Burnout. Burn out? Whatever, it sucks. 

Burnout is a pretty confusing thing made harder by our naive reactions being things like “just try harder” or “grit your teeth and push through”, which usually happen to be exactly the wrong things to do. Burnout also isn’t really just one thing, it’s more like a collection of distinct problems that are clustered by similar symptoms.

Something something intro, research context, this is what I’ve learned / synthesized blah blah blah. Read on!

Models of burnout

These are models of burnout that I’ve found particularly useful, with the reminder that these are just models with all the caveats that that comes with.

Burnout as a mental injury

Researchers can be thought of as “mental athletes” who get “mental injuries” (such as burnout) the way physical athletes get physical injuries, and we should orient towards these mental injuries in the same way we orient towards physical injuries.

I think this is by far the most useful model, because it makes it easier to actually generate a degree of self-compassion that makes you stop slamming your face into the brick wall. It is much easier to be hard on yourself while burnt out that you’re not producing “enough” legible output than it is to be hard on yourself with a twisted ankle that you aren’t keeping up with your weekly cardio goals. The way in which running on a twisted ankle is self-evidently Bad is more obvious than the way in which pushing through yet another deadline is Bad.

I’m increasingly convinced over time of how deeply this physical analogy runs. Success as an athlete is as much about managing injuries and recovery as it is about optimizing your peak performance. Managing burnout is a core research skill as much as managing recovery is a core athletic skill.

(For rehab of a physical injury, you have “active recovery”, where you aren’t back to normal but it benefits the healing process to start using the injured part again (mobility, physical therapy, light workouts). There is probably some way to triangulate active recovery for burnout here, but my guess is most people’s first attempt at doing so will still end up way too “active” to be recovery.)

Burnout as a deficit of activation energy

I like this description of willpower as “living money” and burnout as being “bankrupt”. In general, tasks have a certain activation energy to them, and we have some capacity (that varies across time) to cross activation energy thresholds. When we’re high capacity (not burnt out), moderate to high activation energy thresholds don’t feel hard to cross, but when we’re low capacity (burnt out), they feel ~impossible.

You can track progress on burnout, both in severity and recovery, by approximating how hard different tasks feel now vs. in the past. Progress on recovery should feel like making things feel easy, not about figuring out how to do things that feel hard. Sometimes life calls and you do just need to buckle up and do hard stuff, but meeting that deadline through blood, sweat, and tears is not the same as recovering from burnout. To borrow the physical analogy, you’re successfully recovering from a broken leg if walking feels easy / normal again, not if you’re managing to walk but your leg remains painful and fucked up each time you take a step.

Sources of burnout

Burnout has many mechanisms, and it can be kind of hard to pinpoint what the root cause is because sometimes they spill over into each other. For example, maybe you’re just burnt out because your sleep has been garbage and you can fix that directly. But it could also be the case that your sleep is bad because you’re anxious about some other root cause, and just fixing your sleep won’t make the other problems go away (it’ll probably help a lot anyways, but might instead be resistant to improvement). I don’t really know what to say to guide you here except that you should introspect, and if that doesn’t work, read other articles that have more to say about it and… keep trying until it does?

Possible mechanisms can broadly be physiological, psychological, or work-related. For work-related burnout, Emmett Shear identifies three sources: “permanent on-call”, “broken steering”, and “mission doubt”. I’ll add a fourth one, which is how “heavy” your work feels.

Physiological + Psychological

Physiologically: if one of [sleep, diet, exercise] isn’t solid, generally try to fix that first and see if the problem goes away.

Psychologically: are you like, generally happy? Do you get enough social interaction? Are there major sources of psychological stress (acute or not)? One of my minor spells of burnout turned out to be solved by just actually leaving the research dungeon and spending more time with friends.

Broken steering / responsiveness

People like being able to poke at the world and have the world react (see also this blog post on responsiveness). It feels bad when this doesn’t happen. It feels really bad when this doesn’t happen for a long time. This is pretty closely related to the “living money” / willpower model; none of your bids to spend energy are sufficiently rewarded with some kind of response. 

I think this is one of the hardest sources to deal with in research, because the steady state of challenging research work is to be stuck and muddling through things. That just kind of sucks! To some degree I think you just have to learn to be ok with this (but there is also a lot that you can do to improve the responsiveness of your work, and if it’s really not responsive that can be a sign that you’re chasing the wrong things or just pressing buttons hoping something happens).

As a sidebar, a friend was recently talking to me about the importance of being able to be bored. Several years ago, I gave TikTok a try. I lasted about a month before I became nearly incapable of focusing on work because it blew up my mental baseline for what a reasonable reward loop with the world was. I quickly returned to my previous baseline after deleting TikTok; I think this probably implies a More Dakka thing exists here (like a digital detox), but I haven’t tried it yet.

Permanent on-call

I’m actually not exactly sure how to map this onto research; research often has stereotypically difficult work-life balance, but some of the ways this happens can be bad, while others are fine or at least instrumental. Crunch time before a research deadline is a form of this, as is being the single person that knows how to do X and having lots of people that need you to do X for them all the time. 

From another angle, it might be when a research problem is really consuming you and it just follows you around everywhere. This is actually kind of ideal in some ways; a lot of conceptual research progress happens as background processing, but in order for background processing to happen, it has to occupy a lot of your background thoughts.

Mission doubt

I would guess that this one is relatively less problematic in research work? It’s probably less common for people to be forced into certain research roles through life circumstances than it is for other types of jobs, so it’s more likely that you have some kind of investment in the mission you’ve chosen. There’s also comparatively more freedom to wiggle your work in a direction that you care about. 

One specific way in which I could see this manifesting in research is believing in some grand vision, but not really believing in how some sub-mission connects to it (sort of like broken steering but at a different scale). You might just keep working on the sub-mission due to inertia and not really having a real-feeling outside option. If this is the case, I suggest that you stare into the abyss.

My coworkers sometimes talk about having radical, irrational optimism in your work – sometimes you have to channel a little crazy to convince yourself to do the hard, uncertain work. It’s not good to always maintain that state, but if you can’t muster it up even a little bit, that seems Bad.

Anyways, if this is your problem with your work, stop working on it! As a researcher you almost certainly have outside options, including spending your energy finding outside options.

Lightness and heaviness

Lightness roughly points in the direction of how fun or playful or generally low-stakes the work feels. This is like that whole attachment thing of holding things lightly. 

• Hackathons / game jams have typically felt very light to me, and my recollection is feeling pretty good afterwards despite them being extremely concentrated periods of effort. Here, the stakes are fairly low and the work (and its impacts) are well-scoped. There’s an atmosphere of (sometimes type 2) fun.
• I’ve also felt this when doing supporting work for some project that feels valuable but isn’t addressing the crux. The project will survive without me, and someone competent that I trust is on the ball. 
• A former mentor of mine would save a certain kind of toy problem for her students to give to them when they seemed stressed out by the core work of their thesis. The toy problems weren’t meant to be publishable, they were just little pieces of mathematical candy to remind her students that math could still be light and fun.

Heaviness roughly points in the direction of high-stakes. 

• You need this to work in order to get or keep your job. 
• It feels like you’re singularly responsible for the crux of the project and other people are counting on you. 
• Your self-worth depends on producing legible outputs.
• If you have to champion your work to other people, it can feel like you have to believe in it enough for several people, and every outcome carries the weight of needing to justify further investment.

These things produce significant extra mental fatigue / friction, even though it might not feel like that when you’re at high capacity. There is always some irreducible degree of difficulty, but to use the physical analogy, it’s like running with a weighted vest vs. not.

Early warning signs

In sports, people say something like “listen to your body” in order to avoid injuries. I didn’t find this particularly helpful until I got injured a few times and actually developed a sense of the limits of my body. I think if you pay close attention when that happens, you actually can learn a fairly fine-grained sense of what it feels like to push something close to its limit and how bad an injury really is.

I think getting better at noticing burnout is like this. That sucks a little because it sort of means that you just need to experience some burnout in order to have any kind of training data, but it’s definitely possible to have high sample efficiency (if there is a way to make people good at this without them ever burning out, please let me know). I suspect each person’s warning signs will look a bit different depending both on their personality and the type of burnout they’re facing. My most common warnings are gradual increases in revenge sleep procrastination, playing more video games, letting chores pile up more, working out less, and eating worse. 

It’s tricky to know the correct response because these signs don’t always indicate a serious problem, and when they do, sometimes you can just grind a little harder (but see the next section for a warning about this) and other times you can’t. This is a skill that you can empirically make progress on though: in grad school I burned out horribly and didn’t do any substantive research for over a year, and these days I’ve been able to intervene quickly and (mostly) prevent long term work disruptions. Nearly all of that progress factors through “listening to my mind” (see also: Noticing).

Coping mechanisms and solutions

My biggest warning here by far is to be clear-headed about which things are coping mechanisms and which are robust, long-term solutions. As a general rule, things that feel like “action scaffolding” that push you in the direction of making short-term progress tend to be coping mechanisms. If you just do the action scaffolding stuff, you might get lucky and outrun your burnout (if, for example, you were grinding out job applications and you finally get an offer), but you might also just get more burnt out until those things don’t work anymore either. This is a very dangerous fire to play with; extra marginal burnout can have extremely outsized impacts. Necessary recovery time can grow surprisingly quickly, and I know of at least one extreme case where someone had to quit an entire area of research permanently.

A (non-exhaustive) list of examples in your action space, (very) coarsely ordered from cope-y to solution-y (don’t read too much into the ordering though, that will vary from person to person too): 

• Take a break (a short vacation, reduced hours, etc).
• Body doubling / coworking; this doesn’t work for everyone, but I find that this robustly lowers the activation energy costs and reduces distractions.
• Try to manufacture some fun in your work. Maybe set aside some time to chase down a sidequest or organize a casual hackathon. Do things that feel easy and don’t do things that feel hard, try to follow the gradients for a while.
• If you’re stressed about other people’s perceptions or of letting other people down, talk to them about it. Sometimes bearing the secret accounts for a large portion of the weight, and it suddenly becomes manageable once you say it out loud to someone.
• In the case of heaviness-from-self-worth, referring to past evidence that you’re worthy. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders during my PhD once I’d finally published a paper I was proud of, and I really milked that as a persistent reminder that I could be a competent researcher. Ideally that wouldn’t be necessary, but it did turn out to be a fairly robust coping mechanism and buys me time to have a healthier attachment to my work. If you’re a very young researcher, maybe you don’t have papers, but surely you’ve ever done something you were proud of in life, let yourself feel a little good about it.
• Fix your feedback cycles in your work; rearrange things or figure out how to actually feel like the world squishes appropriately when you poke it.
• Focus on process: if you’re persistently learning and improving, the power of compounding investment makes it inevitable that impressive results will eventually just fall out.
• Just like, generally being kinder to yourself? Research is a domain where there is always an ~infinite amount of useful work that can be done, and it is also easy to be ~infinitely hard on yourself for not accomplishing more or for not being good enough. This is particularly hard when you’re really burnt out and need to scale down your productivity, because it feels like you’re going in the wrong direction (this is where I find the physical injury analogy most useful personally).

These are just generic examples that tend to work across broad subsets of root causes for burnout, and there’s a decent chance you have to do something more bespoke to solve your problems. In any case, lots of people have had severe burnout and made it through to the other side. It is empirically a tractable problem even if it doesn’t typically feel like it from the inside.

Thanks for discussion and feedback: Andy, Cecilia, Maggie, Maggie