The lame racehorse
There is a horse race. The horses are running as fast as they can around the track. Around and around and around. This is what they're “meant” to do. Suddenly, a horse trips and crashes to the ground. It breaks its leg. It tries to get up. It tries to limp around the track, but it cannot. Try as it might, it can no longer run around and around and around. It is done. The horse is dragged off the track, a white curtain is pulled up around the horse, and a gunshot is heard. The race continues. That is how it goes. Around and around and around.
I've had this recurring thought of the lame racehorse for a few years now. Once I realized I needed to make a living, I set off out of the gates at high speed to become a software engineer. I frantically caught up in math, something I always struggled with in grade school, I took transfer classes at a community college and got 4.0s across the board, I applied to a local university, I got admitted, I stressed and had mental breakdowns and did all my assignments, I graduated Magna Cum Laude, what an honor. I worked so hard, running around and around and around. I actually got my first software engineering position while I was still in university, I worked there part-time for my last year of university, and once I graduated I went full-time. And here I've been running for five years around and around and around. I don't think I can run anymore.
I feel like trips and crashes have been happening over the years, at least I feel like they happen when I suddenly think of the racehorse. And I feel like they get worse and worse. Every time though, eventually I forget about the racehorse, but now I think the racehorse is really lame. And I feel like I am limping along the track not yet being noticed by the referees for some reason, around and around and around.
What keeps me running, and now limping, around and around and around is fear and anxiety. I don't want to think about entering the job market. I don't want to lose my health insurance. I don't want to become financially dependent on my partner. I don't want to feel like a failure. I have watched my brilliant colleagues from university very recently get laid off from their software engineering positions at various companies. And yet somehow I'm still limping around and around and around. I don't even know if I'm limping anymore, I think I'm stuck on the ground just moving my limbs around and around and around. And I'm honestly surprised nobody has noticed yet.
I understand some might suggest burnout. And maybe that is the case, but I've tried to take vacations, I've tried to focus on my own hobbies, and I know this post sounds pretty depressing, but outside of work, I am not depressed. The thing about burnout is that I think you have to actually catch fire before you burnout. Maybe for me it was a slow burn, not a sudden moment of catching on fire. Or maybe I did catch fire at some point, so long ago that I don't remember working so hard, although I probably could be reminded of it by my partner and friends, but I feel like I have never recovered from it. I feel like lifeless ashes from a burnout. I don't feel like I have ever rejuvenated, my ashes did not become soil from which new life can grow.
I have a performance review soon. This year has been the worst performance I've ever had so far. I'm in this weird feeling zone of simultaneously no longer having the energy to care anymore, while also harboring fear and anxiety because I don't want to have the uncertainty of being unemployed. But it generally comes out that "not caring" currently "wins" over the anxiety by a large margin. My work output has been seriously pathetic for at least the past month. Like completely slacking off almost. And I do feel guilty about it, just if anyone is wondering.
I feel like I'm waiting for them to pull up the white curtain and to hear the ringing of a gunshot.
I don't know why I wanted to write this, I guess I am just wanting to connect. I wonder if anyone else has felt such feelings that freeze you and make you feel like you're watching a trainwreck in slow motion that is your own life. And I wonder if anyone else has ever felt like a lame racehorse. I know there are a decent amount of software engineers here.
Thanks for reading.
I know that you are skeptical about burnout but your description sounds exactly like chronic burnout, something I've been struggling with for years myself. Burnout doesn't have to feel like you're on fire before you finally fall to the ground, it can insidiously creep up on you and take you down all at once. Just like you, I would be taken down and then be forced to recover only to be taken down even harder the next time.
When I was really struggling with burnout I felt like time was air and I was always gasping for it, there just wasn't enough. My blames laid with work, it took up so much time (one third of our day, more including commute) and if I could only escape it then I would feel so much better. I struggled to keep up with friends, hobbies, things I'd really like to be doing. Even when I made or found time to get to one of those things I still felt drained, that friends or hobbies, or anything else was only depleting what little time I already had. In truth I had plenty of time but I was misusing it so horribly.
Are you ever really giving yourself rest?
Here is an archive link of an Economist article in which a psychologist talks about a patient who was suffering from chronic burnout. The patient would duly take vacations or make an effort to rest, promising to laze around and read books or take it slow but for some reason it never seemed to restore him. What was happening was that these vacations slowly became filled with activities and packed itineraries, the plans to rest and take it easy would slowly be filled with cocktails out with friends or anything but rest.
I don't know if you're American but I am and I know I struggle a lot with our culture's emphasis on productivity and negative view on unproductive rest. We go into the offices and proclaim, with a smirk, to our coworkers that we did nothing on the weekend and it was so good - as if it were a dirty little secret and we were being naughty. The thing is, proper resting and relaxing is not unproductive. Rest itself is productive - for you. Rest will help restore you so that you can be productive when it's time to be, rest will let you be your best self, rest will prevent burnout. Did you forget how to actually rest? I did.
What are some examples of what real rest can look like?
What is not rest?
Of course, work and hobbies should be parts of our lives and are important but they are inherently not restoratively restful.
I myself am doing so much better now and it all came down to giving a little more time to nights reading, putting on some low-fi music and doing a little sketch, having dimmed indirect light and a few candles going, wearing comfy clothes and lounging on the sofa. It's selfish, I have to tell friends and family "No." I have to put my phone away when I get home and miss all of the pings and popups trying to steal my attention and activate dopamine pathways that energize (i.e. not restful). I have to put hobbies and to-do list items on the backburner and accept that they will happen a little later and that's a big part of it, learning to let go of things. No FOMO, no regret that there are still things on your to-do list, not chasing achievements. And for it all I am SO, SO much better. There are evenings now when I actually even feel bored, I have so much time on my hands. And that's from someone who is healed enough now that I work late some nights. Believe it or not, I haven't felt boredom since my childhood. Boring people got bored, I always had an activity or something to do up my sleave but really I was just keeping myself constantly engaged with no time for rest - letting burnout creep slowly in, over years and years, before it really disrupted my life.
I still struggle with improper stress responses. When I am overwhelmed with tasks or short on time then I can start to feel like I'm gasping again pretty quickly but that is slowly getting better. You can build up a tolerance to stress and burnout with time but only by building up a buffer with rest. Burnout and chronic stress led to a lot of health problems with me that highly disrupted my mid-thirties, a time in my life that I should be flourishing in, but even my health has astronomically improved. My relationships suffered because I had no energy to give others, let alone myself, and what energy I did give I began to resent because it would only leaving me feeling even more strained in the end. And obviously, work became a place where I was completely unproductive and unhappy. A place that stole my time and gave me no more sense of accomplishment. I've never loved my job, it was never a passion, but once upon a time it was highly tolerable. I was productive and didn't dread going to work, didn't constantly ruminate on how much of my time was being stolen by it. Nowadays my productivity is slowly coming back and with the right work-life balance I really don't mind being in the office at all.
I had forgotten how to rest and it was slowly killing me, literally and figuratively. Learning how to slow down and sometimes even do, and I mean really do, nothing has saved my life
Edit: I've already covered most of what I needed to say but there were some points I wanted to add for anyone who is beginning their journey to address their burnout. Everyone's situation will be different but these are some things I've learned myself and I think could help a lot of people
You have been stuck in fight or flight mode for years and actual neurochemical pathways have been altered through neural plasticity in your brain and body that make you more sensitive to stress and arrive at burnout quicker. By never allowing yourself to rest your nervous system has been activated constantly, the circuit fully energized without pause. The goal with rest is to get you back into rest and digest mode, the opposite of flight or fight. You need to slow your nervous system down and give it a chance to down regulate, remember that even during some sleep phases your brain is highly active so sleep itself is not a complete replacement for conscious rest. The good news is that through neural plasticity your body can relearn to relax and you can decrease the sensitivity to your nervous system and a lot faster than you probably think.
Relaxing is like a muscle and you've let it atrophy. It will actually take practice to learn how to relax. At first your mind might constantly think about grabbing your phone (trust me, put it way out of reach from you), plans for a project, or your to-do list. Gently remind yourself that you're relaxing and refocus on what you're doing. If absolutely necessary, add an item to your to-do list so that you don't forget it but leave it at that, get back to resting. This happens to me especially when I'm reading or watching a really good TV show but as you retrain that rest muscle you will be able to enter states of rest and relaxation much faster and have less distraction.
Rest is also like a fuel tank, one that you've let become bone dry for years. It will take a lot of resting up front to begin to refill that tank, when I started working on this I remember a week and a half time period where my normally spotless apartment became a complete disaster. It was uncomfortable but using step #2 above I focused on resting and came to ignore it. More good news, as the tank becomes full again it will take smaller and smaller periods of rest to keep the tank topped up and when you have those major stressful life events you can take from the tank without getting burnt out and refill it with rest. Keep #1 in mind though, you are primed to react to stress in an unhealthy manner, your tank depletes faster than it should. As you recover from burnout your tank will start to last a lot longer and you'll draw from it less to confront stress in your life.
Your priorities will need to change at some point. Your mantra at first will be Rest and that should be your primary focus, you are sick and need to get better. Once you do start getting better your mantra should shift to Balance. Resting, especially once you get really good at it, feels really good but too much rest is called Sloth and there's a reason that it's a deadly sin. Once you're feeling better, start to add back in those projects and non-restful activities slowly. Stress, commitment, resting, productivity, enjoyment, those all go hand-in-hand and should bring balance to each other. Nowadays, boredom is my barometer. When I start to feel bored from resting I know that I am ready to tackle a project or do some cleaning. I finally have some balance in my life
Put away your phone. Really, please give this a try for a couple of weeks or even a month. When you get home from work, do what you absolutely need to do with your phone and then put it in your bedroom or in a drawer and don't touch it at least until later at night and then only for a reasonable amount of time. You will be downright amazed at how much free time you will suddenly have that you never realized you were pissing away on your phone. I struggle with not wanting to be out of contact so I got a smart watch and turned off all notifications except for a couple instant messaging apps. Now when someone messages me I see what it is and make a decision, is this message worth me getting the phone out right now or can I do it later or even tomorrow? I have naturally come to see my phone as the enemy and have developed an aversion to using it.
Be kind to yourself and expect setbacks. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Last week I spent multiple nights on the couch scrolling on my phone, dopamine feels good after all. Let me tell you, I felt terrible after that - back on the brink of burnout. It was a good reminder of what I'm giving up when I'm not focusing on resting
Most likely no. I feel like I can't. It's like a block. I must always be doing something. Cleaning, planning the next house project, "working on" myself, even the books I read now "must" be non-fiction and teach me something. Sigh. And even when I'm "doing nothing," it's like you mentioned, social media browsing time, which is not rest.
It's one of the toughest things about sedentary work time spent staring at a screen all day. We weren't evolutionarily selected for it, it's draining but not physiologically taxing, and the normal cues for when to rest from effort just aren't present. Even if you Pomodoro everything, take breaks to walk around, exercise strenuously, and drain your body by continuous busyness after working hours, you're still disconnected from when you actually need rest.
This isn't a horse race - it's a hamster wheel, and the more energy you put in, the faster you'll keep going until collapse. I'm going to suggest something which helped me break through the thought pattern of "I must do something productive every second or unspecified terrible things will happen and I'll be a bad person".
Walking meditation lets you practice some judo with those thoughts. You're walking, it's exercise, right? It's OK to stop the phone notifications for 15 minutes, so you can be more productive afterwards...
At the same time you're walking, you're permitting yourself to draw attention away from the clamor of anxious productivity thoughts and back into the realm of real and salient sensory information. Mindfulness meditation is not a cure-all; it's a means to gain a little objective distance and respite from calcified habits of thinking, while relearning how to tune into the normal sensory cues that tell you when to rest.
Note that even if it helps, mindfulness meditation is not a substitute for therapy, changes to your job, and the strategies that /u/treefiddyfiddy described.
Hello, are you me? This is literally everything I was doing wrong in my life up until only a few months ago. There's a saying: "If you don't make time for youself to rest, your body will do it for you." Don't let it get to that point if it hasn't already.
I really think that you can get to a point where you can help yourself but if you find that it's impossible for you to clear that block then consider professional help to identify why you are the way you are and gain some tips to help you address this. I replied to another comment of yours elsewher here, in an extreme case do consider taking time off of work and explore the possibility of an in-patient treatment program if you can.
Please hold off on making any drastic changes in your life, especially with work. I know that you are struggling with it a lot right now but your entire outlook might change once you start addressing your burnout. It's beter to consider your employment situation from a place of healing rather than while you are accutely ill.
Also, I've added some notes and strategies to help you rest as an edit on my post. I hope it helps
God I'd mark this post as exceptional five times if I could. Basically everything I could think to say to OP you've said here better than I could. Plus some stuff that's made me think about how to address my own burnout as well -- something I've been knowingly struggling with but probably not adequately giving myself true rest either.
Thank you for your compliment, I really appreciate it. It's a subject i'm passionate about because I think it's very present in our society today and not very well understood. It took me years of trial and error trying to "fix myself" before I discovered I needed rest and quality time, when I saw OPs post I felt like that was me crying out for help only just late last year - I had to try and help. I see that you are also struggling the same as us, I've added some notes to my post that I hope might help you as you rediscover how to rest
You're at the wrong company or in the wrong profession.
I felt like this until I found the right job. Then I felt a lesser discomfort until I found the right place to do my job.
Every job I had prior to teaching made me feel like I wanted to blow my brains out. Friday rolled around and I only felt dread for the coming Monday.
Then I tried a couple school districts while doing field placements, student teaching, and subbing. Felt a lot better but I knew I just needed to find the right district.
Now I have the best job I've ever had at the best district I can imagine working for. My entire life is easier for it. My worst days teaching are better than my best days in human resources, painting houses, working at residential homes, doing sales, and all of the other many jobs I have done.
My wife likes her job okay and we are lower middle class at the moment so that's been nice (we both spent a lot of time being poor before this). But I can tell by her disposition toward work that she hasn't found her place yet. I think she's in the right field but needs a better employer. I try to encourage her gently to consider it but I don't want to throw my happiness with my work in her face.
I want to piggy back off this. If you are feeling like everything else is fine in your life but you just dread everything about work then you need to acknowledge the writing on the wall.
I have been in a similar boat where I thought I would enjoy the research side of academia. But then when I truly immersed myself in it and discovered the realities behind the romanticized ideals I found out it was not for me. I just dread doing certain experiments, I can't find the motivation to get started on work. I hate it.
Teaching on the other hand, I love. It's not difficult for me to make lessons or grade. I don't feel the apathy I do for research. When I recognized that about myself I decided to develop a teaching focused career. I want to make my work as easy for me to do as possible, especially since I am gonna spend a lot of time in my life doing it.
This doesn't necessarily mean doing something you absolutely love, especially if you have a certain quality of life you're trying to maintain. But it does mean that you shouldn't make things harder by working a job that leaves you miserable.
I sometimes think about teaching. I used to be a math tutor while I was taking computer science transfer classes and I had so much fun with that.
It sucks how expensive the degrees and certificates for becoming a teacher are, especially considering the pay afterwards.
My friends this weekend suggested I might be a good fit for a managerial software position, and I somewhat agree. The issue is finding such a position with no actual managerial experience. And I wonder if I really would like to be a manager in the way the job would likely play out. I don't care about meetings and Jira, I care about making software people enjoy using and has a meaningful purpose for people.
Just placing a thought out there as an option - if you want to teach at a community college or something like that you really only need a master's degree. You'll need to get adjunct for a bit to get the experience but there isn't a lot of certification. It's kind of wild how little pedagogical training college instructors get.
...or you'll need to adjunct forever because they're only hiring adjuncts and paying them peanuts. This is not an uncommon scenario, especially in certain fields.
Yes that is true. I have experience teaching anatomy and physiology which is always in demand.
My cousin used to adjunct English courses and I've heard no end of horror stories from him 😅 Definitely a difference between fields
Let me know if you have any questions at all about teaching :)
Cool prose, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I like that you default to looking internally, thinking about how you might be at fault for difficulty keeping up with a stressful job. Self-reflection and an inward-focus is great, in my opinion. However, 5 years out of school and giving up? That sounds like your environment is likely to blame. It doesn't necessarily mean that the work environment is objectively bad, but it does sound like the environment is unsuitable for you. Definitely do a serious look into finding another one before you decide that there is something fundamentally wrong with yourself.
You can do a job search while remaining employed. You don't have to quit before you start looking. It definitely sounds like you need to find a new environment where you can work at a pace that is better for your health. Start your search asap!
Yes, I don't think the environment is objectively bad. There are software developers who have been working here for maybe ten years or more, and they seem to enjoy their work. That further makes me feel like there's something “wrong with me.”
For me, the issue with doing a job search is I feel like have no energy for it, especially at the end of the workday, and the weekends I just want to enjoy as weekends. Like someone else mentioned in a another comment, perhaps maybe this career path isn't right for me, and I worry that might be the case. Although I am interested in programming some hobby projects in my free time sometimes, I feel like have no energy for that either. I also worry that because of where I've been working, where there isn't a good adherence to programming standards like using design patterns, having design meetings, writing thorough documentation, etc. I feel like even though I have 5 years of experience on paper, it doesn't feel like I have 5 years of experience. I guess part of this is negativity and anxiety speaking. Possibly imposter syndrome. But I don't know anymore.
I did at some point a few years ago do several interviews for various companies. I almost got through the interview process at Google, I passed 3 out of 4 interviews! (I do feel proud about that, they really liked my "Googliness" and wanted me to try again next year, but then the Great Tech Layoffs happened...) For the one that I failed it was a horrible coincidence that my power went out right before the interview started, and I nervously tried to go through with it anyways and failed due to stress and nerves, that sucked. The tech interview process I did for multiple companies demotivated me even more; how many days I spent preparing for interviews, three or four or even five technical interviews for a company, each one an hour, spread out over days, weeks, and sometimes even months. Oh boy, now I am suddenly remembering all that, hah. Oh, it's all coming back, now I'm remembering why I've been dreading looking for a new tech job, hah.
(Also, thank you to everyone who replied, your comments are very thoughtful and kind. I'd like to reply to each one, it'll just take me some time to give the thought-out response that I want to give to each one.)
I first off wanted to say that I enjoyed the analogy of the lame race horse, and I think how you view yourself and having a function you're "meant" to do provides a good peek into your perspective on life and work.
I'm gonna disagree with your take on burn-out. I don't think it has to be a certain way - it's the feeling you have when you're exhausted by the work you do. And I don't mean tired because you've been working so much, I mean that you are just done with it. This has happened to me on a few occasions, and I think I know some reasons for it that have to do with being neurodivergent, but I think the root cause of it is depression and/or anxiety. I don't tend to get too anxious, or at least not in the ways that people with anxiety disorders do. Instead, when my anxiety starts to ramp up from feeling overwhelmed or not good enough, I just shut off. I tend to do less work, but I don't feel bad. I still get out of bed in the morning, will often still go to work. But I just sit there scroll the internet. I realized this is how my depression manifests - not laying in bed all day feeling like there is nothing good in life, but instead not making progress on things I want/have to finish and feelings like there is just nothing in life.
Ultimately, there's something wrong. You shouldn't be feeling like this, especially for a prolonged period of time. I know this can be thrown around a lot, and it's not a silver bullet, but are you now or have you considered going into therapy? It can be extremely beneficial to talk through your feelings with someone that can help you organize your thoughts and give you an outside perspective that it's informed by working through the mind. At the very least, they might be able to help you find the root of these feelings and implement ways to get beyond this and feel better. This could involve a career change, it could be changing things at home, but with the desperation that comes through in your words I would recommend trying anything to get through this.
I agree completely. Throughout reading the OP, all I could think of was burnout, despite protestations to the contrary. This sounds to me like classic burnout.
/u/eggpl4nt One of your reasons that it can’t be burnout is that you have tried taking vacations and focusing on hobbies. I’d just like to remind you that recovering from burnout can take months or years. I am not exaggerating. The small trips and stumbles you mention with your racehorse analogy (awesome analogy by the way!) sound to me like spots of burnout that you managed to somewhat recover from, but it wasn’t a complete recovery.
I think I have heard this before. And I wonder, how do I give myself months or years? I don't think I can tell my boss "hey, I'm burnt out, I need to take months/years off," and have it be taken seriously. Does it mean quitting and resting for that long..? I do have several years of savings saved up, based on my current monthly spending. It's just scary to do that. I guess I feel scared that I just lucked myself into this job, and I'm never going to get another software job again if I quit. My low self-esteem is showing, I guess.
Hey, for context, I've read through your comments (and others') in this topic, but what I'd like to share I feel is particularly relevant to this question here:
I'd like to start by saying I've been in your position before; not verbatim, but quite similar. I set out to be a software engineer at 23 after being depressed about my (non-SE) major in college. I took a job I hated in an unrelated field, worked very long hours in that job, and taught myself how to code with whatever time I had left. This was very difficult for me, but at the same time it wasn't. Software was my passion, and at the time, this aspiration to become a software engineer gave is what brought me meaning.
Long story short, I was successful. Through a lot of effort and some luck, I landed a job at a startup who wanted to take a chance on me. Once I got my job, I did not pump the brakes. I threw myself into my new career even harder; if the aspiration to become a software engineer brought meaning, then actually being one gave me, like, meaning x10. 10x engineer, all that stuff.
I do not at all mean to come off as arrogant with any of what follows; I excelled at my job. The first few features I shipped were rough, but after that, I knew I was hot shit. People told me I was hot shit. I was making way more money than at that other job I hated. Everything around me was positive reinforcement, so I continued to just throw myself at this job.
Of course, I started to burn out eventually. I don't need to go into much detail about how that went, because you described it yourself in the original post, way better than I could have. But when everything started to unravel for me, I felt tired, helpless, overwhelmed, all of that, but above all, I felt resentful. It sounds like you also feel that way.
Everything I was working for gradually started to feel like it was for nothing. Who cares about this stupid feature? The product? What am I actually contributing to? Why can't we do things the right way? Why can't I find an industry I actually care about? Why am I spinning my wheels and wasting my life on something I don't even find fulfilling?
During this time, I was also searching for a solution or an escape from my burnout. I tried throwing myself into some hobbies, including some old ones I'd abandoned when I was grinding for this job. I tried rekindling friendships with people I'd alienated. I tried putting more effort into my relationship. This all felt like a step in the right direction. But I was not making much progress. What was the point?
I will fast forward. To summarize: I'm still at this same job, and I'm doing better. I was successful in rekindling my hobbies and friendships, but that one relationship didn't work out. You may be thinking, "well that's great Chroma, you managed to find balance in your life. I wish I could do that. I don't have the months or years to take a sabbatical to find enlightenment like you did, though."
Sure, maybe I found balance; I didn't feel better after I found balance though. In order to find balance, I deprioritized my job and started focusing on other things. I learned how to rest and enriched other parts of my life. I fucked off on multi-week vacations multiple times per year. None of that solved my problem. While sometimes I felt recharged after X hobby or hanging out with Y friend or booking a trip to Z, at the end of the day, I felt like I was bandaiding things.
I only started to feel better and fulfilled once I changed what it meant for me to be fulfilled.
For a very long time, I was fulfilled because I sacrificed time, energy, and my sense of self in order to become a software engineer. Being good at my job was fulfilling because it was my identity. Once the pace of all of that slowed down and I was reminded that life has to suck sometimes, it stopped being fulfilling. I couldn't meet 100% of my expectations. (Also, I didn't know the reason for any of this at the time; I just knew I was sad.)
In order to define for myself what fulfillment was, I had to look inward, like you are doing now. I also realized that this feeling of burnout came and went; there were some good parts to my job, despite me being run into the ground from Monday to Friday. Why could I tolerate it sometimes?
This post is getting really long, so I'll summarize my point: Yes, I absolutely think learning to take downtime is crucial, but it isn't a complete solution. I had to zoom out and identify my self worth (with the help of many friends, family, and a therapist), then zoom back in and contemplate which parts of my job I found fulfilling, and what I could do to work with that. I conflated "working hard" and "doing meaningful work" with "being fulfilled" for a very long time. But for me, "being fulfilled" consists of many other things: Spending time with my family, dedicating time to my health, making dick jokes with friends, as well as designing resilient software, building a reliable and empathetic engineering culture, and working towards a robust internal developer platform.
So back to the reason I picked this specific quote to respond to: It did take me years to realize all of this. But I didn't spend that time meditating under a waterfall. In fact I spent a lot of it quite depressed (all of this happened at the beginning of the pandemic, lol). I only started to find answers after I separated my work ethic from my self worth.
I hope this helps, and if not, I hope it at least makes sense. Your story will be different from mine. Good luck.
I truly don’t know. I hope you can find something that works for you. Everything below this is just speculation and a bit of my experience.
I have been lucky enough that I haven’t had burnout terribly bad. I have had burnout though. And after I thought I had recovered, I found out that I still had recovery to go. I think we learn to live with higher levels of burnout since it sneaks up so slowly. Part of the recovery process is learning not to live with your burnout.
Other people in this thread have given good advice for burnout recovery if you are neurotypical. I have ADHD, and I can share some insight from that perspective. If you are neurotypical, you can probably ignore my advice. But if you suspect you might be neurodivergent, this may be useful.
Recovering from burnout with ADHD does not mean doing nothing or the typical “relaxing”. With ADHD, you can actually cause burnout if you do nothing. The way to “relax” with ADHD is to do other things that feel interesting. Follow where your ADHD takes you. I have been feeling pretty bored at work recently (and I know burnout comes after that for me). In my free time, I have been working on a ton of interesting projects. I mentioned in another thread that I just rebuilt my website, AudiobookCovers.com from scratch. I learned a bunch of cool new computing and programming technologies doing this. That has been more helpful to my mental health than any Bahamas vacation sitting on the beach could have been.
I’ll add this for everyone who needs to hear it: if you think you might be neurodivergent, give yourself permission to find help. I spent the majority of my life not getting assistance for my ADHD because I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I do deserve it, and you do too.
As someone with both ADHD and definitely the early stages of burnout atm, do you have any more advice on this? It's basically opposite of a lot of people's other advice for coping with burnout but it sounds way closer to what I need -- I'm at the point where I got frustrated when my partner asked to go to bed (at a reasonable time) because I'd slept and done nothing all day after work and I "felt like I had no time for life". I'm already medicated but addressing the burnout specifically from an ADHD lens seems like something I need to do.
Hey, I burnt out in my late 20s and have adhd symptoms (but not a whole disorder). Most importantly, I know that feeling of both not having time and not achieving anything really well.
What helped me was recognising that the 'not having time to breathe' feeling is a sign that I'm overwhelmed and need to do something about it. This can mean anything from delegating more or giving (much) less than 100% at work, scheduling a vacation, cancelling some of my plans in my spare time, or re-thinking my priorities. All of these feel supet scary, especially the first time you do them, but I promise you it's MUCH better than burnout. If you let yourself burn out, your performance will go to shit anyway and you'll feel terrible mentally and potentially physically as well. So if it's gonna happen anyway, make it happen on your own terms.
To manage the 'but I'm doing nothing!!' feeling, what I did was two things: worked through my guilt about relaxing to be able to see the value in 'non-productive' things, and tried to find things to do that I either enjoy and make me happy, or are simple chores I can do to feel I accomplished something. The key here is absolutely no talking back. At the beginning, my brain would go 'but you only did x' or 'but you didn't do y'. This is normal but the sooner you banish this voice, the better.
Some activities I find help me feel like I did something:
These are all simple enough that they don't stress me out too much even when I'm tired, and they help me feel productive.
One more tip: figure out what adds to your stress and try to plan around it. ADHD already comes with a bunch of stressors and I found that eliminating those (as much as you can) really helps. For example, if I feel rushed or like I have to do something, I shut down and absolutely won't do anything. So a lot of the time, I try to do things in advance (and then praise myself for it haha), I call my to-do lists something like 'goals' to remind myself that I don't have to do them all right now etc.
This is all super helpful advice, thank you so much!
There is one bit of advice that I think is really important for anyone neurodivergent: Not all advice will work for you, and that is okay. There is a ton of advice for neurotypicals in the world. I would try to follow neurotypical advice, especially things that seemed to work for everyone, and it wouldn't work for me. I would take it personally: "This works for everyone, and since it doesn't work for you, it must mean you are a failure and a bad person". Do not do this. The majority of advice will not apply to you simply because you are neurodivergent. If it doesn't work, ignore it. Pretend you never got that advice. It just didn't work for you. For a more direct example, /u/palimpsest has a lot of great advice in his post, but I don't think it would work for me, even though we both have ADHD. That is also fine. If it doesn't work, ignore it. The same is true for my advice. If it doesn't work, ignore it. This has been a hard thing for me to learn, but it has been very helpful.
Most of what I have done recently is simply addressing ADHD symptoms, and it seems to allow me to handle burnout better. To this effect, you already have medication which is hugely beneficial (at least in my experience). There is one other thing that helped me immensely: exercise. I started running each (week)day after I got my medication, and I haven't stopped since. I treat it like a medication: my number 1 priority each day is to run. If I do absolutely nothing else that day, I still consider it a success. Here is something that might help you be successful. Find a simple and easy thing you can do each day that is a step towards your goal. Make that small step the goal. Once you achieve that step, you can do whatever you want. The example that was used when I first heard about this was someone trying to run or walk in the morning. Their small step was, when their alarm went off, putting one foot on the ground. That was it. Once she got her foot on the ground, if she wasn't feeling up to it, she could get back in bed and go to sleep. But that small step set her up to be successful more often than not. Maybe your target could be putting on running clothes? Whatever you choose, make exercise the priority. It doesn't really matter what form of exercise, so choose something that works for you.
On the subject of "breaks", I am not sure there is much more I can say that I didn't already. But for an example, I just took a break from work by opening my laptop and coding some stuff for my website. This instance was a dockerized rclone script to sync from aws s3 to google drive. The hope is to deploy it to google cloud run so it can be automatically synced every few hours. "Breaks" should be something that can pull your interest away and consume your mind.
I hope you find something that works for you. Burnout sucks, and so does ADHD.
Thanks for addressing this - it's really important to know that only specific things will work for you and that you will only learn which is which through experience. I personally need a weird combo of structure and going by how I feel. Another friend, also with ADHD, gets less stressed when he has an exact plan that he can follow, but also the reassurance that if he doesn't follow it exactly, nothing bad will happen. Neither of us can do phone alarms/reminders but a third neurodivergent friend loves them. It really all depends on the individual.
Yes you can!
Occupational burnout has been on the ICD-11 since 2019, it's an official medical diagnosis. There are people here in Germany who get a diagnosis for burnout and then check in to a psychiatric hospital. Insurance here will even cover a couple of weeks at a wellness resort to help you recover! In the US you can use the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to protect your job for up to one year for any valid medical reason or to care for a family member for family reasons. You aren't entitled to pay during this time but your job is protected, you just need to find a doctor, probably a psychiatrist, who will write you a note to take time off of work. If you do see a psychiatrist and they are a bad one, do not start taking medication for this until you've tried other methods! Antidepressents may be the answer but you should try lifestyle changes first.
I had to use FMLA in my early twenties due to being on an antidepressent that I shouldn't have and it creating massive sleeping problems and accute psychiatric symptoms. I took eight months off of work under FMLA, i think for "Depression," and was even able to access my state disability benefits after two weeks. HR hated me and really wanted me fired but FMLA protected my job and HR knew that they couldn't retaliate or face a lawsuit after that. I went on to a management position within a year and became a stellar employee.
Having said all that, I think this is something you can possibly try and manage at home first. Maybe take a week or two staycation and really rest to get you off to a good start
Please be very cautious with this advice for Americans - we don't have anywhere near the legal workplace protections of European nations, and what little is enforceable varies from state to state. In the particularly toxic workplace I used to inhabit, in a Right-to-Work state, I knew several people who were constructively discharged for exercising FMLA rights to address health issues. In that state, they couldn't even get lawyers to represent their cases, because the laws were so bad and the courts so unfavorable.
I'd say that FMLA should be discussed with your doctor and therapist if other strategies haven't worked, with the understanding that you may be looking for a new job anyway.
Yes and no. In my case I was literally at a table about to get fired when I invoked FMLA. In OPs case they have a performance review coming up and are worried that their complete lack of production is being noticed. You do have a great point, FMLA is a drastic measure and depending on your company culture you could be targeted for it but OP needs to know all their options right now and needs to be aware that FMLA could be a lifeline
Yes, that is how it feels, I am "just done with it." I just don't care. I think about how even if I finish this feature that I hate and I'm currently dragging myself on, the next one is going to make me feel likely the same. Like programmer groundhogs day. Just done.
Yes, that is the point I am at now. In the beginning of doing this, I noticed it and felt concerned and started watching myself. It has now deteriorated to the point where I just don't care. It's like I have no self preservation left. I barely try to hide the fact I'm just sitting at my desk browsing social media.
Yes, I am in therapy. I do find therapy very helpful. I am mainly using it to unlearn detrimental thought patterns I have developed over time. I know my therapist can help me with these things I mention in this post too, but I think because I care so little about my work, because I don't feel like there's a way for me to find meaning in it, it tends to take a backseat to other matters, because I operate from the mindset of "my job is paying for my therapy, my insurance that I get from the job that I hate, is paying for the place where I can rant about how much I hate my job." What a catch-22.
Funny enough, my next therapy session is a few hours after my performance review this week. It'll be interesting to see how everything goes. I do think I can't ignore the feelings about the "lame racehorse" any more and it's going to be more important to talk about everything occuring around me having my current job.
Health insurance being tied to work has been such a disaster.
I am glad you are in therapy, and I get where you're coming from with the catch-22. Maybe focusing on these specific details you talked about in your post with your therapist and figure out ways to get through this burnout would be good. I think you're gotten lots of really good advice in this post that I agree with, and the most important thing right now is to figure out a way to rest and let your battery recharge.
Not a therapist, but it took me multiple career changes, cycles of burnout, and long-term damage to my physical and mental health to pick up this one critical message:
"I am not my job."
When you feel like your entire identity and self-worth are constructed in terms of productivity, the caste status of degree, title and honorifics, and an assortment of assigned milestone achievements... this is not healthy. Racehorses evolved with running as only one aspect of their lives, a survival response to threat, and running in terror all the time kills them. Likewise, making your life all about work and fear causes the atrophy of your capacity for the other worthwhile, pleasurable, restorative activities you need to live.
It's taken me a great deal of time in therapy and personal effort to overcome the deep propaganda we're soaking in - that a person's value is only in productivity, that you must carry your weight and then some to justify your existence, that you must keep limping around the track faster than the other horses, or submit to the gun.
This is the internalized propaganda that keeps people submissive and compliant, competing instead of cooperating with each other. These are the whips in our heads which require no overseer to wield.
In the context of work... do not "give it your all". There isn't a mystical binary where you're either giving 110% or "slacking" - it helps to keep in mind that you're allowed to have intermediate gears.
Do the work you're assigned, without looking over your shoulder at everyone else to make sure you've done enough extra to keep your position secure.
If the work you're assigned cannot be completed within reasonable working hours, always talk with your manager about redistributing workload. You should never be doing more than one person's job on a recurring basis, especially if it means you can't take breaks or vacations when you need to.
Never volunteer for additional work unless you're genuinely interested in the project.
Talk with your coworkers and plant the seeds of an attitude that stops work and life from bleeding together until indistinguishable. Normalize turning off work notifications and not answering e-mails immediately at all hours and on vacation.
These boundaries on work are your entitlement as a human being, a form of self-care that's meant to allow your growth as something other than a tool of capital. If you feel your work is a duty and means of service to others, think of having boundaries as preserving your capacity to care for them.
Some of this resistance to exploitation may come as news to people in the formerly in-demand and sheltered branches of software engineering. You're now exposed, for better or worse, to the same cost-cutting, outsourcing, race to the bottom, automation/AI substitution as people in other specialized high-skill jobs. If you don't want to be on a treadmill that keeps getting speeded up, worked harder for less pay, it's time to organize and push back.
Thank you for sharing. I appreciate your support for people to have strong boundaries. It is indeed an important value to cultivate and wield.
I'd like to think I have been slowly shedding various calloused layers of "I am not just x" like "I am not my job," I think it's just very hard to fully internalize such thoughts. Especially, like you mentioned, because of the "capitalist grind good" mindset we are raised in—it is not human, it is machine.
It might also be time to consider candidness with your manager - that you're unsatisfied with the work you're doing, and would like something new. If you've been doing "satisfactory" (I'm going to guess that you'd deprecate yourself here) work for several years, then it's reasonable to believe the company can help you find a different role because it's cheaper to reuse you than replace a known good worker.
I know that in the depths of burnout, it can seem impossible to imagine a less painful situation. Nonetheless, you might want to investigate job crafting and other strategies for making your work more fulfilling without having to leave and start over elsewhere.
It’s not exactly comparable but I’ve felt similarly at times, and it has usually come at the end of a long time in a particular industry. Changing industries (although always in the software side of whatever business I end up in) has, so far, always refreshed me. I’ve been writing software for about 30 years, and I figure I’ve had roughly 7 mini-careers in that time.
Yes, a change of software development practices would likely be a good refresh. If I do leave this job that has me feeling like I do in this post, I have rudimentary plans to take a break for some months, and then start working on some hobby software projects. I hope those projects would at least help with a later job search in tech, because I'd have more technologies and projects under my belt. Because I know it wouldn't be fair for me to completely write off an entire career in software development just because I got burnt out after several years in my very first job in the industry.
If you are not depressed outside of work, then are you depressed for some reason because of work? You feared becoming the lame racehorse, so you set out of the gates at high speed. Do you even want to be a racehorse? Yes, we all need money to survive especially in this whack economy. But it sounds like you worked really hard and made huge sacrifices for something that you didn't particularly want to do.
And that's totally okay. It's okay to work a job that you feel is your calling. It's also okay to not have much career ambition as long as your physical needs are met. Plenty of people don't love their work and choose to spend their paycheck on things that they love outside of work. Some people can work a job they don't love at a company they don't like. Others need to work at a company they love in order to tolerate the job they don't love. And there are people who can't work for anyone else, they need to be their own boss to be happy.
Something has to change in order for you to figure out what combination of things works for you. If you trust your manager, they would be your first internal resource for career advice. They could try to match you with upskilling opportunities such as shadowing a manager, to see if that is a path you are interested in/better suited for. However, you would have to be performing well in order to gain your manager's trust. If you feel that your performance has been poor, and that matches with their assessment, then be prepared to discuss why. You said that you don't care about meetings and Jira, but that is a big part of the job and an even bigger part of becoming a lead/manager. You want to make software that is meaningful and that people enjoy. Are you frustrated by current ticket processes or inefficient meetings? Are you having a hard time connecting to the bigger picture - the company's mission or the impact of the work that you do? Your company recently underwent a layoff; have you absorbed random responsibilities of your old teammates and become stretched thin? A good manager does their best to address employee concerns and report up, if the issue is that leadership needs to make changes. But if your company refuses to meet you halfway, then it's probably not a good fit in the long run.
You don't have to start looking at other jobs immediately, but it's not a bad idea to start getting your ducks in a row based on what you've described here. Looking for a job is a part-time job in itself. There is no way to get around that. What you can do is break the process down into smaller tasks for a couple of hours each week. It's okay if it takes multiple weeks to finish each item. Secure your most recent professional references, update your resume, write down your own log of the projects/achievements/documents you've owned at work for the past 5 years, update whatever social media for jobs is popular in your country (such as LinkedIn), signal your availability to recruiters on your profile, set up email subscriptions to desired job alerts, etc. You could try applying for non-software developer roles if your skills are transferrable, but the market is tough right now as you know.
I have a close contact who got a computer job for a university 20 years ago with nothing but a sql cert. His original degree was in rhetoric.
He now runs their databases and I don't know what else but he is a highly valued employee who likes his job.
I want to add in a concept that therapists who practice DBT communicate to patients, and it's helped me greatly.
Dialectic is a term for things that can be two sided. It encourages you to use the word "and" instead of "but." An example from my life that may resonate with you somewhat: My employer isn't doing well which is creating internal fears that I might be laid off, AND this extra slack time I am able to put towards schoolwork is making school easier for me. I'm validating the negative side while also acknowledging that there is something positive to come out of it.
Hey I think others have given you excellent advice, but I just want to add that I hope you find a chance to rest and rediscover joy in something.