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

Doing the easy thing and goofing off or taking a break can be exactly the worst thing to do, since you're creating a reward for not-laboring.

My remedy for burnout is to power through it by doing small workful things which are intrinsically their own reward (and not in the pithy sense, there needs to be a primary rewarding stimulus associated with success). When I was a biologist, this was often doing routine molecular biology for a week, seeing those colonies was gratifying (if slow). As a programmer, those green dots carry their own gratification and reward cycle; when I feel burnout coming along it's a great time to work on those refactors or unit tests you've been putting off.

I don't have major burnout episodes anymore, and haven't for the last six years or so (disclaimer: it could also be just maturity)

It took about 1.5 years to get through the work, and another year or so for the last traces of burnout to go away. In retrospect, I think letting go of the fear of failure was what helped me the most.

I was influenced by the passage on burnout from Feynman's memoirs, for what it's worth (excerpted here: https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html).

Read Autobiography of a Yogi first.

Contemplate on "who are you?"

You are just a tiny fraction of the whole consciousness.

So when you do any kind of work, realize you are not the Doer. You're just an instrument serving the moment unfolding in front of you.

This is the teaching Lord Krishna gave to Arjuna when he felt can't fight in the war against his family in the allegorical story in the Bhagavad Gita.

Lens your perspective a bit...

1. Establish healthy habits: eat well, exercise regularly, sleep well, feel gratitude, focus on the people in my life.

2. Derive my sense of self-worth from anything and everything not related to work.

Philosophy(stoicism) has helped me free myself from stress and helped me focus on the task at hand.

Mindset is huge.