Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

uni-mainz.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 216 posts

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#171

Post by ehnto »

DangitBobby wrote: post #134
echelon wrote: post #25

I just want a no-pay sabbatical. Three months, total reset of energy levels. We should all have that option. I would take a lot less money (-$50k or more) if I got to take a quarter off every year. Four day work weeks would be another compelling alternative. Two days a week are not enough time to get chores done. There's no time for relaxing. If I ever create a company, I'd love to offer these options.

I would love to work for a company where I can take a significant pay cut to work 30 or even 35 hours in a typical work week.

38 hours is the standard work week in many countries, which I only mention to let you know that you are asking for a very normal thing. Totally reasonable.

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#172

Post by ehnto »

titanomachy wrote: post #137
DangitBobby wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to work for a company where I can take a significant pay cut to work 30 or even 35 hours in a typical work week.

I've heard (from reliable sources) that Google has the option to work 60% or 80% time (with a corresponding cut to pay). Presumably you need a record of solid performance and your manager needs to be on board.

What is 100% time out of curiosity?

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#173

Post by ehnto »

rabidrat wrote: post #142
titanomachy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard (from reliable sources) that Google has the option to work 60% or 80% time (with a corresponding cut to pay). Presumably you need a record of solid performance and your manager needs to be on board.

It's very hard to get, even for solid performers. Possible but not available to most employees.

That's crazy, you guys need a union or something. It should be easy to negotiate that kind of thing even for people just starting. Everyone's life is different, everyone has different monetary goals and work availability/tolerances.

I'm sure this is obvious but that would exclude a huge group of people from the outset.

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#174

Post by jointpdf »

Ok, so you burned out (maybe not for the first time) and you took an unpaid leave from work. As more time goes on, you convince yourself that your brain is atrophying as you fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.

The time comes where you have to go back. How do you do it? How do you shed this feeling of being broken goods in the eyes of yourself and (most likely) others? How do you heal the infected wounds of burnout? I can’t figure it out.

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#175

Post by waihtis »

jointpdf wrote: post #174

Ok, so you burned out (maybe not for the first time) and you took an unpaid leave from work. As more time goes on, you convince yourself that your brain is atrophying as you fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way . The time comes where you have to go back. How do you do it? How do you shed this feeling of being broken goods in the eyes of yourself and (most likely) others? How do you heal the infected wounds o…

What line of work are you in?

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#176

Post by rubicon33 »

I wonder if one cause of burnout is the slot machine nature of the internet these days.

What do I mean?

YouTube, HackerNews, GoogleNews, Facebook, TikTok, etc...

Every time you hit one of these websites, it's like rolling the dice at a casino. Sometimes, you roll the dice and you win. So you want to roll more. Similarly, sometimes you load up YouTube, and it recommends you a good video. So you come back, looking for more.

The same hook applies to nearly all websites these days, it's not just "social media".

So how does this mess with your motivation? Well, it's seriously messing with your reward system. Instead of seeking long poll rewards, like one gets from reading, and investing in themselves... things necessary for growth in ones career...

We're becoming more and more attuned to seeking short term pulls of the dopamine lever. And it's all over the internet. Even your E-Mail to some extent!

My suggestion to anyone suffering burnout is to try something dramatic, which I am about to try myself:

Cut out all internet except what is required for your job or essential life services (like banking). Everything else, certainly all forms of recreation on the internet, you cut out of your life right NOW.

Try it for a week. I'm going to.

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#177

Post by taneq »

agumonkey wrote: post #129
fakedang wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody ever looks at a person driving a ferrari and thinks, "wow, they must have washed a lot of dishes to afford that car," and yet we still think "if I just wash these dishes hard enough I'll drive a ferrari one day." I'm saving this quote to tell people this later on.

the twist is to make others wash dishes obviously

Ideally build a machine to wash the dishes, then build a company to build and sell the machines.

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#178

Post by taneq »

robotresearcher wrote: post #148
rabidrat wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dish-washing is a cost-center, not a profit-center, so really the solution is to cut costs by washing dishes as little as possible :)

Sodexo washes your dishes (etc) and has a $10.6B market cap.

Sodexo sources dish-washing people. They're recruitment / labour hire / logistics. Dish washing (or whatever other actual physical outputs) are just a side effect of their actual business.

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#179

Post by taneq »

bacon_waffle wrote: post #125
motohagiography wrote: post #5

Clicked for me recently that working hard is like driving in first gear. Necessary initially, but if you don't shift up into higher gears, you're probably not doing it right, and not getting as far as fast as you probably should. If I'm tired, it's necessarily because I'm mismanaging my work and time, and that's a signal it's time to step back and figure out what's wrong. Some people are really good at that initial t…

One of my first jobs was in retail, a backpacking outfitter located at the top of a scenic and winding road that's very popular among fast car folks. Summer weekends when the weather was good, we'd sell huge amounts of soda and trinkets from a gift shop in the front of the store. One day, a guy come in and ask for a jug of water for his car, which had overheated. It turned out to be a yellow Ferrari, I got him some w…

Having driven a sports car (nothing like a Ferrari, sadly) for many years, I can attest to the fact that being sporty makes cars less robust, not more so. Partly because they're designed with tighter tolerances and run closer to their limits, but more largely because they're lower volume and so tend to have less spent on their engineering, ironically, than cheap ultra-mass-produced vehicles.

Re: Burnout can exacerbate work stress, further promoting a vicious circle

#180

Post by mkl95 »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #158
mkl95 wrote: post #38

Every time I approach burnout my body reacts with some funny symptom I had never suffered before. The human brain can be really imaginative at asking you to stop.

Can you elaborate?

It's often some kind of skin itch, weird spot, etc. It quickly goes away when my stress levels stay low for a few days.
Post reply on HN