I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of burnout jacquesm mentions.
A compulsion to prove oneself:
This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.
Working harder:
My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.
Neglecting one's own needs:
At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.
Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress):
Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost entirely my own fault.
Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed):
It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life and I killed all hobbies.
Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent):
I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but during this period of my life, I did.
Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very productive.
Thank you for sharing your experience. combined with the 'exact' same experience as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774, I have been in this phase for couple of years. I am trying to fight it (have to due to peer pressure to make money). It has come to my losing interest in anything. I used to love programming for the sole reason of enjoyment. I haven't made any changes to my lifestyle (I probably cannot). Last 3 weeks, I have been in the 'isolation phase' My work place, it's a farce of work with people pretending to get work done with unnecessary complex sub systems. My family raised concerns (they understand my phase, my wife often tells me to pursue academics, as I seen not raised for the corporate world). It's only when three members in my family asked the same question, I started to wonder. I have a thousand things in my mind and a struggling pain of not accomplishing anything. I encounter this every single minute of the day. I am so stressed by the whole lagging behind the world that I feel I cannot learn anything new. I have finished the first chapters of how to prove it, foundations of computer science and algorithms book. Although I am interested, I find myself lacking the motivation to continue...And this adds up, days to weeks and then months. Then the cumulative depression rides me to hell. The thought that someone started learning math about 6 years ago when I too picked interest and the comparison istantly drives me for a whole day of depression. During those days, I don't absorb a thing of what I read.
I shake my legs when I think and I think all day. I am supposed to working on getting xml schema related work done and I am here shaking my legs and thinking.
I have frequented HN enough to know to that I should visit a doctor. But I know that it will not work for me. I don't have the comfort in talking to a 'stranger'.I have heard few here: try a physically involved job. I want to try out (but feel I cannot due to the money factor). I have to earn the bread. I fight with myself saying 'there is do or do not, there is no try', the difference between doing it and thinking about it. I have all the motivation inside, but I just cannot bring myself to do anything. I can never finish any task that I start. This has been going for years. My sanity is still in positive numbers, thanks to my wife.
could you share how did you come out of this phase (perhaps there is much more than just moving to a different job). Do you have any personal stories? I ask this because, as I understand this is not the nature of the job but an intrinsic battle that you won.
"I have finished the first chapters of how to prove it, foundations of computer science and algorithms book. Although I am interested, I find myself lacking the motivation to continue...And this adds up, days to weeks and then months. Then the cumulative depression rides me to hell. "
It seems to me that you may be overloading yourself, especially if you have a 9 to 5 job. One of my friends is working through "How to Prove it" (see http://technotes-himanshu.blogspot.com/search/label/htpi for his blog on his progress - just one book, not three books like you are doing ). He has a boring (but consuming) corporate job, just got married and is other wise busy. He works for a steady 4-6 hours or so every Saturday and that is it.
And from personal experience, if you are trying to "level up" technically on top of a demanding work schedule, a steady and regular series of small bites seems to work better than ultra intense efforts, which burn you out fast.
PS: If your algorithms book is CLRS that is a tough book to combine with other hard books and on top of a job!
Thank you. This is the precisely the kind of advice I am looking for!
I picked up -How to prove it- based on your recommendation(your comments on bradfordcross's blog [on machine learning]and later on your blog)
Algorithms -by Dasgupta,Papadimitriou,Vazirani is the book i picked up (available free at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html). I understand CLRS is the bible (i own a copy),but I don't think I am competent enough to attempt it now(especially after my work with SOA,ESB and every other mind rotting jargon)
I felt this book to be digestible(atleast the first chapter). I could take a pause, think and continue from where I left. (please let me know if you have any cautions/advice regarding this book). With CLRS, I would have to pick and trace back every notation and come back.
I intend to finish these before end of this year. I have a (strong)feeling, I may miss this goal, hence the parallel study(shameful/guilt note - i missed the deadline last year). Will take your advice- work thru htpi first.
I am off to my daily commute. I'm happy to say what worked for me, so I'll type something up once I get home. Just wanted to let you know I will be responding.
I don't know how to fix your situation, but I do know what helped me, so I'll tell you that and maybe something will be helpful to you.
The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so
there is something wrong with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the problem was exactly none of these.
The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life, especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting balance and getting my health back.
I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with my wife again.
And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two
years to lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life.
And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing, less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then.
And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless. Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.
I could relate the 'balance' aspect to (unburnt) people I see (both I whom look upto and them, who are seemingly 'happy' in doing the chores of the day).
I am by code/articles/hn all of my waking hour. During work hours and when I go back. I even have my lunch and dinner by my laptop. I read articles or watch (from the huge list of google tech videos, that I have to finish).
What I gathered from earlier posts here is to 1) not compare with anyone. If anything learn and use yourself as a benchmark to improve upon. 2) don't worry about the results. 3) don't fear the failure. 4) baby steps (do anything that is answerable to big task, anything.) and from you : 5) balance.
I look forward to doing a 'Tell HN' after I overcome this struggle.
If SMrF cares to share, I'd be curious to hear how his compulsion affected his relationship with his wife. Did she agree with the crazy hours? What did she do when you were crying yourself to sleep? It sounds like a horrible experience to watch a loved one go through.
We've known each other for a very long time, (met when we were 10, started dating 10 years ago), so this was just another experience in a very long series of events. Our relationship is stronger now, but it was strong to begin with.
I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of burnout jacquesm mentions.
A compulsion to prove oneself:
This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.
Working harder:
My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.
Neglecting one's own needs:
At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.
Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress):
Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost entirely my own fault.
Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed):
It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life and I killed all hobbies.
Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent):
-- See displacement of conflicts
Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression:
I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but during this period of my life, I did.
Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very productive.