Hey Habr. Not so long ago, I read with great interest several articles here with sound recommendations to take care of employees before they “burn out”, stop producing the expected result and ultimately benefit the company. And not a single one - from the "other side of the barricades", that is, from those who really burned out and, most importantly, coped with it. I did it, got referrals from my former employer, and found an even better job.
Actually, what the leader and the team should do is well written in “" and "". A brief spoiler from me: it is enough to be an attentive leader and take care of employees, the rest are tools of different degrees of effectiveness.
But I am convinced that ≈80% of the causes of burnout lie in the personal characteristics of the employee. The conclusion is based on my experience, but I think this is true for other burned out people as well. Moreover, it seems to me that more responsible, worried about their work and outwardly promising, complaisant workers burn out more often than others.
The allegory with the hamster may seem offensive to some, but it most accurately reflects everything that happened. First, the hamster joyfully jumps into the wheel, then the speed and adrenaline make him dizzy, and then only the wheel remains in his life ... Actually, how I got off this carousel, as well as honest reflection and unsolicited advice on how to survive burnout - under the cut.
Timeline
I worked in a web studio for seven years. When I started, HR saw me as a promising employee: motivated, enthusiastic, ready for big workloads, stress-resistant, possessing the necessary soft skills, able to work in a team and support corporate values. I just got out of the decree, I really missed the load on the brain and was eager to fight. For the first year or two, my desires came true: I actively developed, went to conferences and took on all sorts of interesting tasks. The work took a lot of time and effort, but it also energized me.
I took the promotion that followed two years later as a logical continuation of the efforts made. But with the increase, responsibility increased, the percentage of creative tasks decreased - most of the time I held negotiations, was responsible for the work of the department, and my regime imperceptibly became formally “more flexible”, but in fact - around the clock. Relations with the team gradually deteriorated: I considered them lazy, they considered me hysterical, and, looking back, I think that they were not so wrong. However, at the time I imagined that I had almost made it to the top of Maslow's pyramid (where self-actualization is).
So, without a vacation and with very conditional days off, several more years passed. By the seventh year of work, my motivation was reduced to the thought “as long as they don’t touch”, and I increasingly imagined very realistically how people in white coats were taking me out of the office.
How did it happen? How did I get to the point where I couldn't handle it on my own? And most importantly, why did it happen so imperceptibly? Today I think the main reasons are perfectionism, perception traps (or cognitive biases) and inertia. Actually, the materiel is quite interestingly described in the posts mentioned above, but repetition is the mother of learning, so here it is.
Automatism and inertia
Surely you know what automatism is - that is, the reproduction of actions without conscious control. This evolutionary mechanism of the psyche allows us to be faster, taller, stronger when performing repetitive tasks and spend less energy on it.
And then watch your hands. The brain, in an effort to save us some more energy, instead of looking for a new solution, seems to be saying: “Hey, well, it always rolled, let's repeat this action?”. As a result, it is easier for us to act according to a pattern once set and reproduced many times (even incorrectly) than to change something. “The psyche is inertial,” my friend, a teacher of neuropsychology, said about this.
When I burned out, most of the actions were performed on "autopilot". But this is not the automatism that allows the accumulated experience and knowledge to be quickly transformed into an optimal solution to a new problem. Rather, it allowed me not to think about what I was doing at all. There was nothing left of the explorer's buzz. One process was replaced by another, but their number did not decrease. This is the norm for any living project, but for me it has become a cyclic function that makes the hamster run in circles. And I ran.
Formally, I continued to give out, if not excellent, but consistently satisfactory result, and this masked the problem from the project manager and the team. “Why touch something if it works?”
Why didn't I offer to discuss terms? Why didn't she ask me to revise my schedule or eventually move on to another project? The thing is, I was a nerdy, perfectionist nerd caught in a perception trap.
How to cook a frog
There is a scientific anecdote about how . The hypothesis for the experiment was: if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly heat the container, the frog will not be able to adequately assess the danger due to the gradual change in conditions and will boil without realizing what is happening at all.
The assumption was not confirmed, but it perfectly illustrates the perception trap. When changes occur gradually, they are practically not fixed by consciousness, and at each moment of time it seems - "it has always been like this." As a result, when I had a heavy collar around my neck, I felt it as part of my own neck. But, as you know, the horse worked the most on the collective farm, but never became the chairman.
Hell of a perfectionist
Surely you have seen such sufferers who experience torment when something is NOT IDEAL. In some parallel universe (as well as among "hungry" HR), such a desire is more often assessed as a positive quality. But everything is good in moderation, and now I think that in reality, the first ones to be eaten by burnout are perfectionists.
They are inherently maximalists, and it’s easier for them to die on a treadmill than not to reach the finish line. They believe that they can literally do anything, just push, then another, and another, and another. But the illiterate distribution of resources is fraught with disruptions: deadlines, forces, and ultimately the roof. That is why smart HR is wary of employees "with_very_burning_eyes" and "devoted_fanatic_of_their_job". Yes, it is possible to master the five-year plan in three years, but only if you take into account the laws of physics and you have a clear plan and resources. And when the hamster enthusiastically jumps into the wheel, he has no purpose, he just wants to run.
The day I broke
Requirements and responsibilities gradually grew, the project gained momentum, I still loved what I was doing and could not reflect in time when I “broke down”. Just once, on the surface of the swamp of consciousness, the thought surfaced that the circle of my interests had narrowed down to the needs of a hamster. Eat, sleep - and in the wheel. Then eat again, and it is better to drink coffee, it invigorates. No longer invigorating? Drink more, and so on in a circle. I no longer want to leave the house for anything other than work. Communication not at work began to tire, but at work - to bring to tears. Now I can’t believe that this alarm bell was so hard to notice even for myself. Every day I communicated for at least several hours with the project team and the leader, and the reaction to my non-verbal and verbal signals was bewilderment. Such sincere bewilderment when a reliable and proven mechanism suddenly fails.
Then I began to sleep. Coming home from work, she would close the tasks, and then fall into bed. On weekends, I woke up, and without getting out of bed, closed other tasks behind the laptop. On Monday I woke up tired, sometimes with a headache.
Several months of constant drowsiness gave way to insomnia. I quickly fell into a heavy sleep and just as easily woke up a few hours later to doze off again for a short time half an hour before the alarm. It was even more tiring than sleepiness. I went to a specialist when I clearly understood that my life consists of two cycles: work and sleep. At that moment, I no longer felt like a hamster. More often than not, I looked like a galley slave whose fingers were so tight from prolonged exertion that he was unable to release the oar.
rescue technique
And yet, the turning point was not the work of a specialist, but the recognition of the problem and the fact that I could not cope. When I gave up my claims to control over myself and the body and asked for help, the process of returning to a full life began.
The recovery took about a year and is still ongoing, but from my own experience I formulate unsolicited advice on the stages of recovery, which, perhaps, will help someone maintain their health and even their favorite job.
- If burnout has reached the stage when physical symptoms appear, first “mask on yourself”, that is, help yourself survive. Insomnia, lack of appetite or uncontrolled overeating, unexplained pain, pressure surges, tachycardia or other deterioration in well-being - now it is important to stabilize the physical condition. Based on my symptoms, I immediately turned to a psychotherapist. The specialist predictably asked about the rest and prescribed sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Not without obvious recommendations: to take a break at work, to establish a strict regimen of the working day (three times ha). Then I was so exhausted that it was less energy-consuming to leave everything as it is (inertia, heartless you...).
- Accept that change is inevitable. Now that you're where you are, it's obvious that there's been a bug somewhere, an invalid pattern, a repetitive erroneous function. It’s not worth rushing to quit right away, but you will have to reconsider at least the daily routine and your priorities. Change is inevitable and must be allowed to happen.
- Realize that there will be no immediate effect. Most likely, you did not immediately reach what you have reached. Recovery will also take some time, and it is better not to set yourself a bar, deadlines or goals. In general, giving yourself time in constant deadlines, shifting the priority from work to your own self-preservation - this was as obvious as it was difficult. But without this, no pills would help. However, if nothing has changed at all in a month of this stage, it is worth consulting with a specialist about changing tactics or finding another specialist.
- Give up the habit of forcing yourself. Most likely, on some moral-volitional ones, you reached the point where the word “I want” disappeared from your vocabulary, and your motivation is a dead horse for a long time. At this stage, it is important to hear in yourself at least some spontaneous desire and support it. After about two weeks of taking regular pills, for the first time I wanted to go to a cosmetics store along the way. I spent a maximum of ten minutes there, remembering why I came at all and looking at the labels, but this was the first improvement.
- Follow the advice given and don't dismiss the possibilities. It is not yet very clear what is next and how to make plans for the future. Therefore, the best strategy is to simply follow the recommendations of those you trust and be open to new opportunities. Personally, I was very afraid to depend on medication. Therefore, as soon as I felt improvement, I refused the pills. After a few days, bed and sleep became very familiar to me, and I realized that it was better to take the whole course of treatment.
- Switch or expand the angle of view. This will give an understanding that life is not limited to one job (or one stack). Almost any non-working, new activity for you that will require attention will do. I needed money, so I continued to work and chose courses that could not be paid, subject to an interview. Infrequent but intense offline sessions took place in different cities. New impressions, new people, informal atmosphere - I looked and realized that there is life outside the office. It felt like I was on Mars without leaving the Earth.
Actually, somewhere at this stage, the psyche is already stable enough to decide how to live on and what to change: a job, a project, or a desktop screensaver. And most importantly, a person is capable of a constructive dialogue and can leave without completely burning bridges, and perhaps even receiving recommendations.
Personally, I realized that I could not work in the same place. Of course, I was immediately offered better conditions, but it no longer made sense. “Inopportuneness is an eternal drama,” Talkov sang 🙂
How to look for a job after burnout?
It's probably better to refrain from directly mentioning burnout. It is unlikely that anyone will want to understand the features of your inner world. I think it’s more beneficial to formulate it more vaguely, for example: “I read studies that on average they work in one position in IT for six years. I feel like my time has come."
And yet, at a meeting with HR, to the predictable question “Why did you leave your last position,” I honestly answered that I had burned out.
Why do you think this won't happen again?
“Unfortunately, no one is immune from this, even the best of your employees. It took me seven years to reach this state, I think a lot can be done during this time. And I still have recommendations 🙂
It has already been a year since I finished drug therapy, and six months since I changed jobs. I returned to a long-abandoned sport, mastering a new area, enjoying my free time and, it seems, I finally learned how to allocate time and effort, maintaining a balance. So the hamster wheel can be stopped. But it's better, of course, not to go there at all.
Source: habr.com