A - To look at the nature?
P - Women to have.
A - Burnt out?
P - Burned out.
I did not expect this from the Portuguese. I myself recently told everyone that programmers in Portugal are not so programmers that they go surfing after work, play tennis and run marathons. Here, by the way, is one of them (I want to note that there, behind, another 13 km of people of the same density):
A bit of background. P is an architect in my former team. And in my former team only we two worked. The rest just pretended to be working, organizing 6 meetings a day to discuss how to write a cycle or how to name a method, so that it would be easier to support in the future. Actually, he chose what and how to do, and I did while the rest discussed how to do it. But in addition to a big load at work, he did his own project at home. So the daily load on his stronger brain was about 13 hours a day. Which led him to think about Thailand, and me to the desire to quickly leave such a team and think about how I myself can avoid such a fate in the future.
Here are some signs of burnout, issued by psychologists (more precisely, Gerald Greenberg, if anyone is interested). If you find at least three of them at home, it's time to think:
Constant fatigue
It's not that you forgot to drink a vitamin in the morning or did not get enough sleep.
The thing is that you sleep 8 hours a day, eat normally and you have no bad habits, but you have complete apathy, laziness and spinning in your head only "as if to lie down as soon as possible on your chic sofa."
Trouble sleeping
This is when you lie at one o’clock in the morning, and the hand brake in the brain did not work and you do not leave thoughts that your team leader is an idiot or what bad code you wrote yesterday.
Appetite problems
There are two sides. Either you do not want to eat, or you want too much. The desire to have coffee with a cake on hand, as well as the unreasonable desire to put something edible in your mouth 20 minutes after lunch - that’s it.
Anxiety
Everything is simple here. If it feels like you are waiting for a tiger attack, sitting on the couch and looking at memes with seals, then something is clearly wrong.
Forgetfulness and decreased attention
If you forgot where you parked your car and the name of your mother-in-law, although a month ago you could retell all the works of Pushkin, then you should think about it. Also, if you arrived home on a vending machine, not understanding how it turned out that you did not notice a single beautiful girl in the transport, a bad smelling trash in the yard and don’t remember where you spilled coffee from your pants, then you need to urgently rest from work .
Health problems
Again, if you are actually a peppy guy, but recently you have a strong heartbeat, sweating, chest pain, headache, dizziness and darkening after tying shoelaces, then this can all be an indicator of burnout. By the way, if you are in a state of burnout for too long, then all these mild illnesses can develop into quite serious health problems. For example, infectious diseases, flu with complications, hair loss and further down the list.
Depression
Sadness and hopelessness, complemented by thoughts that no one needs you. We add here more malice for everyone and everything, irritability and distrust of others. We get a great cocktail for suicide or the desire to repeat the "exploits" of Eric Harris.
Isolation and Alienation
You want to become the hero of the movie “Home Alone”, but at the same time so that no one ever returns. You don’t even want to get close to your inbox, don’t want to call even your best friends, don’t want anyone to talk to you and generally try to limit any social connections.
The desire to decorate life
You are already thinking of flying to Thailand, as my colleague. You are known in the nearest bar by name and even what and on what days you drink. And you are already looking at tickets to Amsterdam and this interest is caused by not beautiful houses and the cozy atmosphere of this city.
Okay, now let's talk about how to escape.
Change your daily routine
Next time, when colleagues will boast that they worked after work for another 3 hours and worked on the project from home all Saturday, you can laugh in their faces and never follow their example. Most likely, no one compensates you for processing, and the presence of the above problems is even more so. And no one will be able to fire you either, because your 40 hours a week is 40 hours, not 50 and not 60. Your brain is not designed for strong mental stress for a long time. Maximum 4-5 hours per day. Do not squeeze it, otherwise the problems are guaranteed to you.
Secondly, find a hobby not related to your main activity. Change of activity is also a vacation. Even if you worked all day, then changing your sedentary work to work in the gym or tennis court will not make you more tired. Quite the contrary. And do not say that you do not have time for this. Many people who get up at 6 in the morning for a morning run say that if it were not for this run, they would have done much less in a day.
Get creative. Seriously
Create memes for VK, create home projects (with your hands and tools, not with the mouse and keyboard), create obscene drawings or beautiful pictures, create clay jugs or dance. All these activities require concentration on what you are doing, which will distract you from thoughts about work, worries, etc.
Develop healthy indifference
If you cannot change something, then change your attitude towards it. If you often have thoughts that everything is bad with the project and I urgently need to start digging in more to fix everything, then the sticker with the words “stop dramatizing” and “actually there is no apocalypse” will help you. Company managers impose on you the critical importance of what you do to increase your responsibility and productivity. But this is not so. Remember this. And do not worry about something that has not happened yet. “Everything is lost, the project will fail, and so on.” - This is not the attitude with which you need to do something. Therefore, try to control your thoughts and if something bad looms on the horizon, try to distract yourself with something positive. Even if something bad happened, then most often it is fixable and not worth your nerves.
Do not hide your emotions
If you think that being a brutal man without emotions is great, then you are mistaken. In childhood, boys are often told that tears are fu, boys do not cry. Loudly laughing is indecent. You can’t wave your hands. You can’t show much joy, otherwise you will cry later. And all that sort of thing. Forget it - you’ll be healthier.
If you like to gesticulate with your hands, then do not hold back. And you can laugh too loudly. And beat dishes, tear paper, yell at the boss (preferably in his photo, of course), throw darts at the photo of a toxic guy from work or cuddle his printed face - everything is possible and even necessary. I am sure that a photo of a toxic guy will not be offended by beatings and punctures, and those around will understand your emotions when they are real and caused by something appropriate (within reasonable limits, of course). If you are a super-educated guy and can not throw out emotions in the above ways, then contact your friends and psychologists. At least when speaking your emotions over a beer in a bar or at a reception, you also bring them out, although not so efficiently. By holding back emotions, both positive and negative, you drive yourself into an emotional hole. And any hole has a bottom, which means sooner or later it will overflow, causing the roof to fall, and I’m sure that you don’t need it, because it’s not far from the asylum.
A couple more thoughts
Locking in a room with a computer, you shove yourself in a bubble. Bubble techies.
This bubble hides from you everything that is outside of IT. And this is very bad. IT is designed to solve problems that lie outside of it. Understanding the real world, business and user needs will make you the best programmer, engineer, etc., because your customers are users, users are not from the IT world. In addition, people who are not from IT hire you to work and work with you, including people who are not from IT. It would be nice to be able to maintain a conversation with them on any topic, and not just what a binary tree is and how the electric motor is arranged in your scooter.
There are a lot of cool stuff around, but you ignore them. Think about what you can talk about besides technical topics? Most likely, you will say that I can talk about cars - again technology. Or about football - it’s better. Maybe about politics - this is important. But here is the girl you like. The girl is not from IT. What will you talk about?
She will not listen about your car, football and politics. But with pleasure he will listen to how you yourself play football, sing in the bar, about travels and how you yourself got up for the first time on a surfboard. Well, or how you pumped yourself cubes in the press (especially if the story is accompanied by a demonstration of the subject of discussion).
Afterword:
I am against the policy of some companies that a good developer should have his own project on GitHub and invest in opensource. This is not true. I know many great developers who are involved in sports, family, dancing, playing the guitar and other things besides work. They don’t have time to sit at the computer after work and invest in third-party projects. But they still develop and companies give them such an opportunity, devoting an hour of their working time to their own projects and self-development, conducting seminars, trainings, etc. This approach is very correct, as for me. And the company always gets a fresh, ready-to-work person, and the employee feels that they are investing in it, too, and not squeezed like a rag. Regarding working conditions and attitude towards personnel, read the book “The Strongest. Netflix Business. ” It describes just the same sound attitude towards employees, and not attempts to create a “family” that will work at night for the bright future of the company without any compensation.
Everything that I described above is taken from books and articles of the aforementioned Gerald Greenberg and the websites of medical universities (Belarusian, British and American). I do not pretend to be 100% faithful and accurate, rather I try to push you to take care of yourself and prevent burnout, and how and by what methods, you already decide for yourself.