Burnout, how to recover.

Eric's short and skinny list on what you are doing to cause burnout in yourself and how to modify/remedy those behaviors

Here is what you do wrong:
1. You feel that you have too much responsibility, and your worth is determined by the productivity of others or the goodness of some process, you perceive them/it as being low-quality and measure your self-worth from that.

2. You do not feel that you are sufficiently appreciated for what you do on a day-to-day basis, you perceive that someone might appreciate you, but they don't.

3. You measure your self-worth by how many useful productive items you can cram into your day.

4. You can't stand it when people question your capability or intelligence, regardless of how high your capability/intelligence is.

5. You are working 60 hours a week or more, work defined as focused goal setting, focused effort, breaking down barriers to progress, mental labor that you perceive as boring or a waste of time.

6. Your entire life is defined by your job, your experiences outside the office are small in comparison.

7. There are cots in your office, and people routinely pull all-nighters/all-weekend/no vacation work. You wake up to work, you stop only to eat and sleep.

8. You find yourself thinking about the other people/processes/events that are causing your productivity to drop (an incorrect understanding of problem).

9. You get mad or angry that someone is saying you are spending too much time working (especially when you are).

10. You think friends, hobbies, useless playing, relationships, games, exercise, and pointless distractions are a complete waste of time.

11. You think the other co-workers are out to get you, and you start getting conspiracy theories going.

12. You think your co workers have lesser value because they don't produce as much as you do.

13. If you are using more and more aggressive behavior to micromanage or control other people's behavior.

14. You are using chemicals to optimize your productivity during the day: Caffeine, chocolate, cocoa, cocaine, soda, sweets, 5 hour power, monster, expresso, etc.

15. Your told that you may be suffering from burnout, and you get defensive and find 27 reasons why you are not suffering burnout.

16. You are feeling depressed.

17. You are feeling a great void in your life, and life seems meaningless, you become fatalist, life is not more valuable than non living material, nothing matters, some alien could squish us like the bug we just stomped and it would be no different.

18. You show up to work, and sit down, but nothing important happens, only meaningless stuff gets shuffled around.

19. If you show up to work and feel that your time is being wasted doing this thing.

20. You are not sleeping enough, you set your alarm clock to get by with as little sleep as possible. You wake up really hard. You disrupted and deprived the brain's of its desired number and depth of cycles of sleep.

21. You think emotions are a useless appendage of the human mind, you think it would be better if everyone made decisions based on cost-benefit analysis, logic and reason.



Eric's short and skinny list; How to remedy your burnout:
1. You feel the work you do is meaningless, stop that work and write down what work would excite you, write down what you want written on your tombstone. Change the work you do so that it works toward something that is filled with meaning and something you care about.

2. Your taking caffeine or sugar or sodas and uppers to increase your productivity. STOP taking those uppers, cold turkey. When you get the munchies eat fruit/vegetables and water.

3. Your taking high octane drugs/alcohol to calm yourself or work yourself up. Cut that out. Alcohol and drugs make the problem worse.

4. You don't feel appreciated, DO NOT work harder to become appreciated, that is the burnout feedback loop. Work to get praise back as a daily requirement. When all that fails, change your job description/bosses/career/work. When that fails, find your passion with other work.

5. You measure your self-worth by how many productive items are in your day. STOP that. Measure your self worth by the number of high-fives you give or your overall health, and set aside 2 hours every day for joining your fitness step aerobics class.

6. You can't stand it when people question your capability. Learn how to shrug it off and say: "Not everyone can be the best performer". And accept their murmurs of your lack of intelligence/capability as totally expected and something to ignore.

7. You are working 60+ hours a week, stop that. Workweeks are 40 hours for a strong reason. On the 40 hours you are not working, do something that cannot be called work by intelligent people.

8. Your entire life is defined by your job, cut out that belief. Your life is now defined by: family cohesion, friends/support group, health/wellness, overall happiness, things other than your work. Stop asking people at parties: "what do you do?". Ask them "What do you think about".

9. You blame other people/processes for your lack of productivity. Move the blame back to yourself and your irresponsible management of your mind. Your lack of productivity is because you screwed up somewhere.

10. You think friends, hobbies, useless playing, relationships, games, exercise, and pointless distractions are a waste of time, they are not, it is time best spent.

11. You think co-workers are out to get you, if it is real, then you can acquire evidence and thus proof and send it to HR, if you can't create an iron-clad case with proof, lose the conspiracy theories.

12. You think your co workers have lesser value for being less productive. NOT true. The less productive employees are terrific, celebrate them every week with a "average employee appreciation day". Treat them with the respect you would give a CEO, and plastic toys from think geek.

13. Stop working on doing a better job, and start working on LOOKING like your doing a better job. Drum up some sustainable routine celebrations for the great things that already are working. Your burning out because nobody is recognizing what work you ARE doing.

14. Work less on making the wiring underneath better and make the presentation better. Everyone is going to attempt to take responsibility for creating the "oohs and aahs". Make sure the recognition comes back to YOU. Don't let people steal the recognition for your work. Burnout comes from being deprived of that appreciation.

15. You have too much responsibility, get LESS responsibility. Make it so that the performance of other humans does not reflect on your performance.

16. If your self worth is determined by how many molecules you shuffle around in a certain way, you'll always be unhappy because there is always more work to do. Derive your self worth from something immovable. One way to do this is to believe that we are fish in a fishtank, and our worth is determined by the fact that the fish-tank still exists and serves a higher purpose. The glory/shame of everything that happens belongs to that, not you.

17. You are letting your health fall behind, spend a few hours a day set aside for exercising and healthy living. Your self worth is not determined by your work, it IS determined by your emotional/mental/physical health.

18. Take your alarm clock and throw it out the window, become an early bird and go to bed by 9PM and wake up early, leaving plenty of time to get ready. Spend 2 months waking up when you naturally feel like waking up. Don't let the alarm clock disturb your sleep cycles. If you can't do that, give yourself at least 9 solid hours of sleep per night. If you can't do that, then continue enjoying the symptoms of burnout.

19. You think emotions are useless. You may be right, but you must still express them, read them in other people, react to them, and manage them. The belief that emotions are a waste of energy will cause critical meters and gauges in your mind to stop measuring and gauging.


You got to burnout by putting your emotional/mental/physical health on the back burner. Put it back as the most important thing you wake up to do.

Good luck, this process will take a year.

If you ignore everything in this list:

OK so you ignored everything in this list. Powered through it, here is what to expect as advanced symptoms of burnout:

1. You will sit down on your computer, and your conscious mind tells the rest of your brain to start performing a work item. You know what to do, you know how to do it, you can think of a series of sub-actions to perform the task, but work will not even begin. A task such as double clicking a certain icon becomes mysteriously difficult, as if your mind is resisting you.

2. Incredible loss of motivation, you could be looking at the source code for the fountain of youth, and you'll fire up your browser to play games and do other time wasting activities. Even though you want to investigate it more.

3. Your circadian rhythms will start moving around, you will experiment with abnormal sleeping patterns, 30 hours days, 4 hour naps during the day, 2 hours awake two hours asleep. This is not healthy unless you have consulted a sleep specialist.

4. Mental errors/illness, you will start making scary lapses of judgment, logic errors and fundamental mistakes will become more frequent, you will become delusional, for example finding the link between terrorist behavior and global warming, and having reasons for believing that.

5. Thoughts of suicide, putting together a 50 item list on why it is better to not be alive than to be burdened with the task of living.

6. Cynicism in overdrive. You will start evaluating people only in terms of their faults and failures, governing change based only on what they have done wrong. Good things done are ignored.

7. You will become ANGRY. More than the regular kind of angry, you'll pound the keyboard, yell on the phone, write emails while snarling and become passive aggressive. You will become angry at little things you normally would deal with easily.

8. You will damage your relationships with family and friends. Leaving you alone in your crystal fortress whom nobody cares about. The computer will not satisfy your every need.


Take it from someone who saw all this play out in a super-achiever over the course of 2-3 years.