15 ms·

Burnout and the Brain (2016)

294 points by akeck 7y ago

FeepingCreature 7y ago
Burnout and the Brain, it's Burnout and the Brain!
mettamage 7y ago
What I would like to know is how psychosis and the brain works. I've heard from sources who work in the field that an overdosis of chronic stress and lack of sleep can also cause a cognitive decline that ultimately leads to an irreperably psychotic state without any hope for recovery. In such a state people are sincerely believing that, for example, aliens exist and they are the only humans and everyone else is a robot. I've heard that people who develop stress/sleep deprived related psychosis over a period of two years are already sensitive towards developing it. The same people also should not take drugs, for example, such as weed. My question simply is: when would it become burnout and when would it become psychosis? (I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this)
- robbiep 7y ago
  The real answer to this question is we don’t know, because we don’t fully understand psychosis. We know that drug induced psychosis is different from schizophrenic psychosis, and we understand that schizophrenia is really a degenerative condition that can get progressively worse if not treated; however even that understanding is limited and ‘coarse’. I have not heard of or seen exhaustion-related psychosis so can’t comment, but there are no simple answers, there are lots of people spending their entire working lives trying to better understand it but we have a long way to go
- bananocurrency 7y ago
  I've heard that people who develop stress/sleep deprived related psychosis over a period of two years are already sensitive towards developing it. The same people also should not take drugs, for example, such as weed. Citation...?
  - mettamage 7y ago
    Regarding weed [1], regarding stress/sleep deprivation. I've heard that from a mental health professional. That's what he saw in the couple of patients he had to treat. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(19)30086-0/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
    - bananocurrency 7y ago
      how nice of you to finally specify a drug instead of making a blanket claim.
      - darkteflon 7y ago
        It’s been interesting in recent years to see the slow disintegration of the taboo against the study of psychedelics as potential treatment for mental health issues.
      - mettamage 7y ago
        To me it's obvious that weed can accelerate psychosis since it comes up quite quickly when researching about weed. I thought it was relatively well-known in the HN community as well. I also said that my other information was from people working in the field. If I say something like that, then I implicitly mean that I couldn't find it on the internet, which I find an interesting thing in itself.
      - dang 7y ago
        Please don't be a jerk on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- thrav 7y ago
  You know who is constantly stressed and doesn’t get good sleep? People who become homeless. ...Homelessness creates perfect conditions for mental health issues to arise, and yet many tend to think people are only homeless because they were already mentally ill.
Arbalest 7y ago
(2016)
mettamage 7y ago
Another thing I would like to know is: how is stress associated with damage vs. relaxation? Is it: 1 day stress means you need 1 day of relaxation and 40 days of stress means you need 40 days of relaxation? Or is the relationship quadratic or some square root or log? e.g. stress_in_days = days_of_recovery^2 or stress_in_days = days_of_recovery or stress_in_days = ln(days_of_recovery) Related: I find it interesting that they write about the HPA-axis as I've learned that the HPA-axis was a biological explanation for depression. To be fair, the way burnout was described in the article, it didn't seem to be all that different from depression. Edit: seems I was right, depression and burnout don't seem to be all that different [1]. I do think the name burnout describes more accurately what depression is than the name depression. (I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this) [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30087493 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30087493
- taurath 7y ago
  Not all relaxation is equal, so I imagine it will be tough to quantify.
- lionhearted 7y ago
  Super interesting question. Quick take — it 100% can't be linear. Take as an analogue a strain injury — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_(injury) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_(injury) — a first degree strain can heal quickly with minimal invasiveness; a third degree strain might never fully heal even with surgery and rehabilitation. Some of stress is happening on a biochemical level — if your hormones get sufficiently out of balance, and especially if it leads to a downward spiral of short-term behaviors (alcohol, junk food, etc) then you might wind up in a seriously diseased state that takes a serious regimen to recover from. On the other hand, if you never get above some threshold of unhealthy biochemistry and avoid downward spirals of behavior, recovery should be expected to be quicker. There's so so many variables that it's heavily confounded and hard to math out, but the relationship for sure has to be non-linear.
- js8 7y ago
  Apparently, negative experience affects us roughly 5x more than positive experience. So if the burnout is caused by accumulation of negative experiences, then I gather, you would have to take 5x as much non-stress days than stress days. But whether the day is stress or not depends on your emotions, not on what the day is objectively. You can have a no-stress day which is really busy or even under pressure. I had some of the most productive days at work when I was solving a critical customer issue, simply because of the excitement (you can't do that everyday, though).
mettamage 7y ago
Final question I would like to know: how do certain high-stress work cultures think about these type of issues? I have seen that the HN community has some management/strategy consultants. I've also seen that if you work at an MBB firm, you basically are guaranteed to work 60+ hours, especially in the first 3 years. I might give this to a couple of MBB acquaintances I know and see how they react, but I find it odd that these industries ignore this. From my (perhaps naive perspective), it simply isn't profitable to ignore this and moreover also unscientific (I had the impression that some finance-based industries were pretty pin point accurate with things). (I secretly hope we have a 60+ hour working person reading this)
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  I worked 60-100 hours weeks for a year with constantly working over 40 a year prior with numerous data above 20 hours. I ended up getting cancer, light sensitivity, and my sleep schedule was difficult to get back into sync. I was also trying to get my team to work less hours because my whole team was being burned out however I wasn't getting support from my management team at the time. I ended up with a new director, a new team as most of my prior team left, a promotion, and proper time to recover from the burnout. It took a few months but I was able to work my way back from it. I'm now approaching a different kind of malaise as with numerous management changes our work has appeared to become unimportant to our upper management and I suspect they will be handing it over to a team openly hostile to what we do and completely unequipped for the job. As much as I need healthcare to live I'm not willing to spend what are most likely my final years in a place that I don't think cares about our customers. All this is to say that there are most definitely different kinds of burnout. One is more physical, the other is emotional. Both impact your mental facilities and ability to get work done. Both directly work on morale, which is why the solution to burnout in employees is to discover what's crushing their morale. If people are passionate and care personally about what they do because they know they are performing important work as part of a unified vision then extra work won't result in burnout. This isn't to say that you should allow your employees to be constantly overworked, just that if occasional extra work is needed, if you've done your job appropriately as a manager the impact is severely less and the cancer if negative thinking doesn't start to creep in. Once that does it's nearly impossible to rectify unless you're very good at rebuilding empowerment.
lionhearted 7y ago
> For example, a comprehensive report on psychosocial stress in the workplace published by the World Health Organization identified consistent evidence that “high job demands, low control, and effort–reward imbalance are risk factors for mental and physical health problems.” I think a key phrase in there is "effort–reward imbalance" — everything I've found in both research and personal experience seems to show that burnout-type effects are much more likely when you're not getting enough of what you want and value. As an example, think of two sports teams that both gave their all in a championship game — the winning team is much less exhausted, they're jubilant and bouncing around and celebrating. Both teams presumably expended similar levels of energy, stress, etc — but the winning team is full of celebration and joie de vivre; the losing team is licking their wounds and questioning everything. There's still limits to the amount of physical and mental stressors we can handle, but winning helps a lot with processing and recovering quickly from stress.
- madaxe_again 7y ago
  I’m not sure if it helps so much as allows you to perpetuate a cycle by providing occasional positive feedback. I should have left my business years before I did, but it was the winning (contracts, technical coups) that kept me on. You end up like an addict, stumbling through the nightmarish days until the next dopamine rush (and crash) comes along. Stress and burnout don’t just have mental impacts - they can have severe physiological impacts. I didn’t realise, acknowledge, or recognise this until my third hospitalisation, and years of increasing illness, made it impossible to continue writing off as “just food poisoning, again”. It’s been nearly three years since I left, and while I’m physically better, and no longer spending half my life puking and delirious (it took six months for that to subside), I still have occasional anxiety attacks. My mother asked me about what I plan on doing for a career over dinner a few weeks back and I out and out fainted. Never used to have any of this. I was the resilient one, the one who could carry the world on his shoulders - or thought he could. Broke me.
  - lionhearted 7y ago
    Whoa, condolences. Glad to hear you're getting better.
unixhero 7y ago
The trifecta of hell: Burnout is caused by (1)increased workload not resulting in incremental feeling of accomplishment, and also typically with (2) negativity from external sources and a (3) high workload.
- taneq 7y ago
  Those are definitely things which can cause burnout, but I guarantee you that unsustainably high workload can absolutely cause burnout all on its own.
  - unixhero 7y ago
    Yes I agree. I will edit for clarity.
    - taneq 7y ago
      Ah right, I see how you meant it. Yeah, if all three of those are hitting you at once then you're gonna have a bad time.
stareatgoats 7y ago
> At its core, burnout emerges when the demands of a job outstrip a person’s ability to cope with the stress. Having witnessed multiple burnouts first-hand I'd say this description is only half-way helpful. In my lay-man experience a burnout occurs when the aforementioned precedes several days without sleep. Lack of sleep over a prolonged stressful period must be avoided, especially from ages 30-40, otherwise damage will highly likely occur, similar to blown fuses in the brain, which takes many years to recover from (if ever, completely). Many people that reach this stage of stress unfortunately acquire a tunnel vision that convinces them they are invincible and can do anything (except take care of themselves and their loved ones). It is one of the scourges of modern life, and a tragedy that people are not properly prepared for this in school, especially in industries that are susceptible to it, like ours.
- GorgeRonde 7y ago
  I have no problem working twice as much as normal. What I want is to be paid twice as much (at least).
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Good for you. I’ve tried working twice as much once for ten days, and I am never doing that again. Not even for a one-off with one hundred thousand dollars/Euros/whatever after-tax overtime pay.
    - GorgeRonde 7y ago
      So are you fine with the idea that I get twice as much money and decision power than you, all things beyond worked hours being equal ?
      - ben_w 7y ago
        Money stopped being a major concern after my first year in my first job. Quality of life is more important to me. Your mileage may vary.
      - 7y ago
p0nce 7y ago
Great article. There is this excellent talk by Maslach, "Understanding Burnout" which dispels most misunderstandings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLPyV8lBbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLPyV8lBbs However, as with most conditions it's unlikely you will have any interest in it until being affected.
leonroy 7y ago
One thing I'd love to know is how leaders who have faced incredibly stressful situations for sustained periods manage to push through. Hannibal the Carthaginian general for example spent nearly 20 years fighting the Romans on their own turf in Italy. He had a string of victories and also suffered incredible losses including the loss of an eye to infection. Despite that he led his men and was incredibly popular. After laying waste to the Italian countryside for two decades he was reluctantly recalled back to Carthage where he served as a statesman for several more years. He was then exiled and a price put on his head and he made plans to ally himself with other leaders of the day - honestly his life goes on and on. The guy's resiliency is incredible and he isn't the only one of his age. There are numerous examples of similar people from the history of the time. I suppose your modern day cases like Musk or Jobs are what we'd think of today. The former's challenges are well documented but the latter had just months to turnaround a sinking Apple and restructure the company before it ran out of money. He'd been through many ups and downs and again displayed a resiliency which is pretty remarkable. I think that everyone's ability to handle stress varies. What I'd love to know is why some people can suffer incredibly and not only survive but thrive and if there is some way in which we can learn how to suffer the everyday arrows slung our way and bear our burdens better.
- kodz4 7y ago
  I think it boils down to energy. Much more than ability. If you don't have enough to handle an issue, you need to be around people who do. They need to be interested in the same issue and you have to give them reasons why you need to be on their team. There are lots of people who handle stress well one time. There are very few who can handle it as it piles up. They can't do it without others around them absorbing some of it. 'It takes a village' and all that. Niall Fergusan's book the square and the tower talks about the networks of people behind famous personalities and stressfull events. It's very interesting to understand how those networks emerge. The village props up the endurance athletes. Because that give the village the best shot.
- p0nce 7y ago
  Because Hannibal did not have the six factors of burn-out: lack of control, insufficient reward, lack of community, absence fo fairness, conflict in values, work overload. Arguably Hannibal: - is in control (he's leading), - he's probably rewarded through pillaging, (I feel that reward is absolutely key to continue pushing through) - there is probably a sense of community while they are laying waste, - as a leader he probably get "fair" shares of reward for himself (cf. the Iliad, opening list of treasures) - the work he's doing is probably aligned with his own values (unlike Xenopho who was hired as mercenary in terrible conditions), as we can see he didn't want to stop campaigning - work overload is probably there, as campaigning men have little sleep and work a lot (cf. Cesar) Conclusion: Hannibal is less at risk of burn-out than men serving under Hannibal.
s188 7y ago
Airline pilots have a legal limit to the number of hours they can work per month. I think this is mostly to avoid the consequences of mental exhaustion (rather than emotional exhaustion) such as in the Colgan Air Disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407 An interesting quote in that article is: "NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman, while concurring, made it clear that she considered fatigue to be a contributing factor." I've often wondered if there should be a similar rule for software developers. We're required to maintain high levels of concentration for extended periods, day in, day out, month after month. I'm sure this leads to a kind of burnout that goes undiagnosed and which must, at some level, be detrimental to an employer. Is there value in limiting time spent on solving difficult software problems? Say, 30 hours a week for problem solving and 10 for training?
- dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  devs are treated as ‘burn and churn’ resources - work conditions are similar to a sweatshop because there is a huge, inexpensive pool of applicants
  - s188 7y ago
    Yep. That's my experience too. But ‘burn and churn’ thrives in the absence of decent human resource management. Is it possible to link 'problem complexity' to 'concentration demands'? And from that, derive a metric that will enable better management of the human resource?
    - krageon 7y ago
      It would help if you defined what is to you "decent human resource management", as for most HR divisions I've seen this appears to mean "churn and burn".
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
    My theory is that managers who are working today learned their craft when unemployment was at 8 - 10% and it shows in turnover.
yarg 7y ago
For me, burn out was not a consequence of the demands of the job, but a belief that nothing I did could possibly have any impact, that nothing I said would ever be listened to, that every moment I spent in that fucking place was an absolute waste of time. This wasn't how it started, I took a vital yet buggy and unmaintainable piece of software and got it to a point where new features could be cleanly added and new bugs were a very rare event. And yet, every time I tried to make any significant change - generally intended to further improve the maintainability of the project - I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else.
- durnygbur 7y ago
  > I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else. Sole aim of some people is just to have power over others, force subordinates to commit their mistakes, and to replace subordinates with others who are increasingly zealot, obedient, and desperate. I have no idea how to defend myself in such situations, usually I just quit. "Professional managers" (persons being managers and leads from the beginning of their career), and overeducated people joining the workforce late in their lives and straight from or shortly after the academia are the two profiles from whom I observed such behaviour.
  - Aromasin 7y ago
    Honestly, as silly as the book and most of the philosophy behind it is in my eyes, "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene can be quite helpful in playing the game with overtly controlling people. Often the correct path is just to quit though. Provided you're a skilled professional you'll likely be finding a job in what is a buyers market, so there's little to lose in leaving and a lot to lose (sanity included) in staying.
  - xiaolingxiao 7y ago
    in your opinion why do people joining workforce late in their career from academia behave this way?
gopuseyuj 7y ago
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mojuba 7y ago
A bit tangential but this > Maslach received an incredible outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who were grateful to find out that they were not alone in their experience of burnout. got me thinking how important it is for us, humans, to compare and match our own experiences with the societal "averages". It's usually a relief to learn you are not alone in something that's happening to you, despite that it can be truly worrisome. But at the end of the day it's all relative to the averages and norms. And norms change over time, too. Not saying burnout and depression can become a norm, just pointing out what it means to be a "social animal". Something bad happens to you and suddenly it's not as bad because you are not unique.
mothsonasloth 7y ago
My formula for burnout: * macro-environment (office, commute, noise etc.) * diet * away time from desk * meeting creep * lack of dialogue from management e.g. (HR edicts, performance management curves) * bureacracy * deadlines without any clear goals behind them i.e. for ticking boxes * micro-environment (team, equipment, desk, apathetic colleagues) * workload (give a busy man things to do) * family, finances etc.
sudoaza 7y ago
"the loss of motivation, growing sense of emotional depletion, and cynicism" Clearly identify with this, but is this burnout or just doing the same boring/meaningless sh!t over and over again?
skizm 7y ago
I’m burnt out, not from stress, but from being “forced” to do a bunch of stuff that I don’t care about with a bunch of other people I don’t really care about for a company I don’t care about, but if I stop at any time the money stops coming into my bank account so I just have to keep pretending I care for years just to keep the game going. The actual work itself varies from stupid easy to relatively challenging, but again, I just can’t bring myself to care beyond ensuring my team doesn’t think I suck at my job so I can keep collecting my paycheck. All I’m doing is running out the clock every single day. That’s why I’m burnt out.
- plutonorm 7y ago
  That is stressful.
- pbrb 7y ago
  Wow, way too close to home. You've got me thinking...
- nurettin 7y ago
  That's burnout? I thought that was just work.
- manmal 7y ago
  I have a similar feeling, sometimes. It crops up whenever I stop coding on the side, for fun, for more than a month. The playfulness just gets lost over time. Last week my motivation went to almost 0, and it took me a while until I discovered the why: I had been stunned by the SwiftUI demos, and wanted to get my hands dirty. But I hadn't had ANY time to dabble around because I had overburdened myself with promises to various customers. What I did felt very far away from what I actually wanted to do, and it got worse every day. When I finally understood what the problem was, motivation started to come back. I played around with SwiftUI for only 5 minutes yesterday, and feel so much better already. Do you have a side project that you would love to spend all your time on? (doesn't have to be coding)
  - tayo42 7y ago
    This kind of stuff just makes me feel worse in the end. I try out all this cool stuff in my free time then I'm stuck doing monotonous work with same tools at work. Or I learn something cool and just never get a chance to apply it. I feel like what's the point beyond satisfying some curiosity.
andraaspar 7y ago
Breathe in – breathe out. Breathe in – breathe out. Ever tired of breathing? You will be. I've seen all my favorite activities turn sour. Pleasure turned into pain. Relief out of reach. Breathe in – breathe out. The world is like this. Breathe in – breathe out. It does not go anywhere, it just breathes. Breathe in – breathe out. Until it breaks. Breathe in – breathe out. Find your peace.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ElonsMosque 7y ago
Not to downplay any serious issues of fatigue, overworking or burnout but I personally found good air ventilation, strict rules of drinking water regularly, meditation and exercise did immense things for me. To the point where I have an excess of energy I never used to have previously at work.
woowoowoo 7y ago
We live in a time when it's more difficult to switch off than ever before. I was burned out for a couple of years for sure until a major life threatening illness forced me to take stock. I've made some important and very useful changes: - I've started saying "no" to others including clients, business partners, friends, family etc. Every time I do this, it is saying "yes" to myself - I've blocked all social media and news websites from my phone (both apps and via Safari) - I've gotten rid of all work emails from my phone too - I have an alarm clock by my bed instead of my phone which sleeps in another room - I start every day using the 5 minute journal method - I journal (almost) every day before I start my work - I no longer work weekends and evenings - I've made peace with the fact that my business isn't going to grow as quickly as I want it to. We do have choices at the end of the day. Check out the 5 balls for life speech by Bryan Dyson, former CEO of Coca Cola; work is a rubber ball that you can drop and it will bounce back, the rest of the balls that we juggle (health, friendships, family etc) are all glass balls which may shatter if we drop them.
IMAYousaf 7y ago
Forgive me if I’m being callous. There’s an intersection in the Venn Diagram between burnout and mental health issues, but also some distinctions. I’ve viewed burnout to be one of two options. 1 - For creatives, a lack of creative fulfillment. Everyone has some creativity but I’m specifically talking about “artists”. 2 - Not being paid enough. Everything is relative. For some people “hustling” even if they’re making 1% salaries is too much. I think that the perspective would be changed if one was a C-suite level or a founder of that same company. We see this in Wall Street too, and nearly ever power law job. Most people, particularly blue collar workers, work physically backbreaking hours doing physically backbreaking work. They can’t afford the luxury of burnout. There’s maybe a large middle class band where people can. For people beyond that, maybe even on the higher end of upper middle class, they’re being compensated enough so the psychological checks and balances compute well enough that burnout doesn’t manifest like how it does for others. I’d also argue that the optics of “success/growth at all costs” are falsely blamed in SV in particular because SV has a “fail upwards” mechanism that rewards failures. Lastly, I think that stagnation is not the same thing as burnout.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

294 points by akeck 7y ago

Burnout and the Brain, it's Burnout and the Brain!

What I would like to know is how psychosis and the brain works. I've heard from sources who work in the field that an overdosis of chronic stress and lack of sleep can also cause a cognitive decline that ultimately leads to an irreperably psychotic state without any hope for recovery. In such a state people are sincerely believing that, for example, aliens exist and they are the only humans and everyone else is a robot. I've heard that people who develop stress/sleep deprived related psychosis over a period of two years are already sensitive towards developing it. The same people also should not take drugs, for example, such as weed. My question simply is: when would it become burnout and when would it become psychosis? (I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this)

robbiep 7y ago
The real answer to this question is we don’t know, because we don’t fully understand psychosis. We know that drug induced psychosis is different from schizophrenic psychosis, and we understand that schizophrenia is really a degenerative condition that can get progressively worse if not treated; however even that understanding is limited and ‘coarse’. I have not heard of or seen exhaustion-related psychosis so can’t comment, but there are no simple answers, there are lots of people spending their entire working lives trying to better understand it but we have a long way to go
bananocurrency 7y ago
I've heard that people who develop stress/sleep deprived related psychosis over a period of two years are already sensitive towards developing it. The same people also should not take drugs, for example, such as weed. Citation...?
- mettamage 7y ago
  Regarding weed [1], regarding stress/sleep deprivation. I've heard that from a mental health professional. That's what he saw in the couple of patients he had to treat. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(19)30086-0/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
  - bananocurrency 7y ago
    how nice of you to finally specify a drug instead of making a blanket claim.
    - darkteflon 7y ago
      It’s been interesting in recent years to see the slow disintegration of the taboo against the study of psychedelics as potential treatment for mental health issues.
    - mettamage 7y ago
      To me it's obvious that weed can accelerate psychosis since it comes up quite quickly when researching about weed. I thought it was relatively well-known in the HN community as well. I also said that my other information was from people working in the field. If I say something like that, then I implicitly mean that I couldn't find it on the internet, which I find an interesting thing in itself.
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't be a jerk on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
thrav 7y ago
You know who is constantly stressed and doesn’t get good sleep? People who become homeless. ...Homelessness creates perfect conditions for mental health issues to arise, and yet many tend to think people are only homeless because they were already mentally ill.

Arbalest 7y ago

(2016)

mettamage 7y ago

Another thing I would like to know is: how is stress associated with damage vs. relaxation? Is it: 1 day stress means you need 1 day of relaxation and 40 days of stress means you need 40 days of relaxation? Or is the relationship quadratic or some square root or log? e.g. stress_in_days = days_of_recovery^2 or stress_in_days = days_of_recovery or stress_in_days = ln(days_of_recovery) Related: I find it interesting that they write about the HPA-axis as I've learned that the HPA-axis was a biological explanation for depression. To be fair, the way burnout was described in the article, it didn't seem to be all that different from depression. Edit: seems I was right, depression and burnout don't seem to be all that different [1]. I do think the name burnout describes more accurately what depression is than the name depression. (I secretly hope we have a medical professional reading this) [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30087493 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30087493

taurath 7y ago
Not all relaxation is equal, so I imagine it will be tough to quantify.
lionhearted 7y ago
Super interesting question. Quick take — it 100% can't be linear. Take as an analogue a strain injury — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_(injury) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_(injury) — a first degree strain can heal quickly with minimal invasiveness; a third degree strain might never fully heal even with surgery and rehabilitation. Some of stress is happening on a biochemical level — if your hormones get sufficiently out of balance, and especially if it leads to a downward spiral of short-term behaviors (alcohol, junk food, etc) then you might wind up in a seriously diseased state that takes a serious regimen to recover from. On the other hand, if you never get above some threshold of unhealthy biochemistry and avoid downward spirals of behavior, recovery should be expected to be quicker. There's so so many variables that it's heavily confounded and hard to math out, but the relationship for sure has to be non-linear.
js8 7y ago
Apparently, negative experience affects us roughly 5x more than positive experience. So if the burnout is caused by accumulation of negative experiences, then I gather, you would have to take 5x as much non-stress days than stress days. But whether the day is stress or not depends on your emotions, not on what the day is objectively. You can have a no-stress day which is really busy or even under pressure. I had some of the most productive days at work when I was solving a critical customer issue, simply because of the excitement (you can't do that everyday, though).

mettamage 7y ago

Final question I would like to know: how do certain high-stress work cultures think about these type of issues? I have seen that the HN community has some management/strategy consultants. I've also seen that if you work at an MBB firm, you basically are guaranteed to work 60+ hours, especially in the first 3 years. I might give this to a couple of MBB acquaintances I know and see how they react, but I find it odd that these industries ignore this. From my (perhaps naive perspective), it simply isn't profitable to ignore this and moreover also unscientific (I had the impression that some finance-based industries were pretty pin point accurate with things). (I secretly hope we have a 60+ hour working person reading this)

cannonedhamster 7y ago
I worked 60-100 hours weeks for a year with constantly working over 40 a year prior with numerous data above 20 hours. I ended up getting cancer, light sensitivity, and my sleep schedule was difficult to get back into sync. I was also trying to get my team to work less hours because my whole team was being burned out however I wasn't getting support from my management team at the time. I ended up with a new director, a new team as most of my prior team left, a promotion, and proper time to recover from the burnout. It took a few months but I was able to work my way back from it. I'm now approaching a different kind of malaise as with numerous management changes our work has appeared to become unimportant to our upper management and I suspect they will be handing it over to a team openly hostile to what we do and completely unequipped for the job. As much as I need healthcare to live I'm not willing to spend what are most likely my final years in a place that I don't think cares about our customers. All this is to say that there are most definitely different kinds of burnout. One is more physical, the other is emotional. Both impact your mental facilities and ability to get work done. Both directly work on morale, which is why the solution to burnout in employees is to discover what's crushing their morale. If people are passionate and care personally about what they do because they know they are performing important work as part of a unified vision then extra work won't result in burnout. This isn't to say that you should allow your employees to be constantly overworked, just that if occasional extra work is needed, if you've done your job appropriately as a manager the impact is severely less and the cancer if negative thinking doesn't start to creep in. Once that does it's nearly impossible to rectify unless you're very good at rebuilding empowerment.

lionhearted 7y ago

> For example, a comprehensive report on psychosocial stress in the workplace published by the World Health Organization identified consistent evidence that “high job demands, low control, and effort–reward imbalance are risk factors for mental and physical health problems.” I think a key phrase in there is "effort–reward imbalance" — everything I've found in both research and personal experience seems to show that burnout-type effects are much more likely when you're not getting enough of what you want and value. As an example, think of two sports teams that both gave their all in a championship game — the winning team is much less exhausted, they're jubilant and bouncing around and celebrating. Both teams presumably expended similar levels of energy, stress, etc — but the winning team is full of celebration and joie de vivre; the losing team is licking their wounds and questioning everything. There's still limits to the amount of physical and mental stressors we can handle, but winning helps a lot with processing and recovering quickly from stress.

madaxe_again 7y ago
I’m not sure if it helps so much as allows you to perpetuate a cycle by providing occasional positive feedback. I should have left my business years before I did, but it was the winning (contracts, technical coups) that kept me on. You end up like an addict, stumbling through the nightmarish days until the next dopamine rush (and crash) comes along. Stress and burnout don’t just have mental impacts - they can have severe physiological impacts. I didn’t realise, acknowledge, or recognise this until my third hospitalisation, and years of increasing illness, made it impossible to continue writing off as “just food poisoning, again”. It’s been nearly three years since I left, and while I’m physically better, and no longer spending half my life puking and delirious (it took six months for that to subside), I still have occasional anxiety attacks. My mother asked me about what I plan on doing for a career over dinner a few weeks back and I out and out fainted. Never used to have any of this. I was the resilient one, the one who could carry the world on his shoulders - or thought he could. Broke me.
- lionhearted 7y ago
  Whoa, condolences. Glad to hear you're getting better.

unixhero 7y ago

The trifecta of hell: Burnout is caused by (1)increased workload not resulting in incremental feeling of accomplishment, and also typically with (2) negativity from external sources and a (3) high workload.

taneq 7y ago
Those are definitely things which can cause burnout, but I guarantee you that unsustainably high workload can absolutely cause burnout all on its own.
- unixhero 7y ago
  Yes I agree. I will edit for clarity.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Ah right, I see how you meant it. Yeah, if all three of those are hitting you at once then you're gonna have a bad time.

stareatgoats 7y ago

> At its core, burnout emerges when the demands of a job outstrip a person’s ability to cope with the stress. Having witnessed multiple burnouts first-hand I'd say this description is only half-way helpful. In my lay-man experience a burnout occurs when the aforementioned precedes several days without sleep. Lack of sleep over a prolonged stressful period must be avoided, especially from ages 30-40, otherwise damage will highly likely occur, similar to blown fuses in the brain, which takes many years to recover from (if ever, completely). Many people that reach this stage of stress unfortunately acquire a tunnel vision that convinces them they are invincible and can do anything (except take care of themselves and their loved ones). It is one of the scourges of modern life, and a tragedy that people are not properly prepared for this in school, especially in industries that are susceptible to it, like ours.

GorgeRonde 7y ago
I have no problem working twice as much as normal. What I want is to be paid twice as much (at least).
- ben_w 7y ago
  Good for you. I’ve tried working twice as much once for ten days, and I am never doing that again. Not even for a one-off with one hundred thousand dollars/Euros/whatever after-tax overtime pay.
  - GorgeRonde 7y ago
    So are you fine with the idea that I get twice as much money and decision power than you, all things beyond worked hours being equal ?
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Money stopped being a major concern after my first year in my first job. Quality of life is more important to me. Your mileage may vary.
    - 7y ago

p0nce 7y ago

Great article. There is this excellent talk by Maslach, "Understanding Burnout" which dispels most misunderstandings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLPyV8lBbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLPyV8lBbs However, as with most conditions it's unlikely you will have any interest in it until being affected.

leonroy 7y ago

One thing I'd love to know is how leaders who have faced incredibly stressful situations for sustained periods manage to push through. Hannibal the Carthaginian general for example spent nearly 20 years fighting the Romans on their own turf in Italy. He had a string of victories and also suffered incredible losses including the loss of an eye to infection. Despite that he led his men and was incredibly popular. After laying waste to the Italian countryside for two decades he was reluctantly recalled back to Carthage where he served as a statesman for several more years. He was then exiled and a price put on his head and he made plans to ally himself with other leaders of the day - honestly his life goes on and on. The guy's resiliency is incredible and he isn't the only one of his age. There are numerous examples of similar people from the history of the time. I suppose your modern day cases like Musk or Jobs are what we'd think of today. The former's challenges are well documented but the latter had just months to turnaround a sinking Apple and restructure the company before it ran out of money. He'd been through many ups and downs and again displayed a resiliency which is pretty remarkable. I think that everyone's ability to handle stress varies. What I'd love to know is why some people can suffer incredibly and not only survive but thrive and if there is some way in which we can learn how to suffer the everyday arrows slung our way and bear our burdens better.

kodz4 7y ago
I think it boils down to energy. Much more than ability. If you don't have enough to handle an issue, you need to be around people who do. They need to be interested in the same issue and you have to give them reasons why you need to be on their team. There are lots of people who handle stress well one time. There are very few who can handle it as it piles up. They can't do it without others around them absorbing some of it. 'It takes a village' and all that. Niall Fergusan's book the square and the tower talks about the networks of people behind famous personalities and stressfull events. It's very interesting to understand how those networks emerge. The village props up the endurance athletes. Because that give the village the best shot.
p0nce 7y ago
Because Hannibal did not have the six factors of burn-out: lack of control, insufficient reward, lack of community, absence fo fairness, conflict in values, work overload. Arguably Hannibal: - is in control (he's leading), - he's probably rewarded through pillaging, (I feel that reward is absolutely key to continue pushing through) - there is probably a sense of community while they are laying waste, - as a leader he probably get "fair" shares of reward for himself (cf. the Iliad, opening list of treasures) - the work he's doing is probably aligned with his own values (unlike Xenopho who was hired as mercenary in terrible conditions), as we can see he didn't want to stop campaigning - work overload is probably there, as campaigning men have little sleep and work a lot (cf. Cesar) Conclusion: Hannibal is less at risk of burn-out than men serving under Hannibal.

s188 7y ago

Airline pilots have a legal limit to the number of hours they can work per month. I think this is mostly to avoid the consequences of mental exhaustion (rather than emotional exhaustion) such as in the Colgan Air Disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407 An interesting quote in that article is: "NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman, while concurring, made it clear that she considered fatigue to be a contributing factor." I've often wondered if there should be a similar rule for software developers. We're required to maintain high levels of concentration for extended periods, day in, day out, month after month. I'm sure this leads to a kind of burnout that goes undiagnosed and which must, at some level, be detrimental to an employer. Is there value in limiting time spent on solving difficult software problems? Say, 30 hours a week for problem solving and 10 for training?

dlphn___xyz 7y ago
devs are treated as ‘burn and churn’ resources - work conditions are similar to a sweatshop because there is a huge, inexpensive pool of applicants
- s188 7y ago
  Yep. That's my experience too. But ‘burn and churn’ thrives in the absence of decent human resource management. Is it possible to link 'problem complexity' to 'concentration demands'? And from that, derive a metric that will enable better management of the human resource?
  - krageon 7y ago
    It would help if you defined what is to you "decent human resource management", as for most HR divisions I've seen this appears to mean "churn and burn".
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  My theory is that managers who are working today learned their craft when unemployment was at 8 - 10% and it shows in turnover.

yarg 7y ago

For me, burn out was not a consequence of the demands of the job, but a belief that nothing I did could possibly have any impact, that nothing I said would ever be listened to, that every moment I spent in that fucking place was an absolute waste of time. This wasn't how it started, I took a vital yet buggy and unmaintainable piece of software and got it to a point where new features could be cleanly added and new bugs were a very rare event. And yet, every time I tried to make any significant change - generally intended to further improve the maintainability of the project - I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else.

durnygbur 7y ago
> I got shat on by an architect who otherwise had nothing to do with the project and a boss who never listened to any one else. Sole aim of some people is just to have power over others, force subordinates to commit their mistakes, and to replace subordinates with others who are increasingly zealot, obedient, and desperate. I have no idea how to defend myself in such situations, usually I just quit. "Professional managers" (persons being managers and leads from the beginning of their career), and overeducated people joining the workforce late in their lives and straight from or shortly after the academia are the two profiles from whom I observed such behaviour.
- Aromasin 7y ago
  Honestly, as silly as the book and most of the philosophy behind it is in my eyes, "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene can be quite helpful in playing the game with overtly controlling people. Often the correct path is just to quit though. Provided you're a skilled professional you'll likely be finding a job in what is a buyers market, so there's little to lose in leaving and a lot to lose (sanity included) in staying.
- xiaolingxiao 7y ago
  in your opinion why do people joining workforce late in their career from academia behave this way?

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mojuba 7y ago

A bit tangential but this > Maslach received an incredible outpouring of letters and phone calls from people who were grateful to find out that they were not alone in their experience of burnout. got me thinking how important it is for us, humans, to compare and match our own experiences with the societal "averages". It's usually a relief to learn you are not alone in something that's happening to you, despite that it can be truly worrisome. But at the end of the day it's all relative to the averages and norms. And norms change over time, too. Not saying burnout and depression can become a norm, just pointing out what it means to be a "social animal". Something bad happens to you and suddenly it's not as bad because you are not unique.

mothsonasloth 7y ago

My formula for burnout: * macro-environment (office, commute, noise etc.) * diet * away time from desk * meeting creep * lack of dialogue from management e.g. (HR edicts, performance management curves) * bureacracy * deadlines without any clear goals behind them i.e. for ticking boxes * micro-environment (team, equipment, desk, apathetic colleagues) * workload (give a busy man things to do) * family, finances etc.

sudoaza 7y ago

"the loss of motivation, growing sense of emotional depletion, and cynicism" Clearly identify with this, but is this burnout or just doing the same boring/meaningless sh!t over and over again?

skizm 7y ago

I’m burnt out, not from stress, but from being “forced” to do a bunch of stuff that I don’t care about with a bunch of other people I don’t really care about for a company I don’t care about, but if I stop at any time the money stops coming into my bank account so I just have to keep pretending I care for years just to keep the game going. The actual work itself varies from stupid easy to relatively challenging, but again, I just can’t bring myself to care beyond ensuring my team doesn’t think I suck at my job so I can keep collecting my paycheck. All I’m doing is running out the clock every single day. That’s why I’m burnt out.

plutonorm 7y ago
That is stressful.
pbrb 7y ago
Wow, way too close to home. You've got me thinking...
nurettin 7y ago
That's burnout? I thought that was just work.
manmal 7y ago
I have a similar feeling, sometimes. It crops up whenever I stop coding on the side, for fun, for more than a month. The playfulness just gets lost over time. Last week my motivation went to almost 0, and it took me a while until I discovered the why: I had been stunned by the SwiftUI demos, and wanted to get my hands dirty. But I hadn't had ANY time to dabble around because I had overburdened myself with promises to various customers. What I did felt very far away from what I actually wanted to do, and it got worse every day. When I finally understood what the problem was, motivation started to come back. I played around with SwiftUI for only 5 minutes yesterday, and feel so much better already. Do you have a side project that you would love to spend all your time on? (doesn't have to be coding)
- tayo42 7y ago
  This kind of stuff just makes me feel worse in the end. I try out all this cool stuff in my free time then I'm stuck doing monotonous work with same tools at work. Or I learn something cool and just never get a chance to apply it. I feel like what's the point beyond satisfying some curiosity.

andraaspar 7y ago

Breathe in – breathe out. Breathe in – breathe out. Ever tired of breathing? You will be. I've seen all my favorite activities turn sour. Pleasure turned into pain. Relief out of reach. Breathe in – breathe out. The world is like this. Breathe in – breathe out. It does not go anywhere, it just breathes. Breathe in – breathe out. Until it breaks. Breathe in – breathe out. Find your peace.

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ElonsMosque 7y ago

Not to downplay any serious issues of fatigue, overworking or burnout but I personally found good air ventilation, strict rules of drinking water regularly, meditation and exercise did immense things for me. To the point where I have an excess of energy I never used to have previously at work.

woowoowoo 7y ago

We live in a time when it's more difficult to switch off than ever before. I was burned out for a couple of years for sure until a major life threatening illness forced me to take stock. I've made some important and very useful changes: - I've started saying "no" to others including clients, business partners, friends, family etc. Every time I do this, it is saying "yes" to myself - I've blocked all social media and news websites from my phone (both apps and via Safari) - I've gotten rid of all work emails from my phone too - I have an alarm clock by my bed instead of my phone which sleeps in another room - I start every day using the 5 minute journal method - I journal (almost) every day before I start my work - I no longer work weekends and evenings - I've made peace with the fact that my business isn't going to grow as quickly as I want it to. We do have choices at the end of the day. Check out the 5 balls for life speech by Bryan Dyson, former CEO of Coca Cola; work is a rubber ball that you can drop and it will bounce back, the rest of the balls that we juggle (health, friendships, family etc) are all glass balls which may shatter if we drop them.

IMAYousaf 7y ago

Forgive me if I’m being callous. There’s an intersection in the Venn Diagram between burnout and mental health issues, but also some distinctions. I’ve viewed burnout to be one of two options. 1 - For creatives, a lack of creative fulfillment. Everyone has some creativity but I’m specifically talking about “artists”. 2 - Not being paid enough. Everything is relative. For some people “hustling” even if they’re making 1% salaries is too much. I think that the perspective would be changed if one was a C-suite level or a founder of that same company. We see this in Wall Street too, and nearly ever power law job. Most people, particularly blue collar workers, work physically backbreaking hours doing physically backbreaking work. They can’t afford the luxury of burnout. There’s maybe a large middle class band where people can. For people beyond that, maybe even on the higher end of upper middle class, they’re being compensated enough so the psychological checks and balances compute well enough that burnout doesn’t manifest like how it does for others. I’d also argue that the optics of “success/growth at all costs” are falsely blamed in SV in particular because SV has a “fail upwards” mechanism that rewards failures. Lastly, I think that stagnation is not the same thing as burnout.

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