I have suffered burnout many times over the space of my small career. I am now developing strategies to avoiding, recognizing and fixing burnout.

What are the symptoms of a programming burnout?⌗

(this might be dependant on the subject, but I’ll act as if my experience was universal and the one and only truth for now)

  • I cannot fix a bug even if it’s an easy one. There is a wall in my mind.
  • I procrastinate programming sessions; I get caught watching 4 hours of anime instead of doing my scheduled 4 hours of programming.
  • I find no pleasure when programming, and sessions leave me with anger and stress instead of a sense of accomplishment

The easiest way to spot a burnout is to constantly evaluate the quality of your programming days, e.g. in a spreadsheet. Once a drop is detected, this means that you need to drop into recovery mode.

Recovering from a programming burnout⌗

In this section, I’ll detail the strategies I have used to get past my few programming burnouts

The classic one: code for pleasure!⌗

As postulated by Mo in his famous piece, Memories of Code, programming burnout might be a simple memory. One of the solutions he proposes is creating new memories of programming that are positive. You have to make sure that the weighting of the new memory is higher than the one of the burnout for it to work.

Concretely, I personally like to start a new project, and I sometimes even open-source it.

It doesn’t even need to be finished projects. The only requirement is for it to be a finished positive memory.

What if we could erase memories?⌗

In the same post, Mo proposed that erasing the burnout memory might help, but there is a risk of lingering feelings. He states that we do not have the technology for it, but I’ll do the opposite: we had the technology for it thousand of years before we were even born!

Let me introduce: classical psychedelics. I am no expert with them, but my personal experience tends to show a melting brain phenomenon; the brain melts the same way that lava does; and after a few days, it starts solidifying again. Another way to say it is that it induces neuro-plasticity (scientists found that, I’m not inventing it.)

I’ve had one instance of burnout where I couldn’t fix a bug despite it being simple to track down (need a few logs here and here should do the work). However, I was stuck in an endless loop of dreading work, trying to work but not being able to do anything, getting yelled at by the customer, and wanting to obliterate myself out of existence.

One day, I decided to do a DMT trip. I don’t remember anything particular about this trip except that it was uninteresting. But even uninteresting trip lead to the brain-melting effect I described earlier (there is even non-hallucinogenic compounds that produce neuro-plasticity that are being studied).

Once I was able to reliably move again, my first impulse was opening my code editor and working on the bug. It might have taken me 30 minutes to track it down and implement a dumb fix.

What I retained from this experience is the following:

  1. if there is a bug, find the root cause and try a stupid fix
  2. if you are burning out, use a psychedelic to reset my brain

Avoiding the burnout altogether⌗

Why was I burning out in the first place?

  • Noisy client
  • Illusory work complexity
  • Bad brain state (not enough sleep/rest, causing a block)
  • Too much work for not enough positive outcome

Here are solutions:

  1. Learn how to deal with noisy clients (I’m currently writing a post on the subject)
  2. Reduce work complexity by starting to tracking down the bug. Stop looking into charts and open your code editor!
  3. Rest properly, even take drugs if that’s your thing
  4. Optimize code to add pleasure (the urge to work on an unrelated open-source project might not be that useless)

Conclusion⌗

Programming burnout is a well-known issue. Everyone has their strategies to deal with it. In this post, I outlined causes, solutions and prevention strategies to avoid the infamous programming burnout. If you liked this post, subscribe to my mailing list for more.

References⌗