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

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 Bukkit s…
4 comments
Read more

Apple: iPad and Emacs

Someone asked my boss's buddy Art Medlar if he was going to buy an iPad. He said, "I figure as soon as it runs Emacs, that will be the sign to buy." I think he was just trying to be funny, but his statement is actually fairly profound.

It's well known that submitting iPhone and iPad applications for sale on Apple's store is a huge pain--even if they're free and open source. Apple is acting as a gatekeeper for what is and isn't allowed on your device. I heard that Apple would never allow a scripting language to be installed on your iPad because it would allow end users to run code that they hadn't verified. (I don't have a reference for this, but if you do, please post it below.) Emacs is mostly written in Emacs Lisp. Per Apple's policy, I don't think it'll ever be possible to run Emacs on the iPad.

Emacs was written by Richard Stallman, and it practically defines the Free Software movement (in a manner of speaking at least). Stal…
17 comments
Read more

JavaScript: Porting from react-css-modules to babel-plugin-react-css-modules (with Less)

I recently found a bug in react-css-modules that prevented me from upgrading react-mobx which prevented us from upgrading to React 16. Then, I found out that react-css-modules is "no longer actively maintained". Hence, whether I wanted to or not, I was kind of forced into moving from react-css-modules to babel-plugin-react-css-modules. Doing the port is mostly straightforward. Once I switched libraries, the rest of the port was basically:
Get ESLint to pass now that react-css-modules is no longer available.Get babel-plugin-react-css-modules working with Less.Get my Karma tests to at least build.Get the Karma tests to pass.Test things thoroughly.Fight off merge conflicts from the rest of engineering every 10 minutes ;) There were a few things that resulted in difficult code changes. That's what the rest of this blog post is about. I don't think you can fix all of these things ahead of time. Just read through them and keep them in mind as you follow the approach above.…
Post a Comment
Read more