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IRCDealing with burnout cozy style!
Cool heads prevail.
Some days I’ll have both the motivation and focus to complete whatever I need to work on, whether that be chores around the house, studying, or work. Other days can feel like the equivalence of a story writer hitting writer’s block, but more like life block.
About 5 years ago I would frequently run into this situation. I would get to a point where it would become difficult to just get anything done which meant things were getting neglected. I would get frustrated and irritable too, and it especially doesn’t help when allergies attack or there are any distracting noises around me.
I’ve always had trouble with focusing or paying attention for prolonged periods of time, which despite popular claim, wasn’t caused by my years of gaming. It’s just always been that way, but I would agree that my prior gaming addiction didn’t help anything except perhaps contribute to the problem.
Now I bring up “5 years ago” because it was around that time I realized something that I hadn’t ever taken into account, which is mental exhaustion or burnout.
I’m writing about this because I think it could be beneficial to some reading, but perhaps not for everyone. Just consider it and try out what I have to say!
For me, I don’t immediately feel mental exhaustion. I never realized it until one day. I can actually keep going and going and going without ceasing from whatever it is I’m focused on. I can sleep for a few hours then get right back to it. Sounds like a pretty cool ability eh!? Well, not really.
The problem here is that although I don’t immediately feel mentally exhausted, pushing myself beyond the limit can lead to a sort of burnout effect where I can’t focus on anything and lack the will power or motivation to get anything done.
So what I began to notice in myself during and prior to these moments was that I was really over working my mind with just too much junk! I’m talking about memorizing names and places of things that didn’t even exist (like in my video game worlds), memorizing insignificant details of events, reading and listening to too much and just over stimulating myself.
Being an android would be pretty sweet!
I was basically working myself like a computer. Doing this was causing me to have these terrible burnout moments where I was effectively stunned and incapable of doing much of anything except to eat and sleep. This would last for a couple of days, and then I would clear up enough to do it all over again. It was a routine that I was familiar with and didn’t think to question it much until I realized it was getting worse. I was spending more days down than I was getting stuff done, which wasn’t ordinary, and because of that I was beginning to neglect and forget about one too many things.
I was wondering to myself what was going on until I had the idea to just basically shut down and maintain only the most minimal of necessitates; keeping clean, eat food and water, and be present at work but do nothing at all. I kept away from my computer and would spend most of my down time sleeping (even at work.) You could call it mind fasting! :^)
During these burnout moments, I can’t focus for nothing, so whenever I got bored I would slowly read an instruction manual or a book at my desk without thinking about the words then get up to take a walk.
Eventually I cleared back up and was able to get back to whatever I wanted, except this time I didn’t. Instead, I decided to just stop with it all but did allow myself to use my computer for simple things and spent my time on a single project rather than hundreds of things all at once. It would take a few months, but something I didn’t anticipate was pretty much forgetting nearly everything!
I forgot everyone’s names from my previous jobs I hadn’t seen in years, gaming forums, guilds, clans of old; forgot a bunch of console commands I never used, specifically the Cisco CLI; forgot all my dang passwords except the few I used the most (fortunately I’ve kept them in KeePass.) Forgot a tonnnn of junk about computer hardware; forgot about a lot of stuff from middle and high school years like phone numbers and birthdays; forgot tons on top of tons of my early internet experiences and shows like Homestar Runner (btw did you know they just made a new animation?). There’s so much that I forgot within the span of a year which I was meticulously keeping up with because it was the only way I could effectively interact and converse with people without coming off as completely ignorant or incompetent.
Since I’ve pretty much purged my memory, it’s actually been difficult to re-establish. Like, someone could tell me their name to my face and I’ll forget it as soon as they told it to me. It’s a little frustrating, but honestly I think being forgetful like this is for the best because I’m no longer fraught with having to recall it from memory anymore. It might sound rude, but I don’t really care because what I was doing before was trash collecting and I don’t want to do that again.
Since I can’t immediately feel mental exhaustion or really know when I’m tired, I hold myself back now instead of throwing myself into things 100%. It’s a balance for sure, but it’s really improved my sleep. I use to have a lot of trouble with sleep, taking hours to eventually fall asleep, but now I seem to doze off pretty quick! Also the fever style dreams where things repeat in a non-stop loop went away.
Ooooooh ahhhhh!
I don’t get as burned out as before, but it does still happen on occasion. I at least know why now and can tell where I need to pull back when it does happen, so it’s at least manageable albeit not consistent. I do feel like a quarter of the person I once was when it comes to my memory capacity or my capacity to keep up with and focus on numerous tasks, which has lead to some frustration with work.
If you work in an office, you’ve probably heard of the concept or practice “continuous learning.” This is something that’s been a bit anxiety inducing for me because I know that I’m no longer compatible with that paradigm. On the surface it sounds ideal, but I find it to be a rather self destructive practice upon your own mental well-being that’ll have you continuously shuffling about accumulating mental trash to the sole benefit of a job. If I have to learn something that I know will be expired “knowledge” no sooner than after learning it, which is often the case with corpo junk, my mind fasting regiment will not be so merciful and will erase anything deemed worthless. I can’t help it unless I force myself like before and I’m not all too certain that I can do that anymore nor do I want to do that anymore. My intent isn’t to be inflexible or non-“agile” or perhaps “silo’ed” as the corpo world likes to browbeat upon, but rather my intent is to be a human instead of a dang android, because that’s what I am - A human! I’m not so thrilled to the prospect of making myself into a depository of worthless knowledge with a short lived expiration date. How about something that’ll last a life time?
So instead, I’ll continuously learn about wood crafting, home repair and restoration work, and whatever else I fancy! Because at least it’ll remain relevant to me rather than some shifting wrestles business that can’t appreciate contentedness and peace in life. It’s only a matter of time I’ll get weeded out, but hopefully by then I’ll have extracted what I needed from it.
Anyway, getting back on topic to my reason in writing this. What you want to maintain is essentially a mono-focus, but don’t mistake that for fixation or the obsession of a one-track mind. An example of this would be eating supper without watching or listening to anything from a computer or TV; you can do that after finishing. As for mind fasting, which I think could be especially beneficial if you have a lot of trouble with keeping focused on things, you would simply eat your supper and omit from watching or listening to anything for that whole day. Don’t over stimulate yourself with too many distractions because even though it might feel good in the moment and seem mindlessly non-important, it contributes in subconsciously exhausting you as well as making it more difficult to sleep. You’d think it would make it easier to sleep going to bed tired, but it creates a swarm of so many thoughts that it turns into a ball of static that floods every crevice of the mind that won’t shut up!
I see it like having an invisible fuse. There’s only so much to burn, and some days it’s a short one and other days it’s a long one, but I won’t find out until after the fact of it completely burning away since I can’t see it. So I just try to play it safe now and not over do it.
I moved out of my apartment into the middle of nowhere because there was a lot of construction going on across the street. That combined with the rise in population for the city I was in contributing to more road noise was making it difficult to tune out those distractions unless I kept inside all day long. Staying inside like that without anything to do (because I was also cutting back my time on the internet and my gaming habits) wasn’t very constructive, but I did find learning to cook and going for walks outside late at night when the activity would die down helped. That was when I decided it would be ideal to just move away.
I’m aware not everyone has the luxury to just get up and move away, but if you can find a way to cut down on distracting noises, it really helps. If you’re one of those people that says they’re hypersensitive to sounds, that’s likely a symptom of something else that has you on the fritz rather than it being the sole cause. I can handle noise so long it isn’t excruciatingly loud, but if I’m at a point of burnout exhaustion and already can’t focus very well, then noise can be especially disruptive and over stimulating. By focusing on the cause, which is to avoid over extending myself to an unnatural degree, I’m able to get along just fine. This means reducing the amount of time I’m looking at my computer screen or working on a task whatever it might be, and frequently taking breaks from it even though I don’t feel like I need to because I can’t feel it until it’s too late.
I don’t care anymore if I come as slow to people or if they think that I’m slacking off. They can work themselves sick, meanwhile I’m just going to take it easy because I have at least another 40 years of life left in me yet and I’m not going to burn it all away to strife and stress into an early grave.
I hope this helps!
Thanks for reading my blog!
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