Skip to main content

Neuroscience: Burn-out Visible in the Brains of Patients

I just found this on Hacker News: Burn-out visible in the brains of patients. Since I've suffered from burnout for about a decade, this comes as no surprise to me.

Try to do pushups until you can't do any more. Now, wait a minute, and then do 50 more pushups. That's the best way I can explain what burnout feels like--my brain just feels like jello a lot of times.

I'm sure a lot of other programmers have to deal with this just like I do.
Labels:

Comments

Donovan Preston said…
Yep. It sucks.
2:30 PM
Sam Rushing said…
I find that's the best time to take a break and kill some zombies.
12:02 AM
jjinux said…
Hey, Donovan. When I saw you at PyCon, your burnout was palpable. That's really a shame since you're such a creative guy.

Kind of like you, Sam ;)
5:41 PM
Dan G Swindles said…
Not sure if you'll ever see this as its an old post, but your description of how a burnout feels is the closest to mine I've ever heard/read - 'how you feel after you've worked out too hard (and you come home and turn white)'.

You mentioned you've been burnt out for ten years, you've have no improvement? I've been burnt out for close to 2 years, I'm getting better, but very slowly
6:18 AM
jjinux said…
Dan, I'm still listening ;)

Now that I think about it, I've suffered from burnout since high school. I'm always a little burned out, but if I work too hard, it gets much worse--just like working out. If I actually take off multiple days in a row completely away from the computer, technical books, etc., I become like a coding version of superman for a day or two.

I've talked to a lot of people about their burnout experiences. I've heard of guys who took 6 months to 2 years away from programming, and that really helped. Since I can't afford to do that (I have 6 kids to feed), my approach is to continually mix it up.

Strangely enough, I get more burned out if I stop reading technical books for more than a few weeks and only do work stuff. If I'm always slowly learning something programming related in my spare time (e.g. Scala, Scheme, etc.), it helps keep me excited. In a certain sense, it's my sense of curiosity and need for order (clean code) that drive me when I program, so anything that contradicts those two things leads to burnout.

I actually have a long list of things that I do to help counter burnout. Here are a few of them:

1. I *do not* work on Sundays.

2. I keep a TODO file of everything I need to do. Sometimes I'm too burned out to fit the bigger picture of what I need to do in my head, but if I mechanically follow what the TODO file says, I can usually get some stuff done.

3. Exercise helps. I don't do that enough, unfortunately.

4. Users groups, conferences, etc. help refresh me (I'm an extrovert).

Best of luck!
11:06 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 20.04 on a 2015 15" MacBook Pro

I decided to give Ubuntu 20.04 a try on my 2015 15" MacBook Pro. I didn't actually install it; I just live booted from a USB thumb drive which was enough to try out everything I wanted. In summary, it's not perfect, and issues with my camera would prevent me from switching, but given the right hardware, I think it's a really viable option. The first thing I wanted to try was what would happen if I plugged in a non-HiDPI screen given that my laptop has a HiDPI screen. Without sub-pixel scaling, whatever scale rate I picked for one screen would apply to the other. However, once I turned on sub-pixel scaling, I was able to pick different scale rates for the internal and external displays. That looked ok. I tried plugging in and unplugging multiple times, and it didn't crash. I doubt it'd work with my Thunderbolt display at work, but it worked fine for my HDMI displays at home. I even plugged it into my TV, and it stuck to the 100% scaling I picked for the othe
1 comment
Read more

Drawing Sierpinski's Triangle in Minecraft Using Python

In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python . Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening. The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for B
4 comments
Read more

Creating Windows 10 Boot Media for a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 Using Only a Mac and a Linux Machine

TL;DR: Giovanni and I struggled trying to get Windows 10 installed on the Lenovo Thinkpad T410. We struggled a lot trying to create the installation media because we only had a Mac and a Linux machine to work with. Everytime we tried to boot the USB thumb drive, it just showed us a blinking cursor. At the end, we finally realized that Windows 10 wasn't supported on this laptop :-/ I've heard that it took Thomas Edison 100 tries to figure out the right material to use as a lightbulb filament. Well, I'm no Thomas Edison, but I thought it might be noteworthy to document our attempts at getting it to boot off a USB thumb drive: Download the ISO. Attempt 1: Use Etcher. Etcher says it doesn't work for Windows. Attempt 2: Use Boot Camp Assistant. It doesn't have that feature anymore. Attempt 3: Use Disk Utility on a Mac. Erase a USB thumb drive: Format: ExFAT Scheme: GUID Partition Map Mount the ISO. Copy everything from
4 comments
Read more