Previously, you sat up on work until ten in the evening, recruited new tasks at rallies, urged colleagues to start new projects, and now the mere mention of them starts to make you sick? Congratulations, you most likely have professional burnout. The problem of professional burnout has long been known, but it has become even more relevant during the pandemic. Working remotely, the lack of a clear work schedule, social life and most of the entertainment that helped to “recharge” turned many IT people and specialists from other fields into burnt out embers. In this text, we have collected recommendations from psychologists and HR specialists on how not to “burn out” at work, as well as a few more stories of people from the IT field who have experienced burnout.What is burnout and how is it different from depression? It is physical, emotional and motivational exhaustion. Most often, burnout is experienced by young people in their 20s and 30s. Why exactly them? At the age of 23-25, on average, a specialist has several years of professional experience behind him. At the university, his time and workload was organized, in fact, by the university - lectures, seminars, exams. The loads were different all the time: you could skip lectures for two weeks, and you had to become more active during exams. When a person enters a professional activity, he no longer has such hard planning, so it seems that he is constantly on the exam: meetings are held every day, new tasks appear. Older people, already having experience, know how to properly organize their work. What is characteristic of a person which burned out? He is experiencingphysical and motivational exhaustion . And this exhaustion will be directed primarily to working moments. If depression paralyzes almost all spheres of life, since a person has no motivation either to take care of himself or to communicate with other people, then in the issue of burnout, exhaustion will appear when a person gets involved in work. Psychological distancing from professional duties is also characteristic . A person begins to notice behind him that at working meetings he no longer wants to take on some tasks, be included in the process, and the like. Also, "burnt out" people experience a decrease in performance . The working pace of a person decreases. And even the simplest tasks take a lot of effort. Appearsnegative attitude towards their work . A person loses the meaning of work, he loses the feeling that he is doing something valuable. If earlier, for example, a developer could say that he makes programs that improve people's lives, then during burnout, he stops thinking that he is doing something important for this world, no matter what a person does.
How has lockdown affected burnout?
During quarantine and lockdown, the number of “burnt out” people increased. First of all, because many employees, staying at a distance, do not organize their working time. Organizing your time is, unfortunately, something that people have not learned to do during the year of quarantine. The second reason for “burnout” during the lockdown is the lack of social inclusion. There may be a break in the office where you can drink coffee, chat, go out, go to a meeting. Socialization reduces emotional burnout. Emotional burnout occurs where there is constant stress. It can be constantly “burning” deadlines, toxic leadership, and the like. The reason may also be the monotony of work: when you do the same thing, although you didn’t agree to it.
How not to burn out:
Cultivate other interests that are not related to the profession. A person's life should not consist of one job. There should be new experiences where you can feel the novelty. The less they are associated with the profession, the better. You can play football, build Lego or sculpt with clay, and programming in your free time for a developer is not a change of activity: it is the same as work.
Bring variety to your work. Even the work that a person does for 3-5 years can be done differently.
Take care of your health. If the body is satisfied, then this will be a strong support for you in counteracting the burnout syndrome. This includes sleep patterns, regular and healthy meals, and meditation techniques. You don’t have to sit for 3 hours in the lotus position, you can concentrate for 2 minutes in the morning just to be with yourself, think about how you feel, what you want.
Participate in social life : communicate with loved ones, relatives, friends, neighbors. It is desirable that these people have other professions. If you are a developer, it is very good if there are lawyers, artists, animators, musicians, doctors in your environment to see how multifaceted the world around is.
You don't have to be a psychotherapist to recognize burnout in a colleague or family member. There are bright enough markers by which you can determine that a person has already embarked on a destructive path of burnout. The first is over-motivation.. Yes, yes, it is the employee’s motivation and striving for achievement that are the markers of the problem. This may seem strange: what does burnout have to do with it? But it is precisely from the desire to do everything and even more that physical and psychological exhaustion begins. If you see that a colleague has picked up tasks and goals, like a dog of fleas, and doesn’t hear when you say: “Slow down, you can’t work like that,” this is a sure sign that the person has already flown into burnout, but he himself does not understand it yet. This is how one of the first stages of internal exhaustion looks from the outside, then the situation will take a more gloomy turn. What to do if you recognize yourself in the description? Stop and analyze the situation. Try to keep work-life balance: do not overload yourself with tasks and goals, set priorities correctly, Don't force yourself into an impossible work schedule. Understand: you can quickly "kill" yourself with achievement and reach the goal completely burnt out. Or you can achieve goals with adequate time frames and reach the goal without burnout. The second bright marker of burnout isloss of motivation and decreased performance . This is also quite easy to notice in yourself and colleagues. For example, I spend one-to-ones with developers and often hear: "I can't force myself to sit down for a project, I'd better stick to Youtube for videos, I'm procrastinating, I've been struggling with myself for a month to get up and do it." Such confessions are a signal that a person may already be in burnout. And he certainly burned out like a candle, if earlier he was mega-motivated, he rushed forward at full power, and then he suddenly got stuck in procrastination and was thinking about whether to run away to the sabbatical. There are also less obvious signs of a problem. One step away from total burnout, a person can constantly talk to the place and not to the place about rest, vacation, repeat that he is tired . Warning signs includean obsessive desire to go into the sabbatical, doubts about whether this is the right professional field . If we talk about external signs, then a burnt out person most often looks tired, he has a gray face, and the leading emotions are negative. There may be toxicity to others. What to do? Seek help from a specialist – it is difficult to cope with such a condition on your own. It is important to analyze the situation individually with the therapist: to determine the entry points to burnout, the level of "losses and pains", in order to then competently draw up a plan to get out of the problem. Not always a simple vacation or even a 365-day sabbatical will help you bounce back.
Why exactly in IT professionals are so often faced with burnout?
The IT-sphere in itself implies constant development and the desire for growth, so IT people often fall for the hook of processing. For example, a developer sets himself the goal of deepening into technology in order to grow from middle to senior, or wants to develop as a Team Lead. Sometimes mentoring, holding training meetups are added here, and no one has canceled the work on projects itself. And everything needs to be paid attention, and deadlines are burning. Naturally, the developer fails to meet the 8 working hours, and he starts to overtime. And such a “cheetah” mode often leads to burnout. Now a lot is written about procrastination on IT forums. Lots of advice on what to do with it. But these are recommendations on how to deal with the consequences of a problem, and no one writes about the causes of procrastination. After all, we all know that we need to fight not with the consequences. Procrastination can be a "bell" that a person burns out, he has no strength, he suffers from chronic fatigue. And it's not about responsibility and discipline, just the opposite. The super responsible and hardworking face this problem more often than those who take 7 coffee breaks during the work day. If you do not allow your body to rest, use your resource to the maximum for a long time, sooner or later the body will take this rest itself. And believe me, this will happen at the most inopportune moment: through procrastination, a hospital bed, clinical depression, or an internal rejection of a once beloved profession. I have seen many examples when developers at their career peak suddenly left for another area "for the soul". So, one cool specialist quit IT completely, started an apiary and started selling honey.
How lockdown exacerbates burnout
Since 2020, lockdown has added fuel to the fire of professional burnout. Let's look at the troubles that the pandemic has brought us:
We are isolated, we are within. When a person feels limited, it is stress. And today we are all limited in behavior, movement and so on. To understand how strongly any framework affects us, remember situations when you had no money at all. How stressed were you? Remember the limits of society, which "necessarily" correspond to, that people suppress their real feelings and emotions, do not allow themselves to relax, and then headlines appear in the news like "A heart attack in Ukraine has become 'younger' again."
Lacks live communication, tactility. A person needs a person, he needs live communication, touch, energy exchange. We do not feel happy in isolation. This is how we are arranged: man is a pack animal. This is confirmed even by studies that were conducted with the involvement of prisoners: people died for no apparent reason in solitary cells.
Lack of recovery methods and sources of positive emotions. We cannot fully travel, even move around the city. We cannot attend events, favorite places of recreation, gyms and pools. We are deprived of our "batteries" from which we were charged. During the lockdown period, we have very few opportunities to fill up with energy and emotions.
Negative information flow and intimidation by the consequences of the virus. We live in constant fear, and this emotion has a devastating effect on the body and psyche. Psychotherapists know that if a person experiences negative emotions for a long enough time, over time he seems to lose the ability to see the positive in life, people, situations, and keeps focus only on the negative. Hence the notorious toxicity.
What can you recommend to a person who is faced with a burnout problem? Turn to specialists so that recovery does not drag on for years. Sometimes getting out of burnout on your own is so difficult that it is almost impossible. But it is better, of course, not to bring yourself to exhaustion. There is one rule of thumb for preventing burnout: balance. What does this mean in practice?
Keep a balance between work and personal life, both of these areas are equally important.
Maintain a balance in the number of tasks and goals in relation to your timing and forces.
Follow the balance of energy: how much you spent, the same amount you need to restore. After heavy periods, it is normal to take a rest.
Balance in relationships is equally important: you don’t need to sacrifice yourself on the altar of self-sacrifice.
Keep a balance in your desires, aspirations: learn the word "enough". Get away from perfectionism - it destroys.
Keep track of your stress levels in life: it is the amount of stress that directly affects the level of burnout. Stress is not always bad. There is such a thing as work stress - it is useful. But if you don't have a healthy balance of work stress and rest periods in your life, the consequences will not be long in coming.
The reason for burnout is not in the schedule, not in the number of tasks or how interesting they are. It is rather the components that speed up this process. In my opinion, the key element of burnout is relationships. Therefore, I look at this problem through the prism of relations, in which there are two dimensions. The first is how we build relationships with ourselves and with others. If, for example, we are subject to codependent behavior, then we build such an interaction with the environment in which it is difficult not to burn out. After all, codependence is a tendency to confluence (fusion) and sacrifice, insensitivity to one's needs and one's boundaries, low self-esteem, the inability to speak openly about one's experiences or difficulties. Add to that complex work tasks, heavy workloads, a tense work environment and imagine the result. The environment is rather a catalyst and the second dimension of this problem. In a supportive environment, we find the necessary supports, expand our capabilities and enrich our experience of productive interaction with others. In the unfavorable - the psyche finds other ways to compensate, and we survive on the experience of our injuries. Therefore, with whom we work, how we are treated, what they tell us and what they are silent about, in what atmosphere we work, it is of great importance. We also collected several stories of people from the IT field who have experienced burnout.
There have been several burnouts in my professional career. The first happened at work in a communications agency. It was a total boredom and lack of interesting tasks. It was accompanied by a constant unwillingness to perform even small tasks and the most poor concentration. He was cured by one very stressful event in his personal life and a job change, where there was movement-Paris. The second burnout happened not for the sake of hatred, but for great love. Then I was in charge of one big project and opened another one, the same size. There were so many tasks that they did not fit in a day. This project burned me, my team and, as it seemed to me then, all my friends, because my mouth did not shut up, there was so much pride in what I was doing. The race for success, complex and super interesting tasks, constant brainstorms, arguments (in which truth was born) and reasoning kept the level of adrenaline in the blood at the highest possible level. And so 24/7 365 days a year. And I liked it so much that I didn't want to stop. It seemed that if I slowed down even for a day, the world would collapse, and all efforts would simply come to naught. But a year passed at such a rhythm, and I noticed that I was starting to lose productivity. Then procrastination skills sharply increased, and I brought myself to the student's syndrome, where everything was done at the last moment. Insomnia worsened. It became not only difficult to wake up in the morning, but unbearable. And every day I persuaded myself to go to the most beloved job in the world. Then a good mood left my life. I seemed to go to sleep irritated and wake up the same way. A little more and I would have rushed at people. And all this was supplemented by the news that that the project is closed. This event brought apathy to an already large bouquet of symptoms, which was replaced by irascibility and a lack of understanding of what I was doing here at all. The situation was slightly balanced by a trip to the mountains and to the ocean, when the project was finally closed. I allowed myself to not work for a month (providing myself with financial stability in advance) and “weep” this state. Let it go. The third time this story happened this fall. We at Digitizing.Space ran one big project, where there were quite significant financial risks and tons of bureaucracy that squeezed all the juice out of me. Remembering my past experience, I tried to switch, reduced my schedule to normal and tried not to give vent to emotions and worries. Everything seemed to be ok. Of course, I was not satisfied with the uncertainty and endless postponements of deadlines, but this was not critical. When the project ended, I realized that I no longer take out and went to my mother: I lay on the couch for two weeks, looking at the ceiling. I couldn't move, think or talk about work. I was endlessly tired and turned into a vegetable who could only watch TV shows, draw, take food inside and apply cats to a newly formed wound with a lot of doubts in the spirit of “whether I do in this life at all”. After grounding, relatives had a trip to Turkey, a serpentine road trip and several strat sessions by the sea. To be fair, in all three situations, I would “turn off” from time to time, breaking into sudden trips where my eyes look at the weekend. I think it helped me not to go crazy and to hold out for so long in such a frenzied rhythm of deadlines and tasks. The conclusion is quite simple and obvious: even doing the most beloved thing in the universe, can burn out. The energy that we spend on work, daily activities, communication with colleagues, relatives and friends tends to end. And if you don’t replenish it, don’t switch and don’t please yourself with simple doing nothing, you can go crazy sooner or later.I have been working in IT for almost 5 years. At the beginning of the quarantine, I worked for a large outsourcing company SoftServe in the direction of employer branding. I came out of maternity leave almost at the beginning of quarantine: then I got on with my life with a child - I had a nanny, I went to the office and got a little involved in the work process. Then, when the quarantine began, the boundaries of work and personal life were erased and it became quite difficult. My husband and I were forced to let go of the nanny, because it was difficult for her to get to us, and we decided that we would take care of the child according to the schedule: at certain hours, my husband, me, my mother. Somehow it went on, but, of course, the work-life balance was very disturbed. I worked with a team: it was difficult to manage and support a team from a distance, to have time for a child and family. Work tasks have also become much larger. It was emotionally difficult to stay in such a rhythm for a long time. I was very close to burnout. In principle, this quarantine situation has changed us a lot, our perception of ourselves, our expectations from colleagues. Even communication itself during the lockdown has become more difficult - it is easier to resolve issues over a cup of coffee than via a messenger. During the lockdown, it became difficult for me to motivate myself for any large work projects. For my work, I myself must be in the resource, for example, to motivate a person to speak at a conference. However, I began to feel that I was losing this resource. So I had somewhere until November 2020. There was less and less energy and desire to start something new. Therefore, I decided to change jobs and from January 2021 I moved to another company. There are many more tasks here than in the previous place, but this change gave me a boost, willingness to work and ease. It was the right decision.
The problem of professional burnout has long been known, but it has become even more relevant during the pandemic. Working remotely, the lack of a clear work schedule, social life and most of the entertainment that helped to “recharge” turned many IT people and specialists from other fields into burnt out embers. In this text, we have collected recommendations from psychologists and HR specialists on how not to “burn out” at work, as well as a few more stories of people from the IT field who have experienced burnout.
What is burnout and how is it different from depression? It is physical, emotional and motivational exhaustion. Most often, burnout is experienced by young people in their 20s and 30s. Why exactly them? At the age of 23-25, on average, a specialist has several years of professional experience behind him. At the university, his time and workload was organized, in fact, by the university - lectures, seminars, exams. The loads were different all the time: you could skip lectures for two weeks, and you had to become more active during exams. When a person enters a professional activity, he no longer has such hard planning, so it seems that he is constantly on the exam: meetings are held every day, new tasks appear. Older people, already having experience, know how to properly organize their work. What is characteristic of a person which burned out? He is experiencingphysical and motivational exhaustion . And this exhaustion will be directed primarily to working moments. If depression paralyzes almost all spheres of life, since a person has no motivation either to take care of himself or to communicate with other people, then in the issue of burnout, exhaustion will appear when a person gets involved in work. Psychological distancing from professional duties is also characteristic . A person begins to notice behind him that at working meetings he no longer wants to take on some tasks, be included in the process, and the like. Also, "burnt out" people experience a decrease in performance . The working pace of a person decreases. And even the simplest tasks take a lot of effort. Appearsnegative attitude towards their work . A person loses the meaning of work, he loses the feeling that he is doing something valuable. If earlier, for example, a developer could say that he makes programs that improve people's lives, then during burnout, he stops thinking that he is doing something important for this world, no matter what a person does.
You don't have to be a psychotherapist to recognize burnout in a colleague or family member. There are bright enough markers by which you can determine that a person has already embarked on a destructive path of burnout. The first is over-motivation.. Yes, yes, it is the employee’s motivation and striving for achievement that are the markers of the problem. This may seem strange: what does burnout have to do with it? But it is precisely from the desire to do everything and even more that physical and psychological exhaustion begins. If you see that a colleague has picked up tasks and goals, like a dog of fleas, and doesn’t hear when you say: “Slow down, you can’t work like that,” this is a sure sign that the person has already flown into burnout, but he himself does not understand it yet. This is how one of the first stages of internal exhaustion looks from the outside, then the situation will take a more gloomy turn. What to do if you recognize yourself in the description? Stop and analyze the situation. Try to keep work-life balance: do not overload yourself with tasks and goals, set priorities correctly, Don't force yourself into an impossible work schedule. Understand: you can quickly "kill" yourself with achievement and reach the goal completely burnt out. Or you can achieve goals with adequate time frames and reach the goal without burnout. The second bright marker of burnout isloss of motivation and decreased performance . This is also quite easy to notice in yourself and colleagues. For example, I spend one-to-ones with developers and often hear: "I can't force myself to sit down for a project, I'd better stick to Youtube for videos, I'm procrastinating, I've been struggling with myself for a month to get up and do it." Such confessions are a signal that a person may already be in burnout. And he certainly burned out like a candle, if earlier he was mega-motivated, he rushed forward at full power, and then he suddenly got stuck in procrastination and was thinking about whether to run away to the sabbatical. There are also less obvious signs of a problem. One step away from total burnout, a person can constantly talk to the place and not to the place about rest, vacation, repeat that he is tired . Warning signs includean obsessive desire to go into the sabbatical, doubts about whether this is the right professional field . If we talk about external signs, then a burnt out person most often looks tired, he has a gray face, and the leading emotions are negative. There may be toxicity to others. What to do? Seek help from a specialist – it is difficult to cope with such a condition on your own. It is important to analyze the situation individually with the therapist: to determine the entry points to burnout, the level of "losses and pains", in order to then competently draw up a plan to get out of the problem. Not always a simple vacation or even a 365-day sabbatical will help you bounce back.
The reason for burnout is not in the schedule, not in the number of tasks or how interesting they are. It is rather the components that speed up this process. In my opinion, the key element of burnout is relationships. Therefore, I look at this problem through the prism of relations, in which there are two dimensions. The first is how we build relationships with ourselves and with others. If, for example, we are subject to codependent behavior, then we build such an interaction with the environment in which it is difficult not to burn out. After all, codependence is a tendency to confluence (fusion) and sacrifice, insensitivity to one's needs and one's boundaries, low self-esteem, the inability to speak openly about one's experiences or difficulties. Add to that complex work tasks, heavy workloads, a tense work environment and imagine the result. The environment is rather a catalyst and the second dimension of this problem. In a supportive environment, we find the necessary supports, expand our capabilities and enrich our experience of productive interaction with others. In the unfavorable - the psyche finds other ways to compensate, and we survive on the experience of our injuries. Therefore, with whom we work, how we are treated, what they tell us and what they are silent about, in what atmosphere we work, it is of great importance. We also collected several stories of people from the IT field who have experienced burnout.
There have been several burnouts in my professional career. The first happened at work in a communications agency. It was a total boredom and lack of interesting tasks. It was accompanied by a constant unwillingness to perform even small tasks and the most poor concentration. He was cured by one very stressful event in his personal life and a job change, where there was movement-Paris. The second burnout happened not for the sake of hatred, but for great love. Then I was in charge of one big project and opened another one, the same size. There were so many tasks that they did not fit in a day. This project burned me, my team and, as it seemed to me then, all my friends, because my mouth did not shut up, there was so much pride in what I was doing. The race for success, complex and super interesting tasks, constant brainstorms, arguments (in which truth was born) and reasoning kept the level of adrenaline in the blood at the highest possible level. And so 24/7 365 days a year. And I liked it so much that I didn't want to stop. It seemed that if I slowed down even for a day, the world would collapse, and all efforts would simply come to naught. But a year passed at such a rhythm, and I noticed that I was starting to lose productivity. Then procrastination skills sharply increased, and I brought myself to the student's syndrome, where everything was done at the last moment. Insomnia worsened. It became not only difficult to wake up in the morning, but unbearable. And every day I persuaded myself to go to the most beloved job in the world. Then a good mood left my life. I seemed to go to sleep irritated and wake up the same way. A little more and I would have rushed at people. And all this was supplemented by the news that that the project is closed. This event brought apathy to an already large bouquet of symptoms, which was replaced by irascibility and a lack of understanding of what I was doing here at all. The situation was slightly balanced by a trip to the mountains and to the ocean, when the project was finally closed. I allowed myself to not work for a month (providing myself with financial stability in advance) and “weep” this state. Let it go. The third time this story happened this fall. We at Digitizing.Space ran one big project, where there were quite significant financial risks and tons of bureaucracy that squeezed all the juice out of me. Remembering my past experience, I tried to switch, reduced my schedule to normal and tried not to give vent to emotions and worries. Everything seemed to be ok. Of course, I was not satisfied with the uncertainty and endless postponements of deadlines, but this was not critical. When the project ended, I realized that I no longer take out and went to my mother: I lay on the couch for two weeks, looking at the ceiling. I couldn't move, think or talk about work. I was endlessly tired and turned into a vegetable who could only watch TV shows, draw, take food inside and apply cats to a newly formed wound with a lot of doubts in the spirit of “whether I do in this life at all”. After grounding, relatives had a trip to Turkey, a serpentine road trip and several strat sessions by the sea. To be fair, in all three situations, I would “turn off” from time to time, breaking into sudden trips where my eyes look at the weekend. I think it helped me not to go crazy and to hold out for so long in such a frenzied rhythm of deadlines and tasks. The conclusion is quite simple and obvious: even doing the most beloved thing in the universe, can burn out. The energy that we spend on work, daily activities, communication with colleagues, relatives and friends tends to end. And if you don’t replenish it, don’t switch and don’t please yourself with simple doing nothing, you can go crazy sooner or later.
I have been working in IT for almost 5 years. At the beginning of the quarantine, I worked for a large outsourcing company SoftServe in the direction of employer branding. I came out of maternity leave almost at the beginning of quarantine: then I got on with my life with a child - I had a nanny, I went to the office and got a little involved in the work process. Then, when the quarantine began, the boundaries of work and personal life were erased and it became quite difficult. My husband and I were forced to let go of the nanny, because it was difficult for her to get to us, and we decided that we would take care of the child according to the schedule: at certain hours, my husband, me, my mother. Somehow it went on, but, of course, the work-life balance was very disturbed. I worked with a team: it was difficult to manage and support a team from a distance, to have time for a child and family. Work tasks have also become much larger. It was emotionally difficult to stay in such a rhythm for a long time. I was very close to burnout. In principle, this quarantine situation has changed us a lot, our perception of ourselves, our expectations from colleagues. Even communication itself during the lockdown has become more difficult - it is easier to resolve issues over a cup of coffee than via a messenger. During the lockdown, it became difficult for me to motivate myself for any large work projects. For my work, I myself must be in the resource, for example, to motivate a person to speak at a conference. However, I began to feel that I was losing this resource. So I had somewhere until November 2020. There was less and less energy and desire to start something new. Therefore, I decided to change jobs and from January 2021 I moved to another company. There are many more tasks here than in the previous place, but this change gave me a boost, willingness to work and ease. It was the right decision.
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