Posted on: October 29th, 2009 by Famous Phil

From the title, I’m sure that you can infer that I recently experienced someone burning out or I burned out.  To remove the inference, I’m fairly sure that I hit my breaking point this past Monday around midnight.  I didn’t realize it until a few minutes after I hit the point, but I’m going to put some tips in this post that will help you identify when burn out occurs and why it can be spectacular to watch.

Normally, burnout occurs from having the answer the same question, or repeat yourself many times over and over.  It eventually gets to the point where you can’t stand it anymore and you bust.  Another instance that causes burn out (and in my case is true) is pushing yourself to the limit for long periods of time with little self time.  Not setting time aside for yourself can make the burn out happen quickly and be the prime reason for fireworks.   Now to define burnout.  As wikipedia puts it, burnout is the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest.

In my case, I am normally a very calm, patient person that is willing to put up with a lot of nonsense for a long period of time without loosing my temper or cool.  Having experienced burnout only on Monday, I wasn’t really sure what was happening.

I was working as normal on coding for a school project due in a few weeks (I’m normally a week or two ahead of the due dates).  For some reason around midnight, the lack of sleep coupled with I couldn’t get a piece of code to work properly caused me to hit the breaking point.  For a few minutes, my laptop was likely worried (if it has feelings) that it might go out the window and 5 stories below the airborne way.  Thankfully, I had a lot of other (non expensive) cups and papers and remotes that I could throw and erupt at.

I normally don’t throw stuff or really get upset like that but for some reason, it was simply an uncontrollable reaction.  Because of this happening, I decided to take it easy this week and only slightly push to get the rest of my tasks for the week done.  This weekend is going to be entirely taken off and I plan on watching several movies.  Hopefully I can get this stress gone so that I can focus on school work again next week without the kind of stress that I’ve noticed lately.

Burnout can be quite spectacular.  with me, I found it was totally uncontrollable.  I also found that I was quickly able to fix the problems and lighten the load to make the stress go away quickly (basically that is why I keep a 1-2 week buffer on work due).  I’ve also noticed that I’m slowly regaining my productivity that I lost a month ago when I started overworking myself. I’m assuming that I’m going to have to push starting next week again, but I will not push nearly as hard as I have been pushing.

In conclusion, always take time for yourself, you need it!  Burnout does happen, and when it does, it is usually uncontrollable.  You certainly don’t want that, do you?  I don’t think so!

Tags: burnout
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