How to Deal with (and Prevent) Burnout
How to Deal with (and Prevent) Burnout
What I learnt from burning out - and what you can do if you are going through it.
Introduction, Disclaimer and Thanks
I went through burnout for the first time in 2017, when I was running my company Medella Health. We had gone from a team of 17 to a team of 4 in a matter of 2 months. On top of this, I was dealing with my grandma’s on-going health problems. After 2017, I went through two other instances of burnout (in 2019 and in 2020 respectively), and I’ve been a proponent of founder mental health ever since.
While I want to emphasize that every founder’s burnout experience is going to be different (and if you’re lucky, you might never experience it), I am writing the following essay to share about how I (and other founders I’ve discussed this with) dealt with their burnout, and best practises we’ve come up with.
How to know that you are in “burnout mode”
The first step is knowing that you are in burnout mode. More specifically, there are different types of burnouts — with different emergence points, with different severities, how one reacts to different stressors, with different distractions, etc.
Fundamentally, burnout happens when your happy hormones are depleted, and your current life structure can’t replenish the happy hormones either. The biggest symptom of this state is feeling a lack of energy and motivation (ie. doing tasks that were once “easy” take longer and more effort, dealing with problems is harder, etc.). The earlier you catch yourself in burnout mode, the easier it is to improve your life structure to get back to a healthy state (ie. finding joy from accomplishments, spending time with friends/family is something you look forward to).
This can be a confusing period — from not being productive, losing sense of identity, inching away from relationships. This is why I want to share a framework (or a set of tools) to help you organize your thoughts in this confusing period.
What to do once you are in “burnout mode”
I’ve broken this part into three digestible chunks, each with a different goal to work towards:
These are the three phases of burnout (and what to do about each one). Reference to Atomic Habits, by James Clear.
My Personal Burnout Journey
When I went through the above, here’s how I went through each phase:
Maximize Phase
As I mentioned, the hardest part was admitting to myself that I was actually burnt out. Once I came to terms with this, my first step was to let my co-founders know. Together we came up with a plan on how I would be able to take time off until I got back to a high-performance state. Once I closed some of the commitments I was working on (and the necessary transitions had happened), I focused on minimizing my company work. I went from working 60+ hours/week to 10–20 hours/week.
Now with this free time, I re-discovered all the things that I found fun, or led to “happy hormones”. For me, this was playing racket sports, going on walks, reading literature, and spending time with loved ones. I tried doing the above as much as I could with my free time — and slowly I started feeling better. (It’s important to point out that “better” is an emotional state of feeling in high spirits — hard to quantify).
Optimize Phase
At this stage, I started re-integrating myself back into the company in a real way (working 40+ hours/week), while finding a balance to do the activities that brought me joy. For example, I dedicated Saturday mornings to playing badminton, and I found a group of people that would do this consistently with me.
It took me almost 4 weeks to go through this phase — what required the most effort/work was finding a way to balance (non-work) fun and work.
Re-optimize Phase
This is a continued phase where I am constantly finding ways to “check-in” with myself about how I am feeling, and why. For me, this comes through meditation (I meditate 3–5 times a week). The fundamental premise here is to reflect about how to improve your emotional state at all times. Structured ways of this reflection are meditation, journaling, co-reflecting with a friend etc. The unstructured ways of this reflection are teaching your mind to wander to your feelings, and being able to analyze them in real time. (The latter takes time — so I almost always recommend starting with a structured approach first).
Final Notes
As I mentioned previously, every burnout is different, and as a result, you will spend different amounts of time in each of the above phases. For some the “maximize phase” can be a few days, for others, it can be a few weeks/months. Almost always, the “optimize phase” is the longest (usually double or triple of the “maximize phase”). And the “re-optimize phase” is about setting up consistent habits to minimize the chances of burnout.
Since burnout is such a dynamic problem, doing the same thing that someone else did almost always doesn’t work. You’ll have to try different experiments — some will work, and some will not — the best thing you can do for yourself is be patient with yourself.