Burnout is a bitch, and I've never had it this bad however I'm not going to give in to it this time.
Below I have compiled some notes to my future self or some poor soul who stumbles upon my page to remember how to effectively deal with burnout. This list is not exhaustive and I'll probably keep adding to it as time passes.
Please keep in mind that this is not a one-size-fits-all thing. I have a very different personality than you do and how we deal with stress might differ vastly. These things are just a collection of actions and mindsets I've adopted to help me get through this a better person, with higher resilience and a bag of tools to help me through it again if it happens in the future.
I encourage you to come up with your own list of anti-burnout tools, you know yourself better than anyone ever will.
Talk to your manager about it
I've made the mistake of not talking about problems in fear of being perceived as acting out of line or being entitled, arrogant, and full of shit and it did not end well for me and the people I worked with.
A festering wound becomes a gangrenous threat to life if not treated. You don't just wait it out, you can't expect things to get better if you don't take action.
Just talk to your manager, boss, whatever, when you feel overwhelmed. They are humans just like you, and chances are they'll be compassionate and appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable. If not, they're assholes and you should probably find a nicer place to work at.
I personally hate exposing myself like this, but after a long think, there wasn't a better option. I either have to hand in my resignation, or talk through the issues and come to a compromise.
I chose to talk it through this time, and it is working out amazingly well. I am incredibly thankful to those individuals who are supportive and kind to me about this. We all have our own loads to carry. You have my gratitude ;)
Reframe how you think about your work
There is no such thing as a perfect job, and there will always be some things or people that irritate the shit out of you, but you have to learn how to live with this. It's part of life. Imagine how utterly mundane a job would be if there were no challenges, interpersonal ones being the most difficult.
Some projects drain me immensely because of personality quirks (looking at you, Perfectionism and obsessively wanting to optimise) and I find myself becoming resentful at times of how certain things are done or being told no when I am convinced my way is the best way. This is a toxic mindset to get stuck into and I actively stop myself from going further if I realise I'm thinking in an asinine manner like this.
People have valid reasons for doing things the way they do things and once I've learned to communicate effectively with them and understand their reasons for doing whatever they are doing, I'm much calmer and willing to make compromises. Nothing is black and white, my job is not a stereotype. Not all managers are jerks. If they're wise, they know that the people who work at the enterprise are their biggest asset and they'll take care of you, but you have to be a decent human being too.
Be gentle, I'm not a knife that needs to cut things to precision. On my own work that I do in a personal capacity such as my AI-powered meta description generator web app I can do this, but when it comes to working with a team on code that others wrote, I don't get to judge it harshly because it is written in a messy way. It works for the business, it works for the users, so it's good enough.
Physical health
This is a point I cannot stress enough. If you start letting yourself go by not eating healthy, sleeping well and exercising, your body will start to go into survival mode too, and become an unbalanced, chaotic mess.
Something I've noticed with my personality type is that I would go into a kind of autopilot mode and not think too much about food and the consequences of eating less healthy stuff. I do my best to avoid processed foods with foreign, unpronounceable ingredients and sugar in it.
When I am not in a good place emotionally, I tend to want to eat stuff that tastes good, becoming uncharacteristically impulsive and indulging in sensory stuff, drinking more beer than usual and end up with long term health issues because of the amount of toxins I stuffed into my mouth.
Ugh.
Messing up your gut is like poisoning the water supply of an entire city. Everything begins to suffer. I can't perform as well as I used to at Crossfit, I have constant headaches, I am utterly exhausted and everything around me begins to suffer the consequences.
Not too long ago the realisation came to me that, if you neglect yourself, it's not just you who suffer the consequences but the other people around you as well. For example, if you share a house with a person that's constantly depressed and in a bad mood, it starts to drain you as well. If someone in your home is ill and is constantly clearing their throat, coughing and blowing their nose until the small hours of the night, it affects your sleep.
Just take care of yourself physically, don't burden others with your poor lifestyle choices. They don't deserve such punishment. It's selfish of me to let myself become lazy with my responsibility to take care of my body and mind.
Exercise is important, motion is medicine for a mind that won't shut up. Lift weights, sweat it all out.
Change your office space
I work from home and am blessed with a big enough room and desk to be able to move things around. I moved my desk to face another window and now my phone charger is behind me on the bookcase, so it's a bit of a pain to reach, but keeps me from doing it often.
I cannot tell you how much of a difference this made in my mood. I feel like I am in a different room and have some new energy. I don't yet know how or why, but it's magical.
Be mindful of letting perfectionism control you
I know I am perfectionistic in all of the things I do, and sometimes this is dangerous. I get frustrated with people's ability to ignore small details and do things half-assed (to my standards at least).
I set extremely high standards for myself and when these cannot be implemented, I feel demotivated. It's a detractor from me as a person, I feel. It seems like having lower standards makes me seem like someone who is careless and is OK with things being done "just good enough".
I might come across as an arrogant asshole in this regard, and someone who likes to nitpick at insignificant little things that are relatively meaningless in the larger sense of the world. This is not the person I want to project to the world.
I need to accept that most other people are OK with things just working and it's not like their standards are low, they just spend energy on other things that are more important to them. It's this difference that make the world such an interesting place.
Go out, see people, appreciate nature
As an introverted type of person, I love being by myself and my thoughts, however this can become troublesome. Why? We are designed to function in a community, we need each other for validation, restraints and happiness. People literally go mad when they isolate themselves socially. I've seen this happen to others.
It's ugly and I don't want that for myself.
Building relationships with people is so incredibly valuable. We need each other to get through this life, we need each other's strengths and weaknesses in order to reach a goal together. As corny as it is, no man is an island and you're not edgy if you consider yourself a loner, you're just being feeble-minded.
Walks in nature is one of the most refreshing things ever, it helps to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of plants.
Don't resort to substances to numb the anxiety
Hangovers have no use, they just make you feel even more shitty and you end up spending a whole day in bed. Also, alcohol damages your brain and body. Just don't, the temporary feeling of loss of control and joviality is really not worth it.
My personality preference's most inferior cognitive function is extraverted sensing. If not well developed, can lead to binge drinking, eating or other nasty stuff that can lead to addiction and health problems. You need to see the burnout as an opportunity to develop this inferior cognitive function.
Understand and recognise the reasons for the burnout and be willing to make changes
A lot of what I am feeling is due to months of emotional abuse from an external source, boredom with work, not feeling in control of things at work and working for months on badly written code that drained all of my energy. Having to deal with a complex code base didn't make it easier, but realising that it is a challenge that I can handle is a major boost in confidence, as well as having amazingly smart team members to work with.
Take breaks, switch off form work after 17h00. Don't disrupt your routine too much.
If I am not willing to make changes to how I perceive my work, then may I be doomed forever to repeated burnout.
You don't always have to run away
I mentioned earlier that I had two choices in my mind: quit and find another job, or talk about it.
Previously I quit my job to study towards a Bachelor's degree in Science after a serious episode of burnout. It worked for a while, but here I am again and I cannot quit and start another degree (not that I want to at this point in my life). Running away from your burnout won't solve it in the future, you'll encounter the same shit again and if you run away again, the cycle continues. It has to stop somewhere. Running away from any problem is never a solution.
Like I said, the best way to deal with it is to talk to someone you trust at work. If there isn't someone like that, you probably have to run away because it's not a good place to work at :)
Find a grind
I was talking to a friend the other day about feeling burned out, and he mentioned how he managed to survive his own burnout: by playing one of his favourite MMOs, doing mindless grind work like meta events, group activities, or map exploration. This reminded me to pick up Guild Wars 2 again. Any day I that I have the time, I boot it up, do the dailies and then some other thing that I happen to stumble upon or work towards one of the achievements I've been tracking. It feels good to just switch my brain off for an hour, with some psytrance as the soundtrack.
Pick up a hobby
One of my favourite things to do is to tinker around and get better with C++. It kicked my ass in university, but deep inside I love it. I still have one of my data structures and algorithms in C++ textbooks, so I started doing those exercises at the back of each chapter. I find such peace and joy in writing no-pressure code, code that is for nothing and nobody besides my own entertainment.