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

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

#61
I went through a really bad burn out and depression a year and a half ago. I was dealing with layoffs at work, a failing relationship with my wife, death in the family and having to support two people financially when their health was failing.

At the darkest moment I was incapable of sleeping and eating. I lost 17 pounds in about 2 months. I stopped work for a month and a half and worked 2 days a week when I came back, slowly raising that to 4 days over a period of 5 months.

I broke down my problems thusly:

1) Professionally I wanted to either accept my situation with the layoffs or find a new job. Things changed at work and I decided to stick around. I offload a lot more work to my team and delegate way more than before. My team accepts their new responsibilities because it allows them to prove themselves and I get to manage my energy levels.

2) Socially I needed to accept that I had little control over outcomes even if my decision process was the right one. I read Marcus Aurelius as well as books to deal with divorce and separation.

3) Physiologically I went to cuddling events and connected on deep levels with people. Took up meditation (even got a Muse Headband which I recommend) and do sunbathing once or twice a week to keep energy levels up. I also have co-workers pair with me on brutal intensive workouts once a week.

4) Mentally: Therapy helped me deal with death and other aspects of my life I was unhappy about and it's continuing today.

If I were to be totally frank... I'm still not 100% and I'm still considering reducing my work hours some more so I can spend more time fixing my new house up and doing projects that bring me joy. /edit formatting

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

#62
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I exercise shortly after getting up 5 days a week. I don't eat food until hours later. Depending on your exercise goals, you may want to eat before or after exercise but it certainly isn't essential. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/eating-before-or-after-...

Eh, for retaining muscle density & mass I'll defer to sports medicine tradition and what I learned from trained coaches there— Healthline also posts articles saying it's important to eat right after exercise, so I gather they aren't speaking unilaterally in either case: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/eat-after-workout

Yea, I'm not trying to argue that eating right after exercise is not important. I just don't believe it's essential. Your body will use nutrients from the post-workout meal to help rebuild muscle and help your body recover so it's highly recommended. If muscle mass and density is a top priority than you may consider it essential for sure.

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

#64
The short answer is: It's complicated, but doable.

There is a lot of good advice here in this thread.

I would begin by forgiving yourself, and by being kind to yourself.

I burned out almost two and a half years ago for the same reason.

My ambition didn't match my ability and I was beating myself up for it. It was an identity crisis for me. I wasn't able to perform as well as I previously had.

I spent the past few years observing my thoughts, and asking myself questions on why I was having those thoughts, and it helped me.

I funneled the energy into https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/

I think there are many areas to start, and even writing this list, can seem overwhelming.

- Be kind to yourself

- Forgive yourself

- Be grateful for where you are now

- Have realistic expectations

- Exercise

- Find/create other sources of fulfillment

- Practice mastery of your craft with a smaller project

- Learn how to empower yourself

- Find other activities where you can feel empowered

- Surround yourself with healthy friends

- Understand why you think what you think

- Understand what maintenance is needed to keep your engine going

- Have other activities where you can see progress in

- Define healthy boundaries

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

#65
post #47

What I see a lot around me: Kids work really hard to get into a good high school High School kids work really hard to get into a good college College kids work really hard to get into a great first job Young Adults working really hard to progress their career Adults working hard and burning out because that is all they really know. If you've always been an A student, and had a good career, its hard to change mentalit…

This was my exact path. For the longest time, the goal was to become gainfully employed as an engineer. Achieving your primary goals seems to be a lot like meeting your heros - you'll always be disappointed. Once I had the job, then I had to figure out how to keep it from completely absorbing me.

Most of the stages you mentioned above use an external criteria for success and for motivation. If that's the only kind of system you're familiar with, then you probably hadn't had the chance to stop and think "Does doing this make me happy?" because in those systems that question is irrelevant. You do what needs to be done to achieve the grade/rating/performance review and then ask what hoop you need to jump through next.

It seems the people that build truly rewarding careers are generally more internally motivated and because they have a better idea of who they are and what drives and motivates them are in a better position to to say "no" to things.

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

#66
I took a 2 year break, and moved in to a tangentially related job. It helped a lot, but I still don't have the drive I did at one point to work 8 hours and then come home and work on person projects all night.

I was a full stack and then primarily backend developer for ~7 years. The burn-out hit hard in the last year or so. A lot of it was burn out specifically due to working on primarily B2B stuff, but it affected everything.

I went to a new company that let me move around job wise. I did special projects for a few months that were heavy on the programming side, I bootstrapped a small security team for about a year, and then I bootstrapped a small platform/devops team for about a year.

Then I got bored and went back to being a full time backend engineer at my current company.

It was a great experience, I'm really glad I did it. I learned a ton about stuff I knew existed but didn't know well enough to speak intelligently about. I'm glad im not doing it anymore, and the company I was with during my 2 year break wasn't great, but I wouldnt trade it for anything else.

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

#67
Here is what worked for me:

1) Stop working after work hours. Read a book, meditate and hang out with friends or family instead. Passive consumption doesn’t help.

2) Get on a bike and ride ( hiking or other outdoor exercise worked as well)

3) Quit my job and started doing something I enjoy more (for me it was audio).

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

#69

I take a LOT of supplements. There are deficiencies in the nutritional benefits of food due to overfarming and other environmental factors. Burning out is NOT a normal state of being - in the past humans did not have the luxury of resting. So why do we feel this now? Lack of nutrition. Try taking supplements and see how it changes things. YMMV and please check with your physician before changing your diet or taking a…

Please do

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

#70
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, you're not alone. I'm not sure if my story will be helpful, but perhaps you can draw something from it.

It's been about 4 years since the start of my decline that included me terminating a marriage which wasn't even the bottom of the hole, that was about half way down the descent. Up until that point everyone around me looked at me as successful. Some days they look at me still and classify me as successful, and to some extent I guess they're right. I have what most would deem an impressive job, good income, two amazing kids. But what people see isn't the reality in my head. Of course, I know the reality in my head is just the depression talking, it's not real, but it feels real and that makes it real, to me.

For me, I found Quora a huge help. Answering questions - specifically those that made me really deeply analyze my own mental state, my relationships, what I really value in the world, who I am, how I got here, what I'm thinking, why I think what I do. The act of self analysis and writing about it in a manner that I thought would be helpful to other people was probably the best therapist I could have asked for. Just talking about it is huge! I started off with the questions I felt were easy to answer, sort of an ice breaker and gradually worked up to the hard "face your own existence" type questions.

This process may be helpful for you, it may not. Perhaps a real skin and bones therapist would help. The apathy and lethargy of burnout aren't just a figment of your own imagination, they're your brain's subconscious way of telling you that you need to stop. It's telling you it needs to rest. It's telling me to stop taking care of everyone else's shit and take care of me for once.

As for "getting back," I don't think that's ever going to happen for me. I'm not the same person I was when I started this journey. There is no getting back, nor do I want to. I've realized and remembered a lot of things about myself and my core values that I had let get bulldozed aside by things that don't really matter to me.

On Sunday everything I spent the last 4 years learning about myself was solidified in an instant when at 6:15am I was awoken by a massive explosion across the field from my bedroom window that wiped a house completely off the map, evacuated 35 people from their homes, including someone I care very deeply about who lives 2 doors from the explosion, and left a man dead.

I will never be going back to letting other people's needs and priorities usurp my own. The fact is, work doesn't make me happy, money doesn't make me happy. It's a means to an end. At some point, I'd made work my priority and let myself believe it was more important than me. I'd let myself believe it made me happy. It doesn't. Problem solving is my compulsion and something I'm really good at. Work enables and feeds that compulsion. That compulsion feeds my family and puts a roof over their heads, but that compulsion doesn't make me happy, it's just a habit like biting my nails.

I want to do something that matters, to me. I'm inspired to do things, I'm full of excitement and wonder again like I was before, I feel joy. But I'm not inspired by stuff that doesn't mean anything.

It may be a while before you figure out what it is that matters to you. You're grieving. Well not really grieving, but the process is similar and can't be rushed. You can't reason with emotion, you can't feel good just because you tell your brain to feel good. You can't rationalize your way out of it. It's a process that you kind of have to go through.

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