7 ms·

> I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls

by bootsz 8y ago

> I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curious if this has been studied at a psychological or neurological level. As in, why do we feel tired/sleepy in these kinds of environments (as opposed to say anxious or restless)? Personally I've experienced it at least some of the time at almost every desk job I've ever had. I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. I also don't think it's the same kind of mental exhaustion you experience when working on something really challenging, like trying to crack a very hard math problem or something. Clearly in these situations the problem is that the tasks at hand, if any, are neither complex nor difficult.

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
> Is there a name for this type of fatigue Stress. (One of the smyptoms of)
- bootsz 8y ago
  Is it? To me the situation in question seems like the complete opposite of stressful
  - frereubu 8y ago
    Yeah, this sounds like too _little_ stress to me. Imagine a bell curve with stress on the X axis and performance on the Y axis, and there's a sweet spot in the middle where you're getting enough of a kick to motivate you, but not so much that you're drowning.
    - bootsz 8y ago
      Yes. And I've personally found that the "sweet spot" in the middle is all too elusive. In my career I think I've spent the majority of time at one extreme or the other. Feast or famine: overworked & stressed or underworked & depressed. When you can hit it just right in the middle, life is truly great. But rarely have I been able to sustain it for more than a couple months at a time. Let me know if you've found the secret :)
tomhoward 8y ago
I think it's related to the notion that depression (and burnout and other chronic states of negative emotion and low energy) is caused by a lack of optimism - or a lack of things to feel optimistic about. From an evolutionary point of view, if we're not inspired and excited about what we're doing now or what we expect to be doing in the near future, it makes sense to go into energy conservation/restoration mode and go to sleep. Similarly, over the long term, if we aren't inspired by the life we see ahead of us, it's best to go into energy preservation and contemplation mode while we try to figure out how to get onto a better path (and if we can't find one, we end up in chronic/deep depression/despair). I've overcome depression (and come off meds) by developing/learning techniques for finding optimism any time things seem bleak.
- naveen99 8y ago
  If you find optimism in the thing you were pessimistic about before that’s ideal. But if you can’t, how do you switch to not caring about it and switch to something else that you can be optimistic about ? It’s hard to know when to quit.
  - tomhoward 8y ago
    Yeah, that's all part of the technique; breaking down the issue, understanding why you're having negative emotional reactions to it, and deciding whether the problem is your emotional reaction (in which case, change that), or the outer-world situation (in which case, figure out the steps needed to change the situation). It's taken a while to learn it (indeed I'm still learning it), but it's powerful the more it starts to click.
    - martinraag 8y ago
      That sounds very interesting. Would you happen to have any pointers (i.e. books, links etc.) for anyone interested in learning more?
      - tomhoward 8y ago
anoncoward111 8y ago
Down here in real world land, I would be fired for voluntarily leaving my shift at any time. I once had a manager tell me, "Show up or be fired. We will judge if you deserve to go home or not." Yes, one should look for a better job elsewhere, and lately the economy has found more room for all of society's laborers regardless of vogue credentials. However, I can't pay the bills with interviews, and often times I lose value through interviewing.
- lighthazard 8y ago
  This sentiment is typical of the general HN population - a disconnect on the average person. What job wouldn't fire you for leaving in the middle of the day? Most likely a job where OP has a lot of freedom, trust, and respect - something that isn't readily available everywhere else.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Completely agree, and maybe we should strive for it. Lunch breaks, smoking breaks etc are already a thing. Employers let certain employees leave early to go take their kids to the doctor or etc. But the reality is that most employers are far less friendly, to their own detriment of course... but only in the long term.
  - cbzoiav 8y ago
    On the flip side I think a lot of people are just scared to push the boundaries. If you have a manager who values you you'll often find you can get away with a lot more than you expect as long as you are still a strong benefit to the team.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >What job wouldn't fire you for leaving in the middle of the day? Many. Especially smaller shops in laxer countries.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Willing to bet you that it's less than 50% of total shops, therefore less than the word "many".
rdeboo 8y ago
"Boreout" is an established term, it's kind of the inverse of a burnout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boreout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boreout
- jhabdas 8y ago
  That's interesting. I developed an ulcer at my first job out of college in 2004 and didn't know what was wrong until I spoke with a doctor. It was a brain factory with white noise and cube walls so high you had to stand to see your neighbor. I used to work 11-14 hours per day because I was young and foolish, and had a blasé manager. My how times have changed.
- bootsz 8y ago
  Wow, nice. That's pretty much spot-on
have_faith 8y ago
It's a strong feature of Attention Deficit Disorder as I understand it. Hyperfocus often comes hand in hand with extreme fatigue and brain fog in the presence of tasks that don't motivate enough, to the point that you can feel it physically. I often get it myself, feeling like I can't physically write another line of code until I move onto one of my own projects, then I'm good to concentrate for another 6 hours. I have to work extremely hard to complete tasks that on the surface look very simple and involve solving no new problems. This also extends into my normal life, like cleaning a messy room. Note: I haven't been diagnosed with ADD and am not suggesting anyone has it if they experience this, I've just looked into it a lot.
- pault 8y ago
  I have ADD (diagnosed) and this happens to me every day at work. Around three o'clock in the afternoon I get so sleepy I start to literally fall asleep at my desk, but if I go home I'm immediately refreshed and back to full capacity for another eight hours.
  - vasilipupkin 8y ago
    I don't have ADD and it happens to me every day.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      I tried to hint a doctor once to maybe test me for this, but she wouldn't give. I feel like adult ADD isn't yet recognized in my country as a legitimate thing.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - fokov 8y ago
    Check your diet. This happened to me when I was consuming large amounts of carbs for breakfast and lunch. I switched to keto and noticed the tiredness went away in the afternoon and I didn't require 3+ cups of coffee in the morning. Basically I was crashing multiple times a day which was driving me to the point of falling asleep at work or behind the wheel.
wpietri 8y ago
> Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I think of it as lack of motivation combined with low-grade frustration from not being allowed to shift to something worthwhile. Paul Buchheit is obviously a self-winding guy. But put him in a context where he's expected to do things he doesn't care about and is forbidden to do things he does care about and all the air goes out of him. That's certainly what it's like for me. Companies should learn a lesson from this. When I'm managing I work hard to build close-knit, cross-functional teams that score well on Pink's Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose triad. Purpose is the foundation: you have to give the team something meaningful to do and then connect them to that meaning. Autonomy comes next: you give them broad long-term goals and near-term milestones and turn them loose. They should always feel independent but accountable. Mastery comes from letting them meet and overcome challenges, learning as they go, but it doesn't hurt to support them by providing them coaching, access to experts, and any training they ask for. Buchheit is clearly exceptional, but I think everybody benefits from environments that support his approach to the world. Every child is curious and exploratory. Many have that beaten out of them by industrial-model education and top-down corporate workplaces. But I don't think it's ever truly gone, and I think businesses really benefit if they deeply engage their staff.
apohn 8y ago
>I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. At least for me, it's boredom combined with a lack of purpose. If you're doing something boring/mundane at home like doing the dishes, at least at the end of it you can see your sink is empty and the dishes are clean. It feels like there was some point to it. At many companies it can really feel like you are just doing something because somebody told you do it and there's no other purpose in doing so. Sometimes you have no connection to the people using what you are building, and no idea if what you're doing is even really driving revenue or benefiting anybody. If you're not learning and you're bored, the lack of purpose eats away at you slowly. Even if you build something that ultimately fails, if you can directly understand the cause of that failure you can learn something for the future. It can be harder to understand how what you did is related to success or failure at big companies.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  I think the washing dishes analogy is a great. I've made a rule for myself that I won't take a job working on something I wouldn't personally care about or use myself, no matter how nice the pay/work culture/benefits are.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following is based on my notes: In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if they're doing something they actually care about. He gave some examples, one involving special forces people, and concluded that the primary source of tiredness for most people is lack of motivation - lack of interest, or not being able to feel there's a goal to all the work one is doing. While my opinion is that Carnegie was exaggerating a bit here, I won't deny that this rings very true to my experience. As a programmer, I don't get physically taxed by work, and I very rarely get mental exercise too (most programming on regular web jobs is just plain tedium). But I do feel really tired on the job very quickly, and - back when I was a regular employee - the feeling used to evaporate almost immediately when I clocked out for the day. I can even give an example from yesterday - lots of work and a visiting a doctor made me really tired by the evening, but I decided to sit down and write some code for a side project. My tiredness was gone immediately, and after 2 hours of cranking out code, I had to force myself to go to sleep, in order to have any energy for the next day.
- bootsz 8y ago
  Love it, thanks for the reference. Things rings true with my experience as well.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    The book is good in general, I recommend it. Reading it and thinking it over lowered my background anxiety level by a noticeable amount.
- existencebox 8y ago
  I was literally talking about this exact phenomena with the wife last night. It's almost impossible for me to be bored if I'm doing nothing. I could fill years of daydreaming, just in my own head. However, give me work tasks that I have no interest in, and I'll feel so bored/lethargic/unmotivated that just keeping my eyes on task and moving forward requires mental exertion. When I was young, apparently this meant I had ADHD (Throwing this in as a snide comment to expose my opinion of how my primary schooling treated this symptom in children EDIT: I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I'll admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD. The medicines I was given gave me ticks that took decades for me to get rid of and altered my mental state in terrible ways, and it meant that instead of inspecting WHY I felt this way, I simply got shoved chock full of pills and then booted/put with other misfits, which just made the focus problem worse. The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit for things that didn't matter). I took issue with that, largely because I find the response to be eminently logical, and built coping mechanisms to let me succeed in spite of it, but the underlying driver is still there. I realize this is such an insubstantive comment, but it's a topic I've tossed around in my head for many many years now, and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with doing your job like every other professional adult" and hearing others express the same root is somewhat reassuring. (I realize this is tangential, but if you're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan, check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping mechanisms" when I feel this way.)
Aeolun 8y ago
I call it ‘falling asleep when sitting in the backseat of a car syndrome’ the feelings are more or less the same to me. Stuff happens around you, but you are not really a party to it, and you don’t have to be. Same for really boring meetings. You just get slowly lulled to sleep.
dsajames 8y ago
I've heard it called bore-out
33a 8y ago
Office air quality maybe?
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
I might be oversimplifying, but I have experienced it multiple times, and I simply call it "lack of purpose".
not_real_acct 8y ago
> I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. Back when I was in college, I used to go to raves and do drugs. At some point, I started to chaperone my friends and I'd be the sober one, responsible for taking everyone home. I noticed that there's definitely an "energy" that you feel in the room, even stone cold sober. Being surrounded by 2000 people who are high as a kite has a way of making you feel high... Even if you're stone cold sober. I think there's something similar going on in offices. There's some kind of 'proximity effect' there.
goldfeld 8y ago
Yes it's been for millenia understood as a place with awful stagnated energy, by many cultures.

by bootsz 8y ago

WorkLifeBalance 8y ago

> Is there a name for this type of fatigue Stress. (One of the smyptoms of)

bootsz 8y ago
Is it? To me the situation in question seems like the complete opposite of stressful
- frereubu 8y ago
  Yeah, this sounds like too _little_ stress to me. Imagine a bell curve with stress on the X axis and performance on the Y axis, and there's a sweet spot in the middle where you're getting enough of a kick to motivate you, but not so much that you're drowning.
  - bootsz 8y ago
    Yes. And I've personally found that the "sweet spot" in the middle is all too elusive. In my career I think I've spent the majority of time at one extreme or the other. Feast or famine: overworked & stressed or underworked & depressed. When you can hit it just right in the middle, life is truly great. But rarely have I been able to sustain it for more than a couple months at a time. Let me know if you've found the secret :)

tomhoward 8y ago

I think it's related to the notion that depression (and burnout and other chronic states of negative emotion and low energy) is caused by a lack of optimism - or a lack of things to feel optimistic about. From an evolutionary point of view, if we're not inspired and excited about what we're doing now or what we expect to be doing in the near future, it makes sense to go into energy conservation/restoration mode and go to sleep. Similarly, over the long term, if we aren't inspired by the life we see ahead of us, it's best to go into energy preservation and contemplation mode while we try to figure out how to get onto a better path (and if we can't find one, we end up in chronic/deep depression/despair). I've overcome depression (and come off meds) by developing/learning techniques for finding optimism any time things seem bleak.

naveen99 8y ago
If you find optimism in the thing you were pessimistic about before that’s ideal. But if you can’t, how do you switch to not caring about it and switch to something else that you can be optimistic about ? It’s hard to know when to quit.
- tomhoward 8y ago
  Yeah, that's all part of the technique; breaking down the issue, understanding why you're having negative emotional reactions to it, and deciding whether the problem is your emotional reaction (in which case, change that), or the outer-world situation (in which case, figure out the steps needed to change the situation). It's taken a while to learn it (indeed I'm still learning it), but it's powerful the more it starts to click.
  - martinraag 8y ago
    That sounds very interesting. Would you happen to have any pointers (i.e. books, links etc.) for anyone interested in learning more?
    - tomhoward 8y ago

anoncoward111 8y ago

Down here in real world land, I would be fired for voluntarily leaving my shift at any time. I once had a manager tell me, "Show up or be fired. We will judge if you deserve to go home or not." Yes, one should look for a better job elsewhere, and lately the economy has found more room for all of society's laborers regardless of vogue credentials. However, I can't pay the bills with interviews, and often times I lose value through interviewing.

lighthazard 8y ago
This sentiment is typical of the general HN population - a disconnect on the average person. What job wouldn't fire you for leaving in the middle of the day? Most likely a job where OP has a lot of freedom, trust, and respect - something that isn't readily available everywhere else.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Completely agree, and maybe we should strive for it. Lunch breaks, smoking breaks etc are already a thing. Employers let certain employees leave early to go take their kids to the doctor or etc. But the reality is that most employers are far less friendly, to their own detriment of course... but only in the long term.
- cbzoiav 8y ago
  On the flip side I think a lot of people are just scared to push the boundaries. If you have a manager who values you you'll often find you can get away with a lot more than you expect as long as you are still a strong benefit to the team.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >What job wouldn't fire you for leaving in the middle of the day? Many. Especially smaller shops in laxer countries.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Willing to bet you that it's less than 50% of total shops, therefore less than the word "many".

rdeboo 8y ago

"Boreout" is an established term, it's kind of the inverse of a burnout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boreout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boreout

jhabdas 8y ago
That's interesting. I developed an ulcer at my first job out of college in 2004 and didn't know what was wrong until I spoke with a doctor. It was a brain factory with white noise and cube walls so high you had to stand to see your neighbor. I used to work 11-14 hours per day because I was young and foolish, and had a blasé manager. My how times have changed.
bootsz 8y ago
Wow, nice. That's pretty much spot-on

have_faith 8y ago

It's a strong feature of Attention Deficit Disorder as I understand it. Hyperfocus often comes hand in hand with extreme fatigue and brain fog in the presence of tasks that don't motivate enough, to the point that you can feel it physically. I often get it myself, feeling like I can't physically write another line of code until I move onto one of my own projects, then I'm good to concentrate for another 6 hours. I have to work extremely hard to complete tasks that on the surface look very simple and involve solving no new problems. This also extends into my normal life, like cleaning a messy room. Note: I haven't been diagnosed with ADD and am not suggesting anyone has it if they experience this, I've just looked into it a lot.

pault 8y ago
I have ADD (diagnosed) and this happens to me every day at work. Around three o'clock in the afternoon I get so sleepy I start to literally fall asleep at my desk, but if I go home I'm immediately refreshed and back to full capacity for another eight hours.
- vasilipupkin 8y ago
  I don't have ADD and it happens to me every day.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I tried to hint a doctor once to maybe test me for this, but she wouldn't give. I feel like adult ADD isn't yet recognized in my country as a legitimate thing.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- fokov 8y ago
  Check your diet. This happened to me when I was consuming large amounts of carbs for breakfast and lunch. I switched to keto and noticed the tiredness went away in the afternoon and I didn't require 3+ cups of coffee in the morning. Basically I was crashing multiple times a day which was driving me to the point of falling asleep at work or behind the wheel.

wpietri 8y ago

> Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I think of it as lack of motivation combined with low-grade frustration from not being allowed to shift to something worthwhile. Paul Buchheit is obviously a self-winding guy. But put him in a context where he's expected to do things he doesn't care about and is forbidden to do things he does care about and all the air goes out of him. That's certainly what it's like for me. Companies should learn a lesson from this. When I'm managing I work hard to build close-knit, cross-functional teams that score well on Pink's Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose triad. Purpose is the foundation: you have to give the team something meaningful to do and then connect them to that meaning. Autonomy comes next: you give them broad long-term goals and near-term milestones and turn them loose. They should always feel independent but accountable. Mastery comes from letting them meet and overcome challenges, learning as they go, but it doesn't hurt to support them by providing them coaching, access to experts, and any training they ask for. Buchheit is clearly exceptional, but I think everybody benefits from environments that support his approach to the world. Every child is curious and exploratory. Many have that beaten out of them by industrial-model education and top-down corporate workplaces. But I don't think it's ever truly gone, and I think businesses really benefit if they deeply engage their staff.

apohn 8y ago

>I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. At least for me, it's boredom combined with a lack of purpose. If you're doing something boring/mundane at home like doing the dishes, at least at the end of it you can see your sink is empty and the dishes are clean. It feels like there was some point to it. At many companies it can really feel like you are just doing something because somebody told you do it and there's no other purpose in doing so. Sometimes you have no connection to the people using what you are building, and no idea if what you're doing is even really driving revenue or benefiting anybody. If you're not learning and you're bored, the lack of purpose eats away at you slowly. Even if you build something that ultimately fails, if you can directly understand the cause of that failure you can learn something for the future. It can be harder to understand how what you did is related to success or failure at big companies.

PascLeRasc 8y ago
I think the washing dishes analogy is a great. I've made a rule for myself that I won't take a job working on something I wouldn't personally care about or use myself, no matter how nice the pay/work culture/benefits are.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Dale Carnegie, in his book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living", raised a similar point. I won't quote directly, as I read it in Polish; the following is based on my notes: In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if they're doing something they actually care about. He gave some examples, one involving special forces people, and concluded that the primary source of tiredness for most people is lack of motivation - lack of interest, or not being able to feel there's a goal to all the work one is doing. While my opinion is that Carnegie was exaggerating a bit here, I won't deny that this rings very true to my experience. As a programmer, I don't get physically taxed by work, and I very rarely get mental exercise too (most programming on regular web jobs is just plain tedium). But I do feel really tired on the job very quickly, and - back when I was a regular employee - the feeling used to evaporate almost immediately when I clocked out for the day. I can even give an example from yesterday - lots of work and a visiting a doctor made me really tired by the evening, but I decided to sit down and write some code for a side project. My tiredness was gone immediately, and after 2 hours of cranking out code, I had to force myself to go to sleep, in order to have any energy for the next day.

bootsz 8y ago
Love it, thanks for the reference. Things rings true with my experience as well.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The book is good in general, I recommend it. Reading it and thinking it over lowered my background anxiety level by a noticeable amount.
existencebox 8y ago
I was literally talking about this exact phenomena with the wife last night. It's almost impossible for me to be bored if I'm doing nothing. I could fill years of daydreaming, just in my own head. However, give me work tasks that I have no interest in, and I'll feel so bored/lethargic/unmotivated that just keeping my eyes on task and moving forward requires mental exertion. When I was young, apparently this meant I had ADHD (Throwing this in as a snide comment to expose my opinion of how my primary schooling treated this symptom in children EDIT: I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I'll admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD. The medicines I was given gave me ticks that took decades for me to get rid of and altered my mental state in terrible ways, and it meant that instead of inspecting WHY I felt this way, I simply got shoved chock full of pills and then booted/put with other misfits, which just made the focus problem worse. The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit for things that didn't matter). I took issue with that, largely because I find the response to be eminently logical, and built coping mechanisms to let me succeed in spite of it, but the underlying driver is still there. I realize this is such an insubstantive comment, but it's a topic I've tossed around in my head for many many years now, and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with doing your job like every other professional adult" and hearing others express the same root is somewhat reassuring. (I realize this is tangential, but if you're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan, check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping mechanisms" when I feel this way.)

Aeolun 8y ago

I call it ‘falling asleep when sitting in the backseat of a car syndrome’ the feelings are more or less the same to me. Stuff happens around you, but you are not really a party to it, and you don’t have to be. Same for really boring meetings. You just get slowly lulled to sleep.

dsajames 8y ago

I've heard it called bore-out

33a 8y ago

Office air quality maybe?

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

I might be oversimplifying, but I have experienced it multiple times, and I simply call it "lack of purpose".

not_real_acct 8y ago

> I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. Back when I was in college, I used to go to raves and do drugs. At some point, I started to chaperone my friends and I'd be the sober one, responsible for taking everyone home. I noticed that there's definitely an "energy" that you feel in the room, even stone cold sober. Being surrounded by 2000 people who are high as a kite has a way of making you feel high... Even if you're stone cold sober. I think there's something similar going on in offices. There's some kind of 'proximity effect' there.

goldfeld 8y ago

Yes it's been for millenia understood as a place with awful stagnated energy, by many cultures.