I survived burnout, or How to stop a hamster in a wheel
Hello, Habr. Not so long ago, I read with great interest here several articles with sound recommendations to take care of employees before they âburn outâ, cease to produce the expected result and ultimately benefit the company. And not one - on the "other side of the barricades", that is, from those who really burned out and most importantly, coped with this. I did it, received recommendations from a former employer and found a job even better.
Actually, what to do for the leader and the team is written quite well in â Burnt employees: is there a way out â ( uyga ) and â Burn, burn clearly until it goes out â ( Lisichkina ). A short spoiler from me: itâs enough to be an attentive leader and take care of employees, the rest is different tools in terms of efficiency.
But I am convinced that â80% of the causes of burnout lie in the personal characteristics of the employee. The conclusion is based on my experience, but I think this is also true for other burned out ones. Moreover, it seems to me that more responsible, worried about their job and outwardly promising, flexible workers burn out more often than others.
An allegory with a hamster may seem offensive to someone, but it most accurately reflects what happened. First, the hamster joyfully jumps into the wheel, then dizzy from speed and adrenaline, and then only the wheel remains in his life ... Actually, how I got off this carousel, as well as honest reflection and unsolicited advice on how to survive burnout - under the cut.
For seven years I worked in a web studio. When I started, HR saw me as a promising employee: motivated, enthusiastic, ready for big loads, stress-resistant, with the necessary soft skills, able to work in a team and support corporate values. I just got out of maternity leave, I missed the load on my brain very much and was eager for battle. The first year or two of my wishes came true: I was actively developing, went to conferences and took on all sorts of interesting tasks. It took a lot of time and effort to work, but she charged me with energy.
The increase that followed two years later was seen as a logical continuation of the efforts. But with increasing responsibility, the percentage increased, the percentage of creative tasks decreased - most of the time I negotiated, was responsible for the work of the department, and my regime quietly became formally âmore flexibleâ, and in fact - around the clock. Relations with the team gradually deteriorated: I considered them lazy people, they considered me a hysterical person, and looking back, I think that they were not so wrong. Nevertheless, then I imagined that I almost reached the top of the Maslow pyramid (where self-actualization is).
So, without a vacation and with a very conditional weekend, several more years passed. By the seventh year of work, my motivation came down to the thought âif only they hadnât touchedâ, and I increasingly imagined very realistically how people in white coats were taking me out of the office.
How did this happen? How did I get to the point where I could no longer cope on my own? And most importantly, why did this happen so unnoticed? Today I think that the main reasons are perfectionism, perception traps (or cognitive distortions) and inertia. Actually, the materiel is rather interestingly described in the posts mentioned above, but repetition is the mother of learning, so there is a little less interesting theory on this subject.
Surely you know what automatism is - that is, the reproduction of actions without conscious control. This evolutionary mechanism of the psyche allows us to be faster, higher, stronger when performing repetitive tasks and spend less effort on it.
And then watch your hands. The brain, in an effort to save us some more energy, instead of looking for a new solution, as it were, says: âHey, it always worked like that, let's repeat this action?â As a result, itâs easier for us to act according to a once given and many times reproduced (even incorrect) pattern than to change something. âThe psyche is inertial,â said my acquaintance professor of neuropsychology.
When I burned out, most of the actions performed on the "autopilot". But this is not the automatism that allows you to quickly transform the accumulated experience and knowledge into an optimal solution to a new problem. Rather, he let me not think about what I was doing at all. From the buzz of the researcher there is nothing left. One process was replaced by another, but their number did not decrease. This is the norm for any living project, but for me it has become a cyclical function that makes the hamster run in circles. And I was running.
Formally, I continued to produce a result that was not excellent, but stably satisfactory, and this masked the problem from the project manager and the team. âWhy touch something if it works?â
Why didnât I suggest discussing the conditions? Why didnât I ask you to revise my schedule or in the end didnât switch to another project? The fact is that I was a boringnerd- perfectionist who fell into the trap of perception.
There is such a scientific joke about how to boil a frog in boiling water . The hypothesis for the experiment was as follows: if you put a frog in a pan with cold water and slowly heat the tank, the frog will not be able to adequately assess the danger due to a gradual change in conditions and will boil up without realizing what is happening.
The assumption has not been confirmed, but it perfectly illustrates the perception trap. When changes occur gradually, they are practically not fixed by consciousness, and at every moment of time it seems âit always has beenâ. As a result, when I had a heavy collar around my neck, I felt it as part of my own neck. But, as you know, the horse worked the most on the collective farm, and did not become chairman.
Surely you have seen such sufferers who experience torment when something is N E AND DE A L N O. In some parallel universe (as well as in "hungry" HR) this is often assessed as a positive quality. But everything is good in moderation, and now I think that in reality the first ones that burnout eats up are precisely the perfectionists.
They are essentially maximalists, and itâs easier to die on a treadmill than not to reach the finish line. They believe that they can literally do anything, just push it, then more, and more, and more. But an illiterate distribution of resources is fraught with failures: deadlines, forces, and ultimately roofs. That is why sensible HR is wary of employees with "very_ burning eyes" and "loyal fanatics of their own business." Yes, overpowering the five-year plan in three years is real, but only if you take into account the laws of physics and you have a clear plan and resources. And when the hamster enthusiastically jumps into the wheel, he has no goal, he just wants to run.
Requirements and responsibilities gradually grew, the project gained momentum, I still loved what I was doing, and could not reflect in time when I âbroke downâ. Just once, on the surface of theswamp of consciousness, an idea surfaced that the circle of my interests narrowed to the needs of a hamster. Eat, sleep - and in the wheel. Then eat again, and it is better to drink coffee, it invigorates. Already invigorates? To drink more, and so on in a circle. I lost the desire to leave my home somewhere other than work. Communication not at work began to tire, but at work - to bring to tears. Now I canât believe that this alarm bell was so hard to notice even for myself. Every day I talked for at least several hours with the project team and the leader, and the reaction to my non-verbal and verbal signals was perplexing. Such sincere bewilderment, when a proven and reliable mechanism suddenly fails.
Then I began to sleep. Coming home from work, she closed the task, and then fell into bed. I woke up at the weekend, and without getting out of bed, I closed other taskes behind the laptop. On Monday I woke up tired, sometimes with a headache.
A few months of constant drowsiness gave way to insomnia. I quickly fell into a heavy sleep and just as easily woke up after a few hours, to again doze off briefly for half an hour before the alarm clock. It bored even more than drowsiness. I went to a specialist when I clearly understood: my life consists of two cycles - work and sleep. At that moment, I no longer felt like a hamster. More often than not, I looked like a galley slave who, from prolonged exertion, got his fingers so tight that he was unable to release the oar.
And yet, the turning point was not the work of a specialist, but the recognition of the problem and the fact that I could not cope. When I refused claims to control myself and my body and asked for help, the process of returning to a full life began.
The restoration took about a year and still continues, but from my own experience I formulated unsolicited advice on changing the situation, which may be useful to someone.
Actually, somewhere at this stage, the psyche is already stable enough to decide how to live on and what to change: a job, a project or a screensaver on the desktop. And most importantly, a person is capable of constructive dialogue and can leave without burning bridges, but retaining a reputation and possibly even receiving recommendations.
Personally, I realized that I canât work in the same place. Of course, they immediately offered me better conditions, but that no longer made sense. âTimeliness is an eternal dramaâ - sang Talkov :)
It is probably better to refrain from a direct mention of burnout. It is unlikely that someone will want to understand the features of your inner world, especially at the first meeting. I think itâs more profitable to formulate it more vaguely, for example: âI read the research that on average six years have been working in one position in IT. There is a feeling that my time has come. â
And yet, at the meeting with HR, to the predictable question âWhy did you leave your previous positionâ, I honestly answered that I had burned out.
âWhy do you think this will not happen again?â
- Unfortunately, no one is safe from this, not even the best of your employees. It took me seven years to get to this state, I think, during this time, much can be done. And I still have recommendations :)
A year has already passed from the moment I finished the drug therapy, and six months from the day when I changed my job. I returned to the long-abandoned sport, Iâm mastering a new sphere, I enjoy the free time and, it seems, I finally learned how to distribute time and energy, while maintaining balance. So the hamsterâs wheel can be stopped. But itâs better, of course, not to go there at all.
Actually, what to do for the leader and the team is written quite well in â Burnt employees: is there a way out â ( uyga ) and â Burn, burn clearly until it goes out â ( Lisichkina ). A short spoiler from me: itâs enough to be an attentive leader and take care of employees, the rest is different tools in terms of efficiency.
But I am convinced that â80% of the causes of burnout lie in the personal characteristics of the employee. The conclusion is based on my experience, but I think this is also true for other burned out ones. Moreover, it seems to me that more responsible, worried about their job and outwardly promising, flexible workers burn out more often than others.
An allegory with a hamster may seem offensive to someone, but it most accurately reflects what happened. First, the hamster joyfully jumps into the wheel, then dizzy from speed and adrenaline, and then only the wheel remains in his life ... Actually, how I got off this carousel, as well as honest reflection and unsolicited advice on how to survive burnout - under the cut.
Timeline
For seven years I worked in a web studio. When I started, HR saw me as a promising employee: motivated, enthusiastic, ready for big loads, stress-resistant, with the necessary soft skills, able to work in a team and support corporate values. I just got out of maternity leave, I missed the load on my brain very much and was eager for battle. The first year or two of my wishes came true: I was actively developing, went to conferences and took on all sorts of interesting tasks. It took a lot of time and effort to work, but she charged me with energy.
The increase that followed two years later was seen as a logical continuation of the efforts. But with increasing responsibility, the percentage increased, the percentage of creative tasks decreased - most of the time I negotiated, was responsible for the work of the department, and my regime quietly became formally âmore flexibleâ, and in fact - around the clock. Relations with the team gradually deteriorated: I considered them lazy people, they considered me a hysterical person, and looking back, I think that they were not so wrong. Nevertheless, then I imagined that I almost reached the top of the Maslow pyramid (where self-actualization is).
So, without a vacation and with a very conditional weekend, several more years passed. By the seventh year of work, my motivation came down to the thought âif only they hadnât touchedâ, and I increasingly imagined very realistically how people in white coats were taking me out of the office.
How did this happen? How did I get to the point where I could no longer cope on my own? And most importantly, why did this happen so unnoticed? Today I think that the main reasons are perfectionism, perception traps (or cognitive distortions) and inertia. Actually, the materiel is rather interestingly described in the posts mentioned above, but repetition is the mother of learning, so there is a little less interesting theory on this subject.
Automatism and inertia
Surely you know what automatism is - that is, the reproduction of actions without conscious control. This evolutionary mechanism of the psyche allows us to be faster, higher, stronger when performing repetitive tasks and spend less effort on it.
And then watch your hands. The brain, in an effort to save us some more energy, instead of looking for a new solution, as it were, says: âHey, it always worked like that, let's repeat this action?â As a result, itâs easier for us to act according to a once given and many times reproduced (even incorrect) pattern than to change something. âThe psyche is inertial,â said my acquaintance professor of neuropsychology.
When I burned out, most of the actions performed on the "autopilot". But this is not the automatism that allows you to quickly transform the accumulated experience and knowledge into an optimal solution to a new problem. Rather, he let me not think about what I was doing at all. From the buzz of the researcher there is nothing left. One process was replaced by another, but their number did not decrease. This is the norm for any living project, but for me it has become a cyclical function that makes the hamster run in circles. And I was running.
Formally, I continued to produce a result that was not excellent, but stably satisfactory, and this masked the problem from the project manager and the team. âWhy touch something if it works?â
Why didnât I suggest discussing the conditions? Why didnât I ask you to revise my schedule or in the end didnât switch to another project? The fact is that I was a boring
How to cook a frog
There is such a scientific joke about how to boil a frog in boiling water . The hypothesis for the experiment was as follows: if you put a frog in a pan with cold water and slowly heat the tank, the frog will not be able to adequately assess the danger due to a gradual change in conditions and will boil up without realizing what is happening.
The assumption has not been confirmed, but it perfectly illustrates the perception trap. When changes occur gradually, they are practically not fixed by consciousness, and at every moment of time it seems âit always has beenâ. As a result, when I had a heavy collar around my neck, I felt it as part of my own neck. But, as you know, the horse worked the most on the collective farm, and did not become chairman.
Perfectionist Hell
Surely you have seen such sufferers who experience torment when something is N E AND DE A L N O. In some parallel universe (as well as in "hungry" HR) this is often assessed as a positive quality. But everything is good in moderation, and now I think that in reality the first ones that burnout eats up are precisely the perfectionists.
They are essentially maximalists, and itâs easier to die on a treadmill than not to reach the finish line. They believe that they can literally do anything, just push it, then more, and more, and more. But an illiterate distribution of resources is fraught with failures: deadlines, forces, and ultimately roofs. That is why sensible HR is wary of employees with "very_ burning eyes" and "loyal fanatics of their own business." Yes, overpowering the five-year plan in three years is real, but only if you take into account the laws of physics and you have a clear plan and resources. And when the hamster enthusiastically jumps into the wheel, he has no goal, he just wants to run.
The day I broke
Requirements and responsibilities gradually grew, the project gained momentum, I still loved what I was doing, and could not reflect in time when I âbroke downâ. Just once, on the surface of the
Then I began to sleep. Coming home from work, she closed the task, and then fell into bed. I woke up at the weekend, and without getting out of bed, I closed other taskes behind the laptop. On Monday I woke up tired, sometimes with a headache.
A few months of constant drowsiness gave way to insomnia. I quickly fell into a heavy sleep and just as easily woke up after a few hours, to again doze off briefly for half an hour before the alarm clock. It bored even more than drowsiness. I went to a specialist when I clearly understood: my life consists of two cycles - work and sleep. At that moment, I no longer felt like a hamster. More often than not, I looked like a galley slave who, from prolonged exertion, got his fingers so tight that he was unable to release the oar.
Rescue technique
And yet, the turning point was not the work of a specialist, but the recognition of the problem and the fact that I could not cope. When I refused claims to control myself and my body and asked for help, the process of returning to a full life began.
The restoration took about a year and still continues, but from my own experience I formulated unsolicited advice on changing the situation, which may be useful to someone.
- If burnout has reached the stage when physical symptoms appear, first âmask yourselfâ, that is, help yourself survive. Insomnia, lack of appetite or uncontrolled overeating, unexplained pain, pressure surges, tachycardia or other deterioration in well-being - it is now important to stabilize the physical condition. Based on my symptoms, I immediately turned to a therapist. The specialist predictably asked about the rest and prescribed sleeping pills and tranquilizers. There were some obvious recommendations: to take a break at work, to establish a strict regime of the working day (three times ha). Then I was so exhausted that it was less energy-consuming to leave everything as it is (inertia, heartless you ...).
- Accept that change is inevitable. Since you ended up where you were, it is obvious that somewhere there was a
bug, anincorrect pattern, a repeating erroneous function. You shouldnât leave immediately, but you will have to reconsider at least the daily regimen and your priorities. Change is inevitable, and you need to let it happen. - Recognize that there will be no instant effect. Most likely, you did not immediately reach what you reached. Recovery will also take some time, and itâs better not to set yourself the bar, deadlines or goals. In general, giving yourself time in constant deadlines, shifting priority from work to our own self-preservation - it was as obvious as difficult. But without this, no pills would help. However, if nothing has changed at all during the month of this stage, you should consult with a specialist on changing tactics or find another specialist.
- Break the habit of pushing yourself. Most likely, on some moral-volitional ones you reached the state when the word âwantâ disappeared from your vocabulary, and your motivation is a long dead horse. At this stage, it is important to hear in yourself at least some kind of spontaneous desire and support it. After two weeks of taking regular pills, I first wanted to go to a cosmetics store along the way. I spent a maximum of ten minutes there, remembering why I had come at all, and looking at the labels, but this was the first improvement.
- Follow the recommendations and donât dismiss opportunities. It is not yet clear what is next and how to make plans for the future. Therefore, the optimal strategy is to simply follow the recommendations of those you trust and be open to new opportunities. Personally, I was very afraid to depend on medication. Therefore, as soon as I felt improvement, I refused pills. After a few days, bed and sleep began to pull me very familiar, and I realized that it was better to undergo the entire course of treatment.
- Switch or expand the angle of view. This will give an understanding that life is not limited to one job (or one stack). Almost any non-working, new activity for you that will require attention is suitable. I needed money, so I continued to work and chose courses that could not be paid if I was interviewed. Infrequent, but intense offline sessions took place in different cities. New impressions, new people, informal atmosphere - I watched and realized that there was life outside the office. The sensations were as if I were on Mars, not flying out of the Earth.
Actually, somewhere at this stage, the psyche is already stable enough to decide how to live on and what to change: a job, a project or a screensaver on the desktop. And most importantly, a person is capable of constructive dialogue and can leave without burning bridges, but retaining a reputation and possibly even receiving recommendations.
Personally, I realized that I canât work in the same place. Of course, they immediately offered me better conditions, but that no longer made sense. âTimeliness is an eternal dramaâ - sang Talkov :)
How to look for work after burnout?
It is probably better to refrain from a direct mention of burnout. It is unlikely that someone will want to understand the features of your inner world, especially at the first meeting. I think itâs more profitable to formulate it more vaguely, for example: âI read the research that on average six years have been working in one position in IT. There is a feeling that my time has come. â
And yet, at the meeting with HR, to the predictable question âWhy did you leave your previous positionâ, I honestly answered that I had burned out.
âWhy do you think this will not happen again?â
- Unfortunately, no one is safe from this, not even the best of your employees. It took me seven years to get to this state, I think, during this time, much can be done. And I still have recommendations :)
A year has already passed from the moment I finished the drug therapy, and six months from the day when I changed my job. I returned to the long-abandoned sport, Iâm mastering a new sphere, I enjoy the free time and, it seems, I finally learned how to distribute time and energy, while maintaining balance. So the hamsterâs wheel can be stopped. But itâs better, of course, not to go there at all.
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