeded your valiant efforts (e.g. people shitting on your open-source project).

If you believe my thesis, then possibly the absolute worst thing you can do is to go on vacation right now (this is rewarding the cycle of not putting in effort). Rather, plan a vacation for yourself, say 3 months from now, (and if you want to be brutally effective, plan to cancel or bump the time of your vacation if you don't recover from burnout by then).

What you want to do from now till then is to build back up your work motivation. Work on a ton of tiny tasks that are almost certainly going to succeed, like that refactoring that you've put off, or writing tests. These are really good because they will give you primary stimulus (making those red dots go green) that provide you a pop of dopamine, rewarding you for the small amounts of work that you've done. Also, do small things, like "cook a meal" which take effort, and celebrate yourself for putting the effort into things, and meals are great because they are their own reward (unless you horribly mess it up).

I haven't generally burnt out (I have burnt out on individual projects) for more than about 2 weeks in a decade or so since I adopted this strategy.