Battling burnout ★

Is it burnout, depression or both?

I find it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what I’ve been through. The first doctor I met diagnosed me as suffering from “extreme stress”, without mentioning depression. The psychologist I met next didn’t think I had any signs of depression either, but the one after that (that I worked with for a few months with KBT) thought I showed clear signs of depression as well as being burnt-out.

No apparent reason

I’ve had large difficulties to accept the burnout because if I try to distance myself from the problem and look at it objectively from a distance, it doesn’t make sense that I would become a victim. I have all these great benefits that I’ve worked at a long time trying to obtain:

• A great family, with three amazing kids that I love with all my heart.

• Low stress from work.

  It seems if you read about burnout online, everything seems to circle around too much stress from work. Either too long hours, too many responsibilities, bad bosses, bad co-workers, too tight deadlines or a combination of it all is always the culprit.

  But I just can’t relate to any of that.

• Few and flexible working hours.

  Apart from having flexible working hours, so as long as I’m there for some meetings I can basically decide when I should work. It’s super nice to be able to take an extra hour of sleep if I woke up too early with the kids, or take an hour to do some weight lifting.

  I also don’t work too many hours. I’ve been working 80% (32h / week) since more than a year back, and I’m good at not exceeding that.

• I work remotely.

  Barring a handful of yearly trips, which I’ve been wanting to do because of social reasons, I’ve been working remotely since 4 years now. And there are some massive benefits to it, like being able to work without disturbance from my home office, using my home gym that’s right next to my office and avoiding a commute.

• I’m able to work professionally in Rust.

  Rust is a favorite language of many programmers, but finding a non-crypto Rust job is very difficult. But here I am with a Rust job. (My employer started some projects in Rust and I started working on those.)

• Good salary.

  While I could absolutely push my salary higher if I was motivated enough to switch jobs or start my own consulting business, I earn more than enough for my current needs.

It feels like the other stories about burnout always have this obvious reason for people hitting the wall (like working 80+ hours a week), but I just can’t find an easy explanation for me.

— Maybe it’s just too difficult to realize it yourself when it’s all happening? I thought I was getting over it, but maybe I’m still in it…?

Red flags

While it was (and is) difficult for me to see the cause, I did notice some of the big red flags signalling that I was getting, or already was, burnt-out:

• Things weren’t fun

  Even my favorite hobbies lost their appeal.

• I became more cynical

  — It’s not worth doing this…

  — It makes no difference…

  — This won’t help anyone…

• Lack of energy

  Despite the previous point, I still wanted to do lots of things, but I didn’t have the energy to do them.

• Difficulty falling asleep

  Even though I was constantly tired, it got harder and harder to fall asleep.

• More easily irritated

  Getting annoyed and even angry at trivial things.

• I didn’t make any progress on my side projects

  Mind you, programming in some way has been my main hobby for over a decade.

• Work performance dropped

  I didn’t get any comments from co-workers, but I felt that I wasn’t nearly as productive as I was 3-6 months previously, let alone a year or two ago.

When I list them like this it might seem like it should be easy to notice them, but it’s really not. They creep up on you and it’s hard to see them when you’re in the middle of it yourself. (It’s easier to see faults in others after all.)

The first time I thought that maybe I’m becoming burnt-out is when I was watching some fantastic TV-series (Better Call Saul and Money Heist). They were so good that I often thought about them—even dreamt of them—and I couldn’t wait to see the next episode. Yet after the amazing Better Call Saul episode with Nacho (season 6 episode 3, you know which one if you’ve seen the show) I just couldn’t make myself to see the next episode.

It’s a weird feeling when you know you love something, but you feel completely drained of joy when you think about doing it, but I can’t describe it any other way.

This can be difficult to recognize, but I did remember the same feeling of joylessness from my previous burnout episode around 8 years ago.

Seeking help

But even if I noticed some of the red flags, and I did try to make some small changes, the real wake-up call was when I was flying home from a work trip and I got this extreme headache. It was more extreme than I had ever had (and I’ve had occasional migraine attacks for years), so much that I thought I was getting a stroke or something. While the pain dissipated in a few minutes, I felt sick the whole day after.

I didn’t have a stroke—it was declared as “only” a migraine attack—but it was clear I had to take it seriously. So I did what everyone recommends: I sought professional help.

And I’m glad I did, because without it I probably would’ve crashed much harder.

The company I work for took it seriously and was incredibly helpful and were very supportive throughout the whole process. They reduced my workload, made it clear that that I could take as much time off as needed and importantly they never made me feel guilty.

Admitting that I had a problem was a difficult thing. I really wanted to hide that I went on sick leave from my partner—a very clear vote for fleeing over fighting. Maybe if I didn’t tell anyone I could continue fooling myself that everything was fine?

But I didn’t hide it, and she was also very supportive. How could I ever have thought otherwise?

What was the actual cause?

While the root cause wasn’t external stress, such as work pressure, now I think it was internal stress coming from me pressuring myself.

One big part of it is all my different projects I’ve got going. Having projects to work on has always been a source of enjoyment and pride. It’s not that I seek fame or recognition, it’s the simple and wonderful feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction of creating something that drives me.

Unfortunately, I have too many large and unfinished projects that started to stress me out because they weren’t finished, and as my productivity slowed down they stressed me out even more.

Here are of some of my ongoing software development projects:

• Finish my book: Why Cryptocurrencies?

  I only need to restyle the e-book and allow people to buy it from my site. The physical book has been done over a year ago.

• Release the first version of BitPal

  I wanted to allow people to buy my book about crypto with crypto, so I started working on my own self-hosted solution.

  It’s so close to being “done”; I’ve already done 90% so it’s only the last 90% left now.

• Finish my git implementation in Rust

  I’ve worked through one-third of Building Git (but with Rust instead of Ruby), and I would really like to continue with the fun branching and rebasing stuff.

• Rewrite the site for our grappling club

  I’d like to have member account, track billing and have some notification system for when training sessions are canceled. Simple stuff. If we ignore the idea of tracking attendance and topics of each session, so we can plan an adaptive spaced repetition curriculum to optimize learning.

  And yet, I’m stuck on getting the styling and layout on the page right.

While creating things is important to me, something else that’s even more important to me—and part of my identity—is improving my skills. It’s not about reaching some goal, but I relish the feeling of learning something new or being able to do something I previously could not.

Here’s a few things that I’m working on:

• Programming skills

  Learning new languages, tools and new ways of solving problems in a faster or simpler way.

• Strength training

  I used to think that squatting is easy. But the more I learn about it, the harder it seems.

• Grappling

  I don’t train that much (1-2 times a week), but still the learning and research continues with tons of hours of instructionals available.

• Memory training

  The main goal was to supercharge language learning by making it easier to learn lots of new words. Honestly though, it was years since I last worked on it.

It shouldn’t be like this, but I feel sad or bad when I’m not trying to improve at something.

And what stresses me out even more are the things I ”should” be doing, but haven’t started yet. For instance:

• Make a roguelike in Rust
• Create a board game
• Learn Korean, Japanese, Finnish…
• Listen to hundreds of hours in my podcast app (not including audiobooks, I use Audible for those)
• Finish dozens of programming books on my to-read list
• Finish dozens of fiction books on my to-read list
• Figure out a product I want to develop and sell
• etc …

Each of these items I list aren’t that stressful by themselves, it’s the combination of many small stressors that over time has caused me an awful amount of stress.

Things that helped me

While I did receive help from work, my family and from professionals, it’s important to realize that in the end you’re the only one who can solve your problems. So here’s a list of things that I did that I think were helpful:

• Be kind towards myself

  I try to reduce the expectations on myself, and I try not to beat myself up if I don’t do everything as quickly as I’d like to.

  But honestly, it’s really hard.

• Go outside and walk

  I didn’t like it when they told me I should go out and just walk, but honestly it was super helpful.

• Physical exercise

  Exercise has really helped me every time I’ve been feeling down, and this time is no different.

• Do things I used to enjoy

  It’s important to break the downward spiral, and forcing yourself to do the things that you used to enjoy—that you intellectually know you still enjoy—is the best way that I’ve found.

• Rest

  When your energy is low you need to stop and recharge.

The only thing that really helped me

While all of the above were helpful in the long run, the only thing that really helped me break the further decline was taking time off.

If started with a 100% sick leave for 3 weeks, followed by a 50% sick leave for 4 weeks and then a 7 weeks long summer vacation. The point was to focus on my recovery, so of course I was forbidden from working on my projects and endeavors too.

I’m convinced that even if I did everything else right (walking, trying to enjoy life etc) I wouldn’t have managed it without this break. I’ve read the opinion that the only thing that can cure a bad burnout is removing yourself from the stressful environment. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it sure felt that way for me this time.

Are you ever cured?

It’s now been a little over a year since my big wake-up call on the flight home, and it’s only now that I feel I’m myself again. I’m finally making progress on my projects again, and I can do deep work to a satisfactory degree again.

The healing process has been slow—much slower than I could’ve thought. Even though it took around a year last time to recover too, a year is a damn long time. A lesson I’ve learned (or having to re-learn) is that doing everything you can to avoid a burnout will pay off in the long run.

But the worst part is: will you ever truly get rid of it? Or is the burnout forever etched into your brain, just waiting for an opportunity to make your life miserable again?

Most people, including myself, keep repeating the same mistakes