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Talking about burnout in general, the main factor that appears to cause all types of burnout is negative emotions. From my perspective, the best antidote is to

Talking about burnout in general, the main factor that appears to cause all types of burnout is negative emotions. From my perspective, the best antidote is to always use logical, intellectual responses to problems, rather than an emotional response. This is also generally more useful than an emotional response. You can train yourself to nip negative emotional responses in the bud, and instead convert them into working out a solution to a problem. For whatever reason, the brain appears to have a limit to the amount of built-up negative emotions it can deal with. Beyond a certain point the result is burnout, depression and psychosomatic illnesses. (source: I suffered from severe burnout, recovered, and have been researching and writing about it for the past 16 years).

amelius 11y ago
> the main factor that appears to cause all types of burnout is negative emotions Interesting. Does that mean that from just working extremely hard, you can never (very likely) get a burnout? That would be big news. By the way, I've heard that sleeping a lot (like 10 hours per night minimum) helps with burnout; not sure if it is universally true.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  >Does that mean that from just working extremely hard, you can never (very likely) get a burnout? That would be big news. The research suggests that burnout is a lot less likely if you enjoy your job and have sufficient support (see the Demands-Resources model of burnout). From research into the brain (see Boksem 2008, and Noakes 2012) there appear to be areas in the brain dedicated to calculating the costs vs benefits of performing activities. Some of the inputs to this system are emotion-based, but others are physiological (e.g. sleep, tissue damage, etc). You can override your brain's fatigue/tiredness signals, but if you do that long-term then burnout will still likely occur. An interesting factoid is that fatigue itself is actually an itself (see Noakes' reviews). So what will likely happen if you continue working hard 16 hour days is that your brain will say "enough is enough" at some point, and you will start to feel negative emotions towards your work even though you previously enjoyed it (and even though consciously you still want to do it). >By the way, I've heard that sleeping a lot (like 10 hours per night minimum) helps with burnout; not sure if it is universally true. Well, it will certainly help if you are suffering from short-term burnout, or to avoid burnout in the first place. Sleep is definitely one of the factors that the brain uses in determining fatigue/burnout.
- qb45 11y ago
  > Does that mean that from just working extremely hard, you can never (very likely) get a burnout? Dashrath Manjhi ran away from his home at a young age and worked at Dhanbad's coal mines. He returned to his village and married Phalguni Devi. While crossing Gehlour hills to bring him lunch, she slipped and seriously injured herself, which eventually led to her death. Manjhi was deeply disturbed and that very night decided to carve a path through the Gehlour hills so that his village could have easier access to medical attention. He carved a path 360-feet-long (110 m), 25-feet-deep (7.6 m) in places and 30-feet-wide (9.1 m) to form a road through the rocks in Gehlour hill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi Not a statistical argument (which your words suggest you expected), but I think it agrees with the spirit of the article - you can find motivation for truly crazy stunts if you focus on obtaining future good emotions instead of avoiding present bad emotions. Working to avoid losing the rat race is a burnout-prone kind of motivation, for example.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  Just to add to my previous comment: there seem to be a few people who can achieve continual high levels of work output on about 4 hours of sleep without burning out. I suspect this is a combination of genetics and being highly in control of -- and motivated by -- the work (e.g. owning the company). Perhaps it is a kind of long-term mild hypomania. The problem is when these people sometimes think that their employees should be able to handle the same workload, which then inevitably leads to burnout.
zzalpha 11y ago
From my perspective, the best antidote is to always use logical, intellectual responses to problems, rather than an emotional response. Let me guess: engineer? There's absolutely a personality type that prefers to solve all problems with logic and clear thinking, which is a very good thing when you're dealing with engineering problems. When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic. Not all people and all problems are amenable to "logical" solutions. Controlling negative emotions is a very good thing. But there are many ways to achieve that. Turning to rational problem solving is just one mental tool, but it's not fit for all occasions.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  Yes, I was mostly talking about problems where a logical solution makes sense. For dealing with people, you're right, an intellectual response alone is not the solution. I was more just pointing out that it is the negative emotions that appear be the cause of the burnout.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  It depends on how far your logic goes. If you have sufficient experience with people, you could see the logic solution to your example as avoiding direct problem solving proposals, as you might expect the person to react negatively. Of course, the natural way of achieving the correct response is by "simulating" the other person's emotional state to try to predict the best outcome (which includes their future emotional state) -- this is what I understand people generally mean when talking about empathy, and this is what the article refers as 'Emotional contagion'. However, as the article argues, it shouldn't be the only way. You should in principle be able to build a sufficient model of people's emotions and reactions without having to use your own "emotional engine" and being impacted yourself (which may in turn affect your own capability to make good decisions).
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic. The rational reaction to such situations would be to recognize that this approach yields bad results and to try something different instead, e.g. the emotional manipulation you seem to be implicitly recommending. One important bit of learning for engineer-types to do is to recognize that most people aren't like them. The more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my life outcomes are. Unfortunately the desire to empathize and treat others like oneself makes this a difficult lesson to learn.
asimuvPR 11y ago
That's a viewpoint I haven't encountered before. May you share more about it? From my POV, it would seem that emotions are logical, or the thought of us being logical itself soothes some emotions and validates others. What would you say makes feeling logical a more rounded approach to certain types of people?
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  Here is an example: someone submits an email to your customer support. The email starts with "your software is full of bugs". They go on to list all the problems they've had. The natural response of the human brain is to get angry at the person reporting the bug. Obviously this isn't very useful or logical. A better solution is to think about the problems reported, and decide whether it is a valid complaint or not. Many people automatically feel anger in situations like this, but you can train yourself out of it. It's essentially a kind of mindfulness: you just look at the situation intellectually and watch your emotions, rather than letting your emotions take control. I would say the only logical time for feeling anger is when someone does something like raping or murdering a member of your family. Even then, anger is only useful in helping you formulate a plan of retaliation.
  - asimuvPR 11y ago
    Oh yes, I understand. Sort of not being overly sensitive to assholes. Quite useful. I would add being kind and nice as a response to those sort of situations. It helps bring down emotions from the altered party.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I love bug reports. I really hate when I find out months later that one of my customers knew about the bug and never bothered to report it. Every bug reported is one I can fix.
- alsetmusic 11y ago
  Not the person you replied to, but I (anecdotally) have had the same experience. This has ranged from negative working conditions to political atmosphere. When I deliberately alter my response from "this frustrates me" to "how can I improve it," I don't feel helpless about my state of mind. The best method for me was to reduce, as much as possible, my use of the words, "I hate XYZ."
p4wnc6 11y ago
Sometimes negative emotional responses are appropriate and even though they cause bad short-term side effects, those side-effects are worthwhile because the negative emotion is a physiological response to an intolerable situation or circumstance, exogenous to your self or attitude, that must be avoided or changed. The trouble comes when a person gets embedded into a circumstance that truly, legitimately warrants the negative emotion, but which is not (or cannot be) removed or changed. Crucially, it is a situation for which it is unequivocally correct to bear the costs of negative short-term emotions to create a noticeable signal that something's just not right and something needs to be fixed. But where those negative emotions would normally serve their purpose and direct you to make a change or direct someone else to make a change in response to you, instead no change occurs. Now the supposedly short-term effects of the negative emotions become long-term effects, and that is what burnout is. It's the application of negative emotions in a circumstance that literally requires short term change, but which resists being changed over a long period. The circumstance is the burnout. Not your negative emotions, which are merely the correct and reasonable response to the circumstance. Problems with a job are a classic example. If you are being treated badly, if basic human needs are not being met, or if you are actively being prevented from satisfying basic human drives, that absolutely warrants negative emotions, and their short-term downsides are necessary evils to bring about change to your situation (whether change that you are able to enact, or if you are not in control, then change which someone else must enact). But at the same time, modern employment is structured for most people to be engineered precisely to disregard human negative reactions. Such reactions will be vilified and/or punished, but they will not be considered in the fullness of humanity and accepted as signals that something is wrong and in need of adjustment. It's simply incompatible with most implementations of bureaucracy to allow for something as messy and bespoke as human needs to drive business policy, and this is why we require employment laws to enforce at least a minimal degree of human-needs-respecting policy (apart from extremely rare businesses actually run by people who consider the human condition of their workers), and also why political activism around worker rights has had such a bloody history, and shows no real reasons to believe it's going to be less bloody going forward from here. So it's a perfect storm. Jobs generally trigger negative emotions due to the way that jobs prevent humans from satisfying basic, required needs (needs for privacy, needs for autonomy, etc.). But our prevailing framework for structuring the human-to-work interface, bureaucracy, is literally based upon the idea of only accommodating human needs to the most threadbare level of uniformity and minimality. As a result, to last a long time in a company, you either are already or become one of the following: (1) genetically predisposed to be capable of sublimating away the human needs that will go unmet, thus sublimating away any negative emotion reactions. Some fraction of this group may not be genetically well-suited for it, but is instead well suited to "drink the Kool-Aid" and fundamentally re-map their internal goal orientation to pulsate in unison with their employer [either way, this is extremely rare, and leads to what Michael O. Church called "macho subordination" whereby people compete to be seen as the "most loyal" by virtue of who can overtly signal that they are most willing to sublimate away human needs for the sake of the company, similar to a proud martyr kind of attitude] (2) constantly drenching yourself in stress hormones, probably eating your feelings, failing at personal relationships, exercise goals, etc., and slowly decaying into a burnt out mess because you can barely duct tape it all together in the morning and drag yourself to face the sisyphean task of pretending to sublimate away your negative emotions every day [pretty common, maybe not the majority] (3) taking medication / seeking major therapy which helps mask the symptom (the negative emotions) without addressing the actual cause (that the concept of work life is structured to be at odds with human goal satisfaction) [probably a much larger fraction than we admit] (4) someone who thinks they are "getting by" but who is actually acting horribly to their coworkers as little cracks in the facade start showing over the years of dealing with the negative emotions, rendering you into someone who is probably the cause of this whole chain of problems for other people, especially when you rise to the level of manager [most middle management that I've ever heard of, encountered myself, or read about in principled research on this issue, like Moral Mazes]. I suspect that many other modalities of life -- long term resentment in marriages or relationships, family dysfunction, negligence regarding easily preventable health problems, etc., -- can be analyzed in a similar way as working life is analyzed above, and that problems of burnout affect most of us in huge ways across vast spectra of our lives. As this becomes better understood, I think burnout will begin to be seen as a fundamentally physiological and even rational response to the way that most modern modalities of life are structured. But I also predict that the only change is that research into pharmaceutical engineering to prevent burnout symptoms will intensify, and that lazy mental health professionals will mostly resort to tossing drugs at people to get them off their back, and basically, with regard to burnout in general, the prevailing attitude will sort of just be "deal with it -- take some drugs to alleviate the symptoms, but don't expect anyone to ever care about the cause." This is one common theme I have seen in a wide range of dystopian literature as well, even though it's not always directly stated as such. When side-effects of structuring society in fundamentally anti-human ways become problematic and it eventually starts trickling up to rich people who begin to be inconvenienced by it, the response is to create a distraction or a device or drug to mask the symptoms just long enough for symptom-sufferers to go on servicing that rich person's desires, but none of which actually offers relief from the underlying cause, and it leads to wider and wider spread feelings of prolonged misery and burnout, despite greater and greater societal wealth in the form of technology.
ThomPete 11y ago
It can be logical to use emotional response and illogical to only use logic. Logic isn't a solution in itself since it always require a premise to begin with. You can logically win a discussion and still loose the argument.

amelius 11y ago

> the main factor that appears to cause all types of burnout is negative emotions Interesting. Does that mean that from just working extremely hard, you can never (very likely) get a burnout? That would be big news. By the way, I've heard that sleeping a lot (like 10 hours per night minimum) helps with burnout; not sure if it is universally true.

cpncrunch 11y ago
>Does that mean that from just working extremely hard, you can never (very likely) get a burnout? That would be big news. The research suggests that burnout is a lot less likely if you enjoy your job and have sufficient support (see the Demands-Resources model of burnout). From research into the brain (see Boksem 2008, and Noakes 2012) there appear to be areas in the brain dedicated to calculating the costs vs benefits of performing activities. Some of the inputs to this system are emotion-based, but others are physiological (e.g. sleep, tissue damage, etc). You can override your brain's fatigue/tiredness signals, but if you do that long-term then burnout will still likely occur. An interesting factoid is that fatigue itself is actually an itself (see Noakes' reviews). So what will likely happen if you continue working hard 16 hour days is that your brain will say "enough is enough" at some point, and you will start to feel negative emotions towards your work even though you previously enjoyed it (and even though consciously you still want to do it). >By the way, I've heard that sleeping a lot (like 10 hours per night minimum) helps with burnout; not sure if it is universally true. Well, it will certainly help if you are suffering from short-term burnout, or to avoid burnout in the first place. Sleep is definitely one of the factors that the brain uses in determining fatigue/burnout.
qb45 11y ago
> Does that mean that from just working extremely hard, you can never (very likely) get a burnout? Dashrath Manjhi ran away from his home at a young age and worked at Dhanbad's coal mines. He returned to his village and married Phalguni Devi. While crossing Gehlour hills to bring him lunch, she slipped and seriously injured herself, which eventually led to her death. Manjhi was deeply disturbed and that very night decided to carve a path through the Gehlour hills so that his village could have easier access to medical attention. He carved a path 360-feet-long (110 m), 25-feet-deep (7.6 m) in places and 30-feet-wide (9.1 m) to form a road through the rocks in Gehlour hill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi Not a statistical argument (which your words suggest you expected), but I think it agrees with the spirit of the article - you can find motivation for truly crazy stunts if you focus on obtaining future good emotions instead of avoiding present bad emotions. Working to avoid losing the rat race is a burnout-prone kind of motivation, for example.
cpncrunch 11y ago
Just to add to my previous comment: there seem to be a few people who can achieve continual high levels of work output on about 4 hours of sleep without burning out. I suspect this is a combination of genetics and being highly in control of -- and motivated by -- the work (e.g. owning the company). Perhaps it is a kind of long-term mild hypomania. The problem is when these people sometimes think that their employees should be able to handle the same workload, which then inevitably leads to burnout.

zzalpha 11y ago

From my perspective, the best antidote is to always use logical, intellectual responses to problems, rather than an emotional response. Let me guess: engineer? There's absolutely a personality type that prefers to solve all problems with logic and clear thinking, which is a very good thing when you're dealing with engineering problems. When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic. Not all people and all problems are amenable to "logical" solutions. Controlling negative emotions is a very good thing. But there are many ways to achieve that. Turning to rational problem solving is just one mental tool, but it's not fit for all occasions.

cpncrunch 11y ago
Yes, I was mostly talking about problems where a logical solution makes sense. For dealing with people, you're right, an intellectual response alone is not the solution. I was more just pointing out that it is the negative emotions that appear be the cause of the burnout.
darkmighty 11y ago
It depends on how far your logic goes. If you have sufficient experience with people, you could see the logic solution to your example as avoiding direct problem solving proposals, as you might expect the person to react negatively. Of course, the natural way of achieving the correct response is by "simulating" the other person's emotional state to try to predict the best outcome (which includes their future emotional state) -- this is what I understand people generally mean when talking about empathy, and this is what the article refers as 'Emotional contagion'. However, as the article argues, it shouldn't be the only way. You should in principle be able to build a sufficient model of people's emotions and reactions without having to use your own "emotional engine" and being impacted yourself (which may in turn affect your own capability to make good decisions).
yummyfajitas 11y ago
When you're dealing with people, though, that kind of response can be actively counterproductive. Anyone who's had a significant other "vent" and respond negatively when you try to turn to problem solving will probably recognize this dynamic. The rational reaction to such situations would be to recognize that this approach yields bad results and to try something different instead, e.g. the emotional manipulation you seem to be implicitly recommending. One important bit of learning for engineer-types to do is to recognize that most people aren't like them. The more I treat other humans as emotionally driven markov chains (rather than intelligent thinkers) the better my life outcomes are. Unfortunately the desire to empathize and treat others like oneself makes this a difficult lesson to learn.

asimuvPR 11y ago

That's a viewpoint I haven't encountered before. May you share more about it? From my POV, it would seem that emotions are logical, or the thought of us being logical itself soothes some emotions and validates others. What would you say makes feeling logical a more rounded approach to certain types of people?

cpncrunch 11y ago
Here is an example: someone submits an email to your customer support. The email starts with "your software is full of bugs". They go on to list all the problems they've had. The natural response of the human brain is to get angry at the person reporting the bug. Obviously this isn't very useful or logical. A better solution is to think about the problems reported, and decide whether it is a valid complaint or not. Many people automatically feel anger in situations like this, but you can train yourself out of it. It's essentially a kind of mindfulness: you just look at the situation intellectually and watch your emotions, rather than letting your emotions take control. I would say the only logical time for feeling anger is when someone does something like raping or murdering a member of your family. Even then, anger is only useful in helping you formulate a plan of retaliation.
- asimuvPR 11y ago
  Oh yes, I understand. Sort of not being overly sensitive to assholes. Quite useful. I would add being kind and nice as a response to those sort of situations. It helps bring down emotions from the altered party.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I love bug reports. I really hate when I find out months later that one of my customers knew about the bug and never bothered to report it. Every bug reported is one I can fix.
alsetmusic 11y ago
Not the person you replied to, but I (anecdotally) have had the same experience. This has ranged from negative working conditions to political atmosphere. When I deliberately alter my response from "this frustrates me" to "how can I improve it," I don't feel helpless about my state of mind. The best method for me was to reduce, as much as possible, my use of the words, "I hate XYZ."

p4wnc6 11y ago

Sometimes negative emotional responses are appropriate and even though they cause bad short-term side effects, those side-effects are worthwhile because the negative emotion is a physiological response to an intolerable situation or circumstance, exogenous to your self or attitude, that must be avoided or changed. The trouble comes when a person gets embedded into a circumstance that truly, legitimately warrants the negative emotion, but which is not (or cannot be) removed or changed. Crucially, it is a situation for which it is unequivocally correct to bear the costs of negative short-term emotions to create a noticeable signal that something's just not right and something needs to be fixed. But where those negative emotions would normally serve their purpose and direct you to make a change or direct someone else to make a change in response to you, instead no change occurs. Now the supposedly short-term effects of the negative emotions become long-term effects, and that is what burnout is. It's the application of negative emotions in a circumstance that literally requires short term change, but which resists being changed over a long period. The circumstance is the burnout. Not your negative emotions, which are merely the correct and reasonable response to the circumstance. Problems with a job are a classic example. If you are being treated badly, if basic human needs are not being met, or if you are actively being prevented from satisfying basic human drives, that absolutely warrants negative emotions, and their short-term downsides are necessary evils to bring about change to your situation (whether change that you are able to enact, or if you are not in control, then change which someone else must enact). But at the same time, modern employment is structured for most people to be engineered precisely to disregard human negative reactions. Such reactions will be vilified and/or punished, but they will not be considered in the fullness of humanity and accepted as signals that something is wrong and in need of adjustment. It's simply incompatible with most implementations of bureaucracy to allow for something as messy and bespoke as human needs to drive business policy, and this is why we require employment laws to enforce at least a minimal degree of human-needs-respecting policy (apart from extremely rare businesses actually run by people who consider the human condition of their workers), and also why political activism around worker rights has had such a bloody history, and shows no real reasons to believe it's going to be less bloody going forward from here. So it's a perfect storm. Jobs generally trigger negative emotions due to the way that jobs prevent humans from satisfying basic, required needs (needs for privacy, needs for autonomy, etc.). But our prevailing framework for structuring the human-to-work interface, bureaucracy, is literally based upon the idea of only accommodating human needs to the most threadbare level of uniformity and minimality. As a result, to last a long time in a company, you either are already or become one of the following: (1) genetically predisposed to be capable of sublimating away the human needs that will go unmet, thus sublimating away any negative emotion reactions. Some fraction of this group may not be genetically well-suited for it, but is instead well suited to "drink the Kool-Aid" and fundamentally re-map their internal goal orientation to pulsate in unison with their employer [either way, this is extremely rare, and leads to what Michael O. Church called "macho subordination" whereby people compete to be seen as the "most loyal" by virtue of who can overtly signal that they are most willing to sublimate away human needs for the sake of the company, similar to a proud martyr kind of attitude] (2) constantly drenching yourself in stress hormones, probably eating your feelings, failing at personal relationships, exercise goals, etc., and slowly decaying into a burnt out mess because you can barely duct tape it all together in the morning and drag yourself to face the sisyphean task of pretending to sublimate away your negative emotions every day [pretty common, maybe not the majority] (3) taking medication / seeking major therapy which helps mask the symptom (the negative emotions) without addressing the actual cause (that the concept of work life is structured to be at odds with human goal satisfaction) [probably a much larger fraction than we admit] (4) someone who thinks they are "getting by" but who is actually acting horribly to their coworkers as little cracks in the facade start showing over the years of dealing with the negative emotions, rendering you into someone who is probably the cause of this whole chain of problems for other people, especially when you rise to the level of manager [most middle management that I've ever heard of, encountered myself, or read about in principled research on this issue, like Moral Mazes]. I suspect that many other modalities of life -- long term resentment in marriages or relationships, family dysfunction, negligence regarding easily preventable health problems, etc., -- can be analyzed in a similar way as working life is analyzed above, and that problems of burnout affect most of us in huge ways across vast spectra of our lives. As this becomes better understood, I think burnout will begin to be seen as a fundamentally physiological and even rational response to the way that most modern modalities of life are structured. But I also predict that the only change is that research into pharmaceutical engineering to prevent burnout symptoms will intensify, and that lazy mental health professionals will mostly resort to tossing drugs at people to get them off their back, and basically, with regard to burnout in general, the prevailing attitude will sort of just be "deal with it -- take some drugs to alleviate the symptoms, but don't expect anyone to ever care about the cause." This is one common theme I have seen in a wide range of dystopian literature as well, even though it's not always directly stated as such. When side-effects of structuring society in fundamentally anti-human ways become problematic and it eventually starts trickling up to rich people who begin to be inconvenienced by it, the response is to create a distraction or a device or drug to mask the symptoms just long enough for symptom-sufferers to go on servicing that rich person's desires, but none of which actually offers relief from the underlying cause, and it leads to wider and wider spread feelings of prolonged misery and burnout, despite greater and greater societal wealth in the form of technology.

ThomPete 11y ago

It can be logical to use emotional response and illogical to only use logic. Logic isn't a solution in itself since it always require a premise to begin with. You can logically win a discussion and still loose the argument.