What does burnout feel like?

[SkinnyPete]

I think I'm suffering from it, and I would describe it as a total and all-encompassing feeling of apathy.

I've tried taking some time off, both a week at a time or frequent extended weekends but it's not working.

The work itself is great, it's more the workload and some of the people. On the rare times, I've felt like this before, I would change jobs, but the prospect of a new role doesn't excite me, and I certainly can't be bothered going through the interview process normally associated with a senior role.

I think I need the summer off.

[youngsyr]

SkinnyPete said:

I think I'm suffering from it, and I would describe it as a total and all-encompassing feeling of apathy.

I've tried taking some time off, both a week at a time or frequent extended weekends but it's not working.

The work itself is great, it's more the workload and some of the people. On the rare times, I've felt like this before, I would change jobs, but the prospect of a new role doesn't excite me, and I certainly can't be bothered going through the interview process normally associated with a senior role.

I think I need the summer off.

For me it's struggling more and more to sit down and start working until it gets to the point that I just can't bring myself to do it until its an emergency and even then I highly resent doing it and make silly mistakes.

Going abroad for a proper break somewhere sunny helps a lot, so does finding someone you can delegate the most tedious parts of your job to - if not internally than there's a lot of qualified people in Asia who speak great English and will do good work for you for peanuts. Bonus is they're 5 hours ahead, so can be working whilst you're sleeping, ready to review in the morning.

[mwstewart]

I think there's short term burnout following some months of intense pressure, and a type that builds up gradually over a longer period and sometimes associated with overall career dissatisfaction.

The first I have experience of, but not the latter. It felt like living on a knife edge every day. A couple of hours sleep at most. Like a permanent, intense, jittery caffeine hit but with overarching tiredness.

Quality time off is the order of the day followed by a decent discussion with someone who can address the workload problem.

[vaud]

It depends, everyone is different.

For me the root cause was a culmination of covid, lockdown with young children, loss of a parent and an extremely stressful job.

This lead to burnout and me taking 8 weeks out from work.

It felt awful. It culminated one Sunday morning, after a night of dreaming that I was on holiday in a hotel and my boss and his boss were in rooms next door and they kept knocking to wake me up to do something.

I went to the GP next morning and was signed off.

Happy to talk via PM.

[Thisburner]

I made a burner account so I can post this but something similar happened to me in the pandemic. I suffered a trauma just before the pandemic and I felt like you describe somewhat. Everything felt very very hard. I thought oh it's just the pandemic. Working lots, being grateful for my job etc etc. But I was really struggling, it was starting to kill me.

Thing is I pushed and pushed and pushed till I couldn't get up, then I pushed some more, then I began to suffer dissociation. I kept pushing until May 2021 I absolutely broke and I've been off work since then nearly 3 years. Bear in mind I'm normally someone with a "good" job, I do triathlons and the like.

I could write an essay on this but my advice is listen to what you're feeling and basically take yourself seriously and pay attention to your needs. Needs and wants are 2 different things. People who just man up for too long can end up breaking and then when they give you the wrong medical advice it can make you a lot worse.

I'm not writing this to scare you but do listen to yourself. I never thought this would happen to me but I pushed myself far too hard and it's hard to come back from.

[SkinnyPete]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm getting a little bit of Sunday dread, thinking about this week's workload and planning through in my head how best to tackle it at 9 AM tomorrow.

I did speak with a trusted recruiter recently, and he told me the market is dire and not to rock the boat. I still think a career break could be a healthy option though.

I'm going to try and survive a couple more months, then I'm out I'm out regardless.

[Arnold Cunningham]

Towards then end of our company's life (ie when the CEO sold up), I felt all this too. When the company sold and the new owners arrived - who were really good - I struggled to get excited by any of it. I did the job, and did it well, but the previous years all just meant I'd had enough.

In my case, I'm now enjoying some gardening leave, and given the state of my old industry, have applied to do a pHd in a different field, related back to my engineering degree as a lad. Hoping to start that in September after having the summer off.

On the one hand, don't be afraid of "manning up" when it's a project that you need to get done. But at the same time - "burns leave scars" as I told our sales team many times when they under-quoted yet another project that they expected the delivery team to clean up again.

For me - burn out felt like an existential dread of any project. Even if it was a good project, well quoted, good customer - I still felt filled with dread about it. (burns leave scars, as above).

So it's really important to have some periodic down time too - you can't keep running at 100% indefinitely, despite what social media attention seeker types tell you.

[Filmer Paradise]

At 51 I had a panic attack on the Motorway.

In the aftermath, I went into a spiral of depression and anxiety.

I couldn't eat, sleep or settle down to rest.

I went down in weight to 9st 11. I'm 5'9.

I couldn't leave the house or drive anywhere. i had to force myself to do do these basic things.

Wifey booked me into counselling.

In counselling, I learned that this was purely down to accumiulated stress.

Stress in middle aged men can come in many forms.

Obesety, ulscers, heart desease & umpteen different issues can happen.

I had none of those. In fact I was 'destressingly' healthy ...........physically.

Anyway, I got on with things as best I could, but eventually I went on medication.

Dr perscribed Lexapro .

Doing alright ever since.

Avoied Motorways to this day however though....

[rival38]

Small business owner here - 20 years, now feeling almost permanant dread that the next plate l am thrown to spin, will bring all the others down. Down time…..when I have it, is spent worrying at problems I can not solve yet, or even problems that have not happened. Never used to be like this. Yes there were stressful times, but now it seems stressful continuously, even relentlessly. Perhaps my ability to cope has erroded and diminished over time? It feels that way to me.