Burnout: How to Avoid, Survive, and Recover (John Darrington)

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we're good all right all right hi everyone uh i'm back here with mr john darrington with burnout how to avoid survive and recover all your sir thank you afternoon and welcome to burnout how to avoid survive and recovered i am excited to be here my name is john darrington i'm a software engineer i have been my entire career and have been down in the trenches and more most recently up in the project management and architecting land um it's my goal today that after this talk we're able to recognize what burnout is and if we're suffering from it or have suffered from it and that we are motivated afterwards to avoid it or to survive we're if we're kind of

caught in the middle here burnout to me is an extremely important topic it's the reason i quit my last job and actually started my own company third house software and it it is even more prevalent now that we're in the middle of this pandemic the outside stressors with regards to you know political climate and things of that nature burnout is becoming more and more prevalent one of the biggest hurdles i have to often overcome when talking about burnout is helping under helping people understand that it's real in the first place and it's real enough that the mayo clinic has an entire section of their site dedicated to job burnout and they say that job burnout is a special type of

work related stress a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity now there's a lot to unpack there in that sentence but the biggest takeaway that we need to have is that burnout is not a disease it's not something you catch like a cold burnout is a state of being it's a state of physical or emotional being and that's hallmarked by exhaustion loss of personal identity loss of accomplishment but that's what burnout is and there's a lot of different symptoms for burnout when we're talking about it the first is becoming cynical or critical work now i think there is a healthy level of cynicism and criticism

that it can exist in the workplace and i think most anyone who's out of the honeymoon stage of uh position is going to experience that and that's okay it's when cynicism and criticism and these other symptoms we'll talk about become all-encompassing where you're cynical about everything about the mission of the company the company itself the people inside the company your job it's when that becomes all-encompassing that it becomes a big issue this one's becoming a little more prevalent now that we're working from home it can be hard to start uh when you don't have uh a good separation between the time you leave for work you know you have a your time to leave you have your commute

and then you're in work and it's this whole little ritual um that's changed now for a lot of individuals that are now working remotely when they haven't before and that can be a symptom is if it's hard to get started at work hard to concentrate all right sorry have you become irritable or impatient with co-workers and again this is all-encompassing this is not a simple bad day you know here and there or just uh you know not a terribly sunny disposition to begin with this is all encompassing where even the little things can get you going when we talk about lack of energy we're not talking about the coffee you need in the morning to

get going or that post-afternoon slump you have after you have a good dinner or a good lunch we're talking about a consistent lack of energy that no matter how much you sleep how much you eat no matter what you do you don't have the energy you need to keep working my last position i found myself sleeping in my car for at least 40 minutes out of the day in order to have the energy that i needed to keep going it's a very big very big symptom hard to concentrate this is one of the hallmark symptoms of job burnout do you lack satisfaction from your achievements can you have a hard time at the end of

the day looking back on what you've accomplished and saying you know what i did a good job or i did a job you know i i worked i did this look at all the stuff i did or was able to accomplish if you can't do that and you consistently can't do that that is a symptom of job burnout another symptom is bad coping mechanisms such as drugs or alcohol or food you can abuse food one of the trends we'll see in burnout often is weight gain in the in as we continue to use food in other ways to help us feel better sleep habits change now this might seem a little bit interesting until you realize

that or tell you except first that job burnout's a state of being stressed it's a it's a specific kind of stress but it's a state of stress and stress our bodies are not designed to stay in that state for long periods of time and it causes physical problems for that it causes physical consequences such as well it compounds whatever other stress we're suffering in our lives um fatigue again that tiredness we talked about before insomnia having a hard time sleeping or staying asleep sadness anger irritability again this is irritability that just the smallest thing can set you off and get you going misuse of alcohol or substances heart disease high blood pressure type 2 diabetes now these are serious

issues i i hope that it highlights how serious staying in a state of burnout can be how serious staying in a state of high stress can be our bodies are not designed to handle that and because of that they start to break down and we start to suffer these things these have been shown to happen in states of high stress i hope that we've covered the symptoms well enough if we have more questions at the end please feel free to ask um there are more symptoms these are just some of the big ones um and remember that job burnout can be caused by more than just job and we'll talk about that more in just a minute

now that we know how serious the consequences are however i think it's time we talk about how we avoid job burnout avoiding job burnout especially now with the outside stressors such as the pandemic and the turbulent political atmosphere is not easy and success will stem from your understanding of burnout's causes we're going to talk about six causes today and keep in mind that there are more but what i hope as after this presentation we'll either talk about those or it becomes more of a common sense kind of a sixth sense that you'll be able to hone in understanding what situations do and do not cause burnout so we'll talk about causes first we'll talk about lack

of control so for you work seven to nine hours a day uh and sometimes even more than that if you are not in control for that amount of time um that is a large amount of stress where very very few people can can function when they don't feel like they're in control and if you're not in control for that much of your day for that like the in your entirety of your work day that could lead to job burnout it also has to do with the resources you need to do your job if you don't have the ability to do your job and yet you're still being expected to do your job that can cause

job burnout as well unclear job expectations if you remember the symptoms we talked about the unable to get a sense of personal satisfaction or a sense of achievement from what you've accomplished you can't do that in a job where your expectations are unclear if you don't know what your job expects of you at any given moment or or [Music] what you can and can't do how can you find that sense of personal satisfaction and personal achievement you can't you can't do that at all and so having those clear job expectations is all important when it comes to setting up a stress-free stress-free environment dysfunctional workplace dynamics is a fancy way of saying office politics now office

politics is something that's going to exist in every job if you don't think so you're probably still in the honeymoon phase in your current position i guarantee you every position you'll work will have some form of office politics it doesn't have to be bad but when we get to office politics they're dysfunctional that are a constant problem or a constant source of stress such as micromanaging or bullying that's when office politics becomes a problem and can become a very big source of stress and a cause of burnout now this next cause is one of the the causes that i struggled with the most and it's called extremes of activity when we when we refer to extremes of activity my

position i was one of the most senior engineers on the team at the time and we were an international e-commerce company and so when we had problems it was up to the team to obviously solve those problems and being one of the most senior members on that team i was constantly and taking a disproportionately large amount of tickets to solve to to help out the company and because of that i always felt like i was on call i always felt like i had to be ready for anything um if i was going on any kind of vacation even a short trip um you know three or four hours away i would have to make sure that i knew

where the internet was made sure i had my laptop on me and this constant extreme of energy of needing to constantly be up and going and ready to go caused a lot of my personal burnout social support and social isolation is a big deal right now in the pandemic as we practice social distancing measures we're distancing ourselves from the people that matter most in our lives in a lot of cases or we're quarantining away from them and if we don't have methods to cope with that or we haven't set up things like you know playing games with them or finding something to to work around it that feeling of isolation and lack of social support can easily grow

and swamp you and become a big issue throughout throughout this time and throughout your experience with let's say remote working the last one is work life and balance now when i talk about work life balance i don't mean eight hours on eight hours off and if you go over eight hours on your work then you're horribly imbalanced and your work's demanding too much of you now what i mean is if work does not leave you the time and energy you want to spend with your family and friends then your work life imbalance is out of whack again if work takes up too much of your time and energy that you don't have any left to spend

with family and friends it's a very big source of stress and can easily cause burnout now if we find ourselves in a state of burnout if we can't avoid these things or we've just haven't thought about them that much and we find ourselves in a state of burnout we have to take a few steps the first step in surviving and recovering burnout is accepting that we are in a state of burnout now accepting and that we're in a state of burnout requires us to get rid of some of the lies like i'm fine i love my job i'm happy to take more on um you don't understand no one else can do this this was one of the

the biggest lies that i told myself as a senior developer i was i was a senior developer i was one that knew the systems very well no one else could possibly solve these tickets other than me and that lie constantly kept me in a sense and in a state of stress and doing more than i that i ought to um people are depending on me i want to be helpful i'll be fine once this is done now this two will pass and i will be fine once this is done um just seem to seem to we try to convince ourselves that burnout is a temporary state and that it's just gonna go away if we

don't do anything and that couldn't be farther from the truth burnout is not a temporary state and it's not gonna go away if we don't do anything things outside things may change and that may help burn out but it's not just going to go away if we don't do anything i need to get back to the top of my game i'll take a vacation and then be okay i think this one is what a lot of people hold on to they have a vacation coming up and so they're willing to suffer through a lot more than they they need to or should in order to go on a vacation and unfortunately a five to ten day vacation or even even

a longer vacation than that is not going to remove the stressors in your life that led you to a state of burnout in the first place it's going to give you a break but who knows how well you're even going to be able to enjoy that vacation if you're in a state of burnout so it's important to note that these lies are things that we tell ourselves that we have to overcome first in order to get out of a state of burnout we have to accept that we are in a state of burnout and we need to get out so we'll get back through this so when we talk about handling burnout our first and biggest step is to

evaluate our options if you can write down everything that you feel is causing you stress and how you feel about it i would write down in my case that i'm constantly on call and i feel like i can't enjoy myself i lose time with friends and family my work life and balance is out of whack those are things that i would have written down and should have written down and then bring those to your supervisor if you're in a functional workplace that that works now i obviously i understand that in some cases this is not the right move you might not be able to talk to your supervisor because they might be part of the bigger problem

in that case maybe look at talking to hr or going to your next option which is finding social support outside of outside of your actual workplace so finding social support in the eyes of friends and loved ones you know talking to your spouse or partner about what you're going through finding support in programs that can really really help you out one thing that i see a lot of people not take advantage of is in a lot of cases employee insurance programs have free counseling or at least a couple of sessions of free counseling with regards to workplace stress and workplace dynamics i would talk to whoever runs your insurance usually hr to find out if your insurance

has something like that if you have a few free counseling sessions that you can take advantage of to find a support group or find somebody that's going to help you another way to handle burnout is to try relaxing activities now when i say relaxing activities i'm talking about activities that change your state of mind or body remember that that burnout is being in a certain state of mind and body being in that stress state well try to find activities that take you out of that stress state or take you out of that state of mind yoga and meditation are big ones tai chi practicing mindfulness which we'll talk about in a minute are all extremely important ways

of handling uh burnout these are called coping mechanisms coping mechanisms are just strategies that we use to handle stress or trauma and there are certain coping mechanisms like we talked about just now with the relaxing activities seeking support changing kind of your environment that help more with burnout than others there are negative coping mechanisms out there such as the abuse of alcohol and substances the abuse of food we talked about that my coping mechanism of sleeping in my car was not helpful in fact it harmed me it took me away from work longer than i should and it didn't actually help but it was the only coping mechanism i knew how to use at the moment and so

we have all these different coping mechanisms that we kind of cobble together we have to approach coping with job burnout more methodically and more like a developer more like a programmer more like you know more like our profession in approaching this problem as a problem to solve instead of something just to suffer through if we're talking about more burnout we're talking about more coping mechanisms we're talking about exercise again we're changing our physical state and my mental state and we're hopefully reversing some of the effects that long-term stress can have on our body that's what we hope to accomplish when we're attempting to go through exercise is just changing our body and changing changing the state that we're sitting in

sleep is probably one of the most important things that you can do to combat burnout if you can divide sorry if you can find your sleep time and guard it with your life set up you know set up alarms set up make sure that where you're sleeping is dark and quiet make sure that you're not going to be interrupted go to bed early if you need to uh you might you might miss out on some things but it's better to be in a state of mental and and physical health than and miss out on a few things than necessarily lose sleep and cause that to become more of a problem the last way i would talk about today of

combating me of combating uh burnout is practicing mindfulness mindfulness is very simple it's just well the the act itself isn't simple but the definition is it's just focusing on yourself and being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling at any given time if you're practicing mindfulness you're able to look at situations from an objective point of view and to see them like you're standing outside of yourself there's an excellent book called search inside yourself it was written by one of google's most early engineers that talks a lot about mindfulness in a in a software engineering world and i highly recommend it as a source of truth when it comes down to mindfulness in the workplace

burnout is not permanent it's not a permanent state it's not going to go away just by not doing anything but it can be beaten you can fight back against burnout we talked about some coping mechanisms today i think if you think about it you can find what's stressing you and find the opposite of your stressor if i'm constantly on call well then the opposite of constantly being on call is not being constantly on call so finding the option to you know to take a rest week or to only be on weekly or something along those lines would have helped immensely these are these are different mechanisms that we can use to get out of burnout

burnout is not a disease it's a state of mind and being in a state of mind and being that can be changed um thank you so much for giving me the option opportunity to present this to you i hope that by by today we're able to recognize if you're suffering from burnout and if so able to get yourself out of it and and find a way to to cope with that health in a healthy way in a healthy way so let's go ahead and open it up to any questions that we may have gotten and throughout the uh the presentation all right we've got one question came through uh he quit judah burned out to start his own company

but doesn't starting your own company potentially involve a lot of stress and long hours yes it absolutely does that's why the nuclear method of quitting your job might not be the right way of handling burnout for me i thought it was going to be the midas touch it was going to be i quit my job and suddenly everything's hunky-dory um i can go do my own thing now you know do my own contracting work and everything's going to be fine and what i found is that the same stressors that i was facing at my workplace i found that inside my own company as well and i've had to learn how to cope with those those things on my own whereas maybe

before i would have had more help and in a different situation so you're absolutely right starting my own company led to a whole new set of stressors and some of the ones i was already suffering with and coping with things in a nuclear method such as quitting um might not be the proper way to handle things i'll just throw in no i'll throw in a question did taking the nuclear method actually send you off the rails what do you mean send me off the house stress you out and and all that like did it give you burnout not doing something or because there is there as well yeah in in the beginning when i first

came to the conclusion of quitting it like i said it seemed like the midas touch and so for the first little bit it kind of gave me a boost like like this kind of like leg up and suddenly you know nothing seemed as bad anymore and you know the company was gonna be great and everything's gonna be hunky-dory kind of it put me in the honeymoon phase is what it did um but like i said it didn't take very long to get back to the same kind of stressors that i was facing at my job at my own company and doing my own thing so it it helped a little bit but not in the

long run and i think that's what it comes down to and i think that's what coping mechanisms come down to you might find a coping mechanism that helps you uh temporarily such as you know alcohol you know drinking yourself to sleep every night but in the long run it's going to do more damage than it does good and quitting my job could have done more damage in the long run than than trying to figure out how to make it work fair enough um question is uh do you think men in particular struggle more with asking for help or seeking counseling i personally think so yes i think our culture focuses on a masculinity that promotes self-you know self-control and

self-containment self-control is a wrong word self-containment is probably a better word for that so i i do think that men have a much harder time reaching out and saying hey you know what i'm struggling with this especially if it can be viewed as anything that would make them seem lesser um software engineers i see and and this is for both men and women i see constantly struggle with a sense of burnout because they can't stop and say you know this is too much for me because that makes them look bad in the eyes of their peers if you can't handle this then who knows you know are are you supposed to be here you know a little bit of imposter

syndrome so absolutely i i do think men struggle with it more but i think we all kind of struggle with with reaching out and saying hey you know i'm struggling with this i think i i'd say that's a male thing because yeah we just don't want to openly admit it uh question how do you distinguish between burnout and anxiety or is that a professional counselling question i think that's an excellent professional counseling question the mayo clinic made a really good note about burnout to specify that the root causes of burnout aren't all known and because of that you might be suffering from clinical anxiety or clinical depression that really balloons into job burnout so absolutely i think it's a question

for a health professional to figure out if one of your root causes of burnout is you know clinical anxiety or clinical depression

all right well that's the end of the questions so i'll double check that yep that's the end questions so i thank you for being here and talking about burnout and i learned some i learned something from it i will say that so i do appreciate it oh that's good and good thank you so much for letting me let me come and thank everyone i'll thank everyone that uh watched and asked questions thank you very much