Burnout is the state one reaches due to prolonged mental fatigue. It’s a dangerous state, and is far better to avoid getting into than to deal with getting out of.
When burnt out, you’re constantly tired, problems that should be simple to solve look like huge undertakings, logical arguments don’t make sense to you anymore, your capacity for complexity is greatly reduced, what required a little willpower previously now seems plain insurmountable.
There are a few properties of burnout that make it dangerous.
First, there’s inertia. By the time you are aware of the symptoms, burnout has already set in. Based on personal experience and observations of colleagues, I’d say there’s about a two week lag between when burnout starts and when symptoms become obvious. This means that by the time you clue in and start addressing the issues, your burnout has had two weeks to deepen. And symmetrically, any effort you put in towards recovery will take a couple of weeks to start visibly paying off. To people who are not used to this long delay between action and response, attempts at recovery can be frustrating, and easy to fall into the mindset of “nothing I do to solve this works”.
But that’s if you even notice that you’re burnt out. The second property that makes burnout so dangerous is that its main symptom is severe reduction in cognitive ability. This includes abilities like introspection. So at the time when you need to be able to observe yourself and notice problems the most, your capacity to do so is the lowest. This can make for a scary experience for people experiencing burnout for the first time — you make more mistakes than usual, the quality of your work drops, you try harder, and that just makes things worse, colleagues give you feedback, but it makes no sense to you. Why did I suddenly become stupid? Was I always stupid? Maybe I need to work harder. Thinking this way only makes matters worse, further reducing you cognitive capacity. A vicious cycle is established.
It’s cases like this when it really helps to have good personal relationships and open communication channels with your coworkers. If people you work with feel comfortable saying “listen, you’re not yourself lately, the quality of your work has dropped, you don’t take in feedback, I think you may be getting burned out,” they may play a crucial role in breaking the cycle, encouraging you to take time off, rest, and start a recovery process. They may also keep an eye on you during the whole thing, to supplement your temporarily lacking introspection faculties.
Severity of burnout depends on the specific situation, but one thing is true in general — it is far cheaper to learn to foresee and prevent burnout than to recover from it. So learn to pay attention to the following red flags:
- you feel a barrier starting tasks that you know should be quick and easy
- you have a hard time keeping complex ideas straight in your head
- you feel tired/sleepy/drowsy for multiple days in a row
- you make more mistakes than usual
- you fail at root cause analysis
- willpower seems to be lacking
- you avoid making decisions
If multiple items from this list start happening, do a self-check. Have you been working with insufficient rest for a stretch of time? Have stress levels been higher than usual? Are you not getting enough sleep? Reduce stress and workload for a few days, and you’ll probably be back to your normal self, burnout avoided. “Reducing workload” may sound like something your employment situation doesn’t easily allow, but remember, for everybody involved, including your employer, it’s cheaper to avoid your burnout than to recover from it once it sets in. So if necessary, educate your employer. Perhaps send them a link to this section.
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