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Ask HN: How do you know if you’re burnt out?

by stonedge on 12/31/19, 5:28 PM with 2 comments

It was clear to me that, by the start of December, I was burnt. Yet I felt that I didn’t deserve the status of Burnt Out because it was a 5 month period, averaging 45 hours a week. The difference is that the pressure was higher than usual.

How do you define burnout and how do you know if you’re there?

And then what steps do you take to recover?

  • by ThrowawayP on 12/31/19, 5:54 PM

    The diagnostic criteria for occupational burnout are pretty well standardized and can easily be found online (e.g. https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-resources/resource...) and, based on my personal experience, are pretty accurate. What about these common lists of symptoms do you disagree with?

    You mention average hours worked per week being not unreasonable and not feeling you "deserve" to be labeled as burnt out, so I'll also note that, although severe overwork is a risk factor for burnout, it's only one of a variety of risk factors.

  • by gshdg on 12/31/19, 5:43 PM

    Burnout isn’t defined by a certain number of hours. It’s defined by how you feel. The difficult thing to disentangle it from (especially because they feed off one another) is depression.