lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

avatar by @citriccenobite

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.​


i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi


I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory


they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"



Bovigender (click flag for more info!)
bovigender pride flag, by @arina-artemis (click for more info)



fullmoon
@fullmoon

A common mistake I see people make is to try to address burnout using the same techniques they'd use to address stress. This is a mistake! If you're a person experiencing burnout or a manager trying to help a report deal with burnout, here is a very quick guide to dealing with burnout.

The difference between burnout and stress

The first step is learning to recognize the difference between the two:

  • stress = being under too much external pressure

    Some examples of factors that contribute to stress are:

    • overwork or too many responsibilities
    • personal issues you're grappling with (e.g. death, divorce, job loss, move)

    In other words, you have way too much on your plate that you have to deal with.

  • burnout = a lack of control

    In other words, it feels like nothing you do matters:

    • accomplishments don't translate into rewards
    • there are constant intrusions into your time and space that wreck your ability to plan
    • your social/work/political environment is dysfunctional and hampers progress
    • you're exhibiting learned helplessness

Now, burnout can sometimes be caused by stress, but a lot of the time it's actually not stress-related! In my experience as a manager it's actually pretty normal for people who are not stressed (e.g. great work/life balance, no deadline pressure) to still feel work-related burnout.

A pretty common example of non-stress-related burnout is a person doing consistently excellent work above their pay grade and not getting a raise or promotion of some sort. That typically leads to burnout fairly quickly, even if they didn't have to push themselves to do so.

Deeper dive into burnout

I want to explain burnout a bit more to really drive home what burnout really is.

I like to say that the opposite of burnout is excitement or arousal: the feeling that reward or victory is imminent or just within reach. You know what you want, you know how to get there, and you have all the tools and opportunity necessary to do so.

But real life isn't always like that ideal. In fact, real life usually isn't like that but we have some capacity to tolerate that. However, if life departs too much from that ideal and we feel like everything we do is pointless then we start to burn out.

For example, suppose that you're trying to get a promotion at work. If you don't know how to get promoted or management keeps stringing you along without ever actually promoting you then you're more likely to burn out because you don't feel like you know what you have to do to get there. In contrast, if management consistently keeps their promises or rewards key accomplishments/deliverables with promotions then you're less likely to burn out.

Another example is things intruding onto your plans. For example: it can be very frustrating when you do have a clear plan of action for how to make things better (at work or otherwise) but unexpected demands on your time keep interfering with you executing on that plan. Those unexpected interruptions could be support requests, changes to your company's roadmap, fires that need to be put out, etc. Or even just people physically walking up to your desk (if you don't work remote) and intruding on your personal space frequently. In contrast, if you have the ability to do deep and focused work for extended periods of time you're less likely to burn out because you will internalize that you have the space and control you need to accomplish the goals you set out for yourself.

So far all of these examples have been work-related, but you can also burn out in non-work-related contexts, too. For example, politics is something that can frequently trigger burnout in people. If you feel like your government's political system is dysfunctional then you're highly likely to burnout because if something's bothering you then you will feel like there isn't a path forward for you to fix it.

Treating burnout

The reason you want to distinguish between burnout and stress is so that you can recognize that stress reduction strategies are not necessarily burnout reduction strategies.

For example, in the context of work going on vacation is a great stress-reduction strategy but typically NOT a burnout-reduction strategy, because if you don't have the ability to control your environment or translate actions into rewards then going on a vacation doesn't fix that. Once you get back to work all the same dysfunctions that led you to experience burnout will still be there and still exacerbating your burnout.

The way to fix burnout is to create an environment where you feel like you are in control of your destiny. The exact fix depends on the nature of the burnout, but some common themes are:

  • fixing dysfunction

    … where that's work-related dysfunction, relationship dysfunction, or political dysfunction. Not only will this help you create an environment where you are more in control of your destiny, but also the very act of fixing the dysfunction will itself give you a greater sense of control, too!

  • leaving

    The ability to exit from a bad situation can sometimes be the greatest sense of control one can have, whether that is:

    • quitting a job / finding a new job
    • leaving a relationship
    • moving to a new municipality/state/province/country

    Obligatory meme:

I think it's also important to stress some approaches that do NOT work for reducing burnout:

  • tolerating or making peace with burnout

    Coping is NOT a good burnout-reduction strategy, because that's just reinforcing the loss of control

  • working harder / powering through burnout

    This won't work because the nature of burnout is that you can't achieve your goals in the first place, despite your best efforts, and working harder won't fix that.


ValerieElysee
@ValerieElysee
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in reply to @fullmoon's post:

i often burn out on personal projects and i think this accurately explains why. thanks!

this also seems to explain why adhd folk so quickly drop a project after the hyperfocus: during the hyperfocus reward is always right there, but when it ends suddenly the reward would take much more work to get there. and unless it happens to be a project which you really actually are committed to, it may not make sense to put in that work

The part of burnout reminds me ofmy e ecutive dysfunction and reward deficiency syndromes, in that i get burned out remarkably fast for no reason, nothing i do feel like it matters, and i often wonder why i bother doing anything

Thank you for sharing this. It wasn't until the end where you talked about remedies for burnout that everything clicked. I was in a really bad marriage, and I remember that last year when I was literally running around trying to address everything I could see but nothing was getting any better. And, yeah... eventually I left... but not after reaching a point of exhaustion and almost complete loss of control of my life...