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I know what you might think: Not me.
Im not the kind of person to burnout!
I know how to manage my stress.
I know how to manage challenges.
Im in the control of my life!
Burnout is only for the others… till it hit you.
I was exhausted, angry, and I had strong physical symptoms, like dizziness and headaches.
I had to stop working for months to come back to a normal state of mind.
Indeed, burnout is more a spectrum than a definitive state.
If you are at the very beginning of the Burnout Road, you have a mild burnout condition.
If you are in theCave of the Burnout Vampire, you have a severe one.
On this delightful and bucolic description, lets look at the Burnout Road from above.
What is burnout?
Its important to understand how people came to speak about burnout before trying to define it.
Its true for technologies too.
The concept of burnout was first described by the psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974.
Professor Christian Maslach and her colleagues then took over his studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Shes still considered the most preeminent scholar in the field.
She extended burnout studies to other profession than medical and social related ones.
More precisely, she studied professions requiring creativity, problem solving or mentoring.
The kind of work a developer would do.
The studies show that burnout is a preeminent problem which exists in the entire world.
Many countries still dont recognize burnout as a valid diagnosis, for example.
First thing first, the burnout condition isalwayslinked to your job.
The definition speaks aboutchronic stresstoo: its more than a bad day, its something which happens repeatedly.
Everybody responds to chronic stress more or less differently.
Freudenberger found that the dedicated and the committed employees have more chance to burnout.
They have significant amount of emotional work and empathy, personal involvement, and intrinsic motivation.
There is two important things which can create burnout: your own personality and the environment you work in.
Learning to detect them early is a very valuable skill before your burnout takes a more severe form.
Be attentive to these signs:
These are clear indicators that youre in the Poisonous Land of Cynicism.
We need motivating goals in our life to feel useful.
Now, it seems to be gone.
When you wake up the morning to go to work, you feel already exhausted.
You didnt throw a big party or smoked anything illegal, but the mental fog youre in is real.
There are multiple levels of exhaustion:
Exhaustion is a strong sign that your burnout is real.
Some studies suggest that exhaustion is mandatory to take theBurnout Road.
You dont really want to go to work every day, but whatever, you better pay the bills.
This will be worst if youre a beginner who has tendency to put every faults on yourself.
Working less wont solve a burnout, at least not entirely.
But if you have other burnout symptoms going on, they will continue to evolve and poison your life.
Furthermore, you might havea normal workload and experience burnout anyway.
Lets not forget that programming is isolating.
If you work non-stop, you will spend your days alone.
People have tendencies to only trust what they see.
The idea of a developer only working when hes behind his computer, for example, is wrong.
Bugs and features populate our brain even when were doing something else.
As a consequence, its not always easy to see if a developer overwork.
If you have other examples, feel free to let a comment below.
This can be due to a lack of trust.
They want a total control on you and what youre doing.
We have to do that because I said so will be their mantra.
It can be more subtle than that: they might listen to you but never take any action.
They might not let you experimenting with your ideas, too.
What are the consequences, you might ask?
A lack of control and autonomy is a comfy nest for chronic stress.
It means as well that you wont learn a lot either.
We need to experiment and make mistakes for that.
Your colleagues
For many of us, were working most of our lifetime.
Hence, our coworkers affect our life significantly, too.
Human interactions can bring the best as well as the worst.
If you have more severe problem like harassment or bullying, run away from your current job.
They reward some talents because ofvisible achievementstheyve accomplished, forgetting other employees who might bring value more quietly.
They forget that:
If youre a manager, keep in mind that work is not always something visible.
Rewards and feedback should be given personally, and employees shouldnt feel compared to others.
Values and entropy
Psychological safety
Psychological safety needs to beensured in a company.
It means that you are not afraid to express yourself, experimenting, and admitting youre wrong.
Judge on what a companys doing, not on what they are saying.
Values
Another thing carried by a company culture are the companys values themselves.
Whats the goal, the mission of the company?
Why do they want to grow their business?
The difficulties come when your values mismatch the companys.
Would you feel motivated to work for them, every single day?
This is a value by itself.
An absence of long term vision can confuse everybody.
This will damage your motivation and your commitment.
Preventing or solving burnout
Nobody wants to burnout.
Preventing it is better than trying to recover from it.
What can you do?
it’s crucial that you be able to explain them and to illustrate them with concrete examples.
Youre a problem solver after all, and the first step is to define the problem.
If you have some colleagues you trust, speak about your discoveries with them first.
Social support inside your company (as well as outside!)
can help you tremendously.
Dont isolate yourself
Then, speak about your concerns with your managers.
Even if developers can feel ashamed about burning out, keeping the silence wont help anybody.
Heck, speaking about it might even help the whole industry and encourage other developers to follow your path!
you’re free to see it as another problem which needs to be solved.
Even better: speak to your managerswiththe colleagues who agree with you.
If you have some possible solutions in mind, its even better.
you could speak about them and see what can be done.
There are exceptions, of course, but they need to have a very solid business model.
Not everybody is McDonald, especially when we speak about startups.
However, the management didnt do anything.
I stayed in the company anyway, trying to solve everything.
This was a big mistake and it didnt end well.
If they dont listen to you now, they wont listen to you in the future.
You cant enforce your help, especially if nobody asked for it.
In that case, find another and better company to work with.
Weeks or months can seem an eternity when youre burnout.
Listen to yourself, and dont play the superhero which can endure everything forever.
Meditation is a good way for me to get some information about my mental state, for example.
Ask yourself these questions from time to time.
Dont put pressure on yourself.
Youll find the answers, and they even might change overtime.
Knowing yourself well can help you find ajob which is aligned with your values, too.
Its the best way to prevent a burnout.
Something inspirational you enjoy and you’ve got the option to learn from is the best bet.
It could be another creative activity, like drawing or writing, for example.
It doesnt cost anything to try new things, you just need a bit of courage not to procrastinate.
A hobby is best when it brings you some sense of accomplishment.
make a run at learn a new language for example and experiment with it.
Begin a side project which really interest you.
Dont expect too much, focus on the process, and enjoy!
A playful state is looking at things like a child.
You want to play, to have fun with whatever youre doing, without expecting any result.
Youll know it when youll be out of your job, trying to recover.
Actually, you should seek one as soon as you feel the need to do so.
Your health, mental or physical, is the most important thing you have.
It means that the culture of the company needs to nurture these ideas.
To summarize, what did we learn in this article?
you’ve got the option to read the piecehere.
