Quick take on Burnout

Note: I am obviously not an expert here nor do I have much first hand experience but I thought it could be useful for people I work with to know how I currently conceptualize burnout. I was then encouraged to post on the forum. This is based off around 4 cases of burnout that I have seen (at varying levels of proximity) and conversations with people who have seen significantly more.

• Different Conceptions of Burnout
  • Basic conception that people often have: working too hard until energy is depleted.
  • Yes, working too hard can lead to exhaustion, but there's a difference between exhaustion and burnout.
  • Exhaustion vs. Burnout
    • Exhaustion:
      • Result of working very hard/ a lot of hours. Possibly including sleep deprivation or just brain fog.
      • Can often be resolved with a short break or vacation (eg: one week)
    • Burnout:
      • More pervasive and affects many areas of life/work. While it shared many physical symptoms of exhaustion, it is deeper.
      • A short vacation isn't sufficient to resolve it.
• Core Feelings Tied to Burnout
  • Burnout is often tied to more core feelings like motivation, recognition, and feeling good about the work you're doing. It is more tied to your feelings of motivation and value than pure sleep deprivation or lack of rest. If someone is unsure of the value of their work and isn't super recognized, especially if they're also working really hard, that can really get into your brain and feels like a recipe for burnout.
• Importance of Motivation
  • This is why I stress the value of motivation so much
  • Nuance: we should distinguish motivation from being overly enthusiastic about programs.
    • Jessica take is that we should have set times for re-evaluating the value of programs. Having set evaluation times helps reduce constant worry about program value but still maintains our ability to have a critical eye toward making sure we are having a large impact.
  • To some extent motivation is a very moldable thing and if you want to try and get more motivated, you can (but it often includes help from others like your manager and team)
• Quick note
  • This isn’t me advocating for exhaustion because it isn’t burnout. I think exhaustion can be very counterproductive and leads to future hours being less productive. 

My main thing here is that I don’t think our LFG / work hard culture is the recipe for burnout. I think being uncertain of the value of our programs, facing many internal structural changes, and not being on top of motivation can be. This is part of why I am excited about the M&E work we are doing, people doing tour of duties, and people tracking motivation/actively valuing it. 

Jessica addition in Dec. 2024:

• Getting sick more often than usual is an indicator to be aware of. This can lead to a spiral of “Get sick, get less done, get more stressed and feel like you are not doing good enough/not feeling good about your work, that stress causing you to get more sick/get sick again”
  
  
  (I will add for the forum that right now I am feeling really good about the value of our programs but its always good to be approaching programs critically to ensure you are having the most impact :) ) 

Very quickly: I feel like it's useful to share that I did this survey and found it very hard, and a lot of other people did too. In particular, it did feel pretty rushed for such difficult questions that we didn't necessarily have a fully informed pre-existing take on. OP does mention this, but I wanted to stress that for people reading this post.

I still think it has a lot of useful information and is directionally very informative. I might get a chance to write up more thoughts here, but I am not sure I will be able to. I mostly wanted to give a quick additional flag :) 

Thanks for sharing this! The power of prompts and letting go of nice to haves have been things I've noticed in my work as well. Good luck with your future efforts here!

Thank you! And thank you so much for your podcasts - like I mentioned in the post I found them really helpful and relatable and am grateful for you sharing so much!

I'm on buproprion xl and generally they don't recommend taking it at night because it can cause insomnia but I'm really lucky and have never really had problems with that. Instead, I just found waking up in the morning extremely difficult - I often woke up sad and just wanted to stay in bed and keep sleeping (even if I had slept a really long time). Due to the extended release, taking it at night means that peak effects are now happening in the mornings when I was most sad / low motivation before. So that was honestly just really great for me.

This is super interesting! How do you do the experiments? Do you change one thing at a time and track?

Thanks! I actually also was using bearable for a while there and had a similar experience of "it's hard to find out info because of confounders but this is generally useful for being mindful of my wellbeing". I don't use it any more but might look into it again :)

I remember thinking it was super cool when I found it

Thank you for writing and sharing this! I'm excited about your work and also excited for other orgs to learn from it :)

This is really impressive output for such a small team!

Just wanted to drop in this study: Harvard Undergraduate Survey on Generative AI since it seems somewhat related/interesting :)