The origin of this blog

I have been aware of the term burnout for a while. In fact, in the first weeks of COVID I had written of burnout from my experiences with WFH. As time progressed, I thought I had identified the issues and started to act on it. I took a couple of weeks off to recover in Aug 2020 and at that time I came across this book Digital Minimalism and I could relate quite a lot to it. So I wrote a blog on my learnings around slowing my digital life which helped quite a bit as well. In early 2021, I started a new job that had me working with people across the world and had crazy work hours (among other challenges). That’s when I remembered a book called Slack (written in 2002) which felt very apt for my work situations. I shared my thoughts on lack of slack and how that increases burnout in modern workplaces. However the situation at my work didn’t improve over the months, and finally in Feb 2022 I hit my tipping point and I could not move any further. I literally just stopped.

When life comes to a standstill

In 2021, when I started a new job, I didn’t realize that I would have to work odd hours. For the first 4-6 months of my job, I had to work 3PM to midnight to collaborate with people on the other side of the world. I faced other challenges at work and that coupled with other life situations, constant lack of sleep, work stress meant that I slowly started feeling increasingly exhausted. Weekends didn’t help, they just gave me enough energy to wake up on Monday.

When I moved to the other side of the world, I ended up with morning work schedule sometimes from 6AM. At work, there was increasingly more wanted from me without getting anything more back. Every day seemed a slog with me waking up, getting on zoom calls and just praying to get to the end of the day and meetings finish. There were weeks when I hoped I would get COVID and can’t get out of bed for a week so I didn’t have to work. Then there were some key incidents at work in December 2021 and January 2022, which made it very hard for me to continue giving my 50% (I had long since lost the ability to give 100%). My work just wanted from me, without giving anything in return. There was not a single moment of joy (except for some occasional chats with colleagues going through something similar).

Finally in Feb 2022, I took some time off to reflect and eventually resigned in March 2022. While I do not use the work debilitating lightly, mentally I felt debilitated. I just had 0 energy to even get out of bed in the morning, I would struggle to even decide what food to order for 20 minutes – just staring blankly at the phone screen. I knew of the term burnout, but what I felt now was an order of magnitude worse than when I first wrote a blog on it in May 2020.

What is burnout?

I recently came across this amazing article on Burnout which has a lot more details, research and recommendations on what Burnout is. I won’t repeat stuff but at core there are 3 characteristics: You feel exhausted, ineffective to do anything and don’t believe anything can be done about it. From my experience:

• I was physically and mentally exhausted most of the time.
• I was restless all the time.
• I was unable to make decisions at work or otherwise.
• I was easily irritable in personal life. Small triggers would set me off.
• I spent a lot of time stress eating.
• I would get panic triggers from daily cues like my phone buzzing or walking into the study (where I would WFH).

What helped me get through?

I finally quit the job and knew I was not going back to work anytime soon. I also quit my daily life for a bit. I have always believed in concept of Flow and a part of that theory talks about how psychological cues impact how you feel. I realized that my daily life, my home, my work, my phone were all triggers.

I decided to go somewhere that I liked. Thailand. In hindsight, I wanted to go somewhere that was familiar but would still be challenging. I reset my phone before going so I only had 5-6 important apps on the phone. While there, I was not really contactable except by email for most part. I spent that time just focusing on survival stuff. How to get food, how to go from one place to another, how to keep myself alive, where I want to go next. That’s pretty much the core parts of my day. I surrounded myself with things and situations that I believed would be healing, eg: stay in the mountains with no humans around in not so hot weather.

I wrote a lot during this time. I let everything that had bothered me come out on the paper. I felt like my spring was unwinding. Driving motorbikes on mountain roads while listening to music you like is also another interesting experience that was healing. With a motorbike, it’s just you and the road. You have to stay focused more than a car but you feel the world around you more. I would say it’s like becoming one with your surroundings.

Then I spent some time at home in extremely hot Delhi which was hard but at the same time a very different experience from everyday life. Finally when I did get back to Vancouver, I was unfortunately alone at home for 2 weeks and I used that time to run every 2nd day. I feel like all that helped me get better.

How to watch out for burnout?

While I was in Thailand, I wrote about a lot of things and burnout was one of them. I was constantly asking myself, how could I have avoided this? What can I learn from what I felt? And I came up with a questionnaire for myself and setup a calendar reminder for every 1-2 months to go through this and provide honest answers. While these would be subjective, at least it will help me see how I am doing?

Here are some sample questions:

• When was the last time I went away from my home and took a vacation for 3+ days?
• What’s my average screen time at work for last few weeks?
  • How many video calls am I doing every day on average?
  • How many focus work blocks (of 3 hours) do I get every week?
• How frequently did I exercise last week?
• When was the last time I did an activity that I can only do when relaxed? (for me, it’s cooking)
• When was the last time I was in nature, surrounded by big trees?
• How many people did I meet in real life last week? (outside of my partner)
• What was one thing of beauty last week that made me smile?

You can create a scale here of these various factors and rate them from 1-5 and see how your scores trend over the months if it helps. I am trying to do that with the following dimensions:

• Emotional energy: 1 (no energy), 5 (feeling great all the time)
• Time famine: The feeling that you don’t have enough time to do everything you want: 1 (no time), 5 (so much time)
• Stress eating: 1(every meal), 5 (never)
• Irritability levels: 1(irritated at random small thing), 5(buddha like calm)

What are some other things that help?

It’s kind of related to the above but I make it a point to do the following things now because I know that working remotely carries a higher risk of burnout.

• Nature helps: Being outside, in green forested areas help for sure. I don’t know why exactly but might be something to do with our brain’s software.
• People help: Even if you are introverted, social interactions help. Being outside and meeting other people even once a week is therapeutic. Again, I am not sure why but I am guessing it’s how our brain’s software evolved.
• Vacations (Going away from your daily place of living) helps. I am guessing this is because it resets your brain circuits which are used to the daily circumstances. It forces new experiences and your brain now has to work in new ways to adapt.
• For introverts (at least), spending some time in solitude helps.
• Watch yourself / check-in regularly on how you are feeling helps. Sometimes burnout creeps up and keeps accumulating and you don’t realize until it’s a harder problem to solve.