One bright September morning, I sat down to work on an AWS Lambda function. Yet, as the minutes ticked by, I realized I had been staring blankly at the code for what felt like an eternity. Thirty minutes had passed, and I had made no progress. I couldn’t do it. The code, which once made perfect sense, now appeared utterly foreign. What was happening to me? Was this “burnout”?
For the past twelve months, I found myself grappling with relentless headaches and migraines that only seemed to grow in frequency. Alongside these, my muscles ached incessantly, and I suffered from flu-like symptoms that never seemed to abate. I exhausted a considerable number of Covid tests, all of which returned negative results, ruling out that possibility. My vision remained untroubled, so the glasses weren’t to blame either.
As distressing as the physical ailments were, what truly frightened me was the stark cognitive decline I was experiencing. My once-sharp problem-solving skills had dulled to the point where they were almost non-existent. Staring at the Lambda code I had meticulously written, my mind drew an utter blank. It was as if I were gazing at a wall of Egyptian hieroglyphics, utterly indecipherable and foreign.
I had also been suffering from crippling fatigue; I felt exhausted all the time, and lived on a hamster-wheel of rolling out of bed, working, and collapsing in a heap on the sofa in the evening.
There was no energy left for the important things in life: I stopped volunteering at the Samaritans, cancelled yoga and art classes, and missed many social engagements. My house was a mess of piles of washing and unwashed crockery in the sink. My garden had become overgrown. I had many half-finished blog posts and pieces of music on my hard drive, easily enough for a small book or a couple of albums if I’d ever get them finished… Gradually, all the things I had enjoyed in life had faded away into the background
But now it had all come to a head. The last thing I could competently do, code and work, had also vanished.
Many things went through my mind. Was I suffering from a form of dementia? Was this an early onset of Alzheimer’s? Or some other neurological issue?
My symptoms
Over the last 12 months I’d noticed, but not really paid attention to, a collection of symptoms. They seemed unrelated at first, but started to coalesce into a cluster of “unwellness” that was starting to dog me with increasing persistence.
Headaches
It seemed every week I had a migraine, and I took to taking a lot of Paracetamol and Nurofen. After a while though, everything seemed to be aching and I kept thinking I was coming down with Covid or flu. I wasted a number of Covid tests, but no cold or flu symptoms properly developed or came out. There was never any snot, runny nose or anything, just a constant feeling of “coming down with something”. Paracetamol helped, as did White Tiger Balm, turmeric and ginger and other anti-inflammatory measures, but not on a long-term basis. The symptoms just persisted.
Fatigue
No matter how well I slept, I always felt tired and lethargic. It was absolutely crushing. During 2023-2024 I cancelled my 50th birthday, countless yoga and meditation classes, art classes and engagements with friends. Most evenings I was only really able to lie on the sofa, braindead, in front of the TV. I had no energy for anything outside work at all, and regularly went to bed at about 9pm.
This affected me not just socially, but as I live alone it compounded an increasing sense of isolation from friends and family. It also sucked a lot of the joy out of life. I’m at my happiest when I’m painting or doing something creative. I love yoga and meditation, going for walks and riding my bike. And despite being an introvert who gets socially overloaded quite quickly, I do love spending time with my friends and family as well. And having to stop working for the Samaritans was heartbreaking.
Memory problems and brain fog
I was forgetting words, couldn’t focus on anything and if someone asked me a question it would take me a long time to answer. As things got worse, I found it hard to solve simple problems and had been making increasing numbers of “schoolboy errors” in my code (e.g. putting an assignment operator = instead of a comparison operator ==, forgetting the syntax for a for loop, that kind of thing).
My ability to just “think” was seriously impaired, and this was the most worrying symptom of all for me, as my career (and a lot of my sense of self-worth throughout my life) had been built on my mental acuity. It was the one thing people knew about me: “Oh Gav? Yeah, he’s really clever. Ask him, he’ll know.”
Cynicism
I was resigned to the fact that nobody was planning or organising anything, that requests would just come through with no kind of plan or rationale other than “the CEO wanted it”. I found myself getting snappy with colleagues and generally feeling irritated whenever someone asked for something, as much of the work felt arbitrary and pointless.
For me, this was a moral injury. Without exception I genuinely liked all my colleagues and deep down wanted to help to the best of my ability, but running on fumes I found myself being impatient, taciturn and tetchy a lot of the time. I was turning into someone I wasn’t, and didn’t want to be. I had worked very hard over the last decade or so to cultivate a kindly, helpful demeanour in the workplace, but was finding that that was becoming undone.
Total lack of motivation
I had, sadly, run out of care. I still wanted to produce good, scaleable and robust code, but I no longer cared about what the business actually did, or where I was in it. At the beginning of the day I just checked in, ground my way through, and checked out again.
Hitting the wall
And then one day, after a few months of feeling run-down and ill and just taking it for granted, I simply hit a wall. I found I was just staring at code and it didn’t make any sense. My brain had simply stopped. I picked up the phone and called my GP, intending to get to the bottom of this for once and for all. I was rather scared, and I knew this could not continue unchecked.
It was time to to ask for help.
It’s not depression…
On the surface, the symptoms seemed very similar to those of depression, something I’d struggled with some years back. The crushing fatigue and the feeling of weight, the brain fog and irritability are all common symptoms of depression.
However despite everything I did not feel in any way “depressed”. My mood was fine and I was quite chirpy when out and about with my friends. When I wasn’t at work the world seemed a lovely, bright place. I enjoy gardening, painting, reading and writing, and life outside work was pleasant enough. The only problem was I simply didn’t have the energy to do those things.
For example, I went on holiday for a week to visit my family in France, and that was great. I felt fine, confident, and had a very enjoyable time in the French countryside with my parents and my brother. I felt alive, and happy, almost back to my old self, although the brain fog persisted.
But when I got back to work, things went downhill from there. More headaches, more brain fog, more aches and pains. I had a list of more “can you just’s”, three websites had to be released on the same day to hit some arbitrary deadline, and worst of all the CEO had been having meetings with my team while I was away. He had been putting in requests for UX/UI changes to our websites, some of which contradicted existing change requests and tickets. The result being that the team had not been able to complete the work I had given them before going away. It was like trying to build a house of cards on board a sailing ship in a storm.
Assessing the situation
So I called my GP. I’m in the UK, and a GP appointment is free. He signed me off work for two weeks with stress, and then again for another week after modifying the reason to “developer burnout”. This was new to me. I’d never taken any time off in my 30 working years for mental health reasons before.
At this point, things got rather surreal. I spoke to my boss who was very helpful and understanding, and I told him I’d been signed off for stress. That was it. No work for three weeks. I wasn’t to check work emails, Slack, Google Chat or anything.
So I had validation from two authority figures, I was given “permission” to not work, nay, I had been instructed to do nothing for three weeks. this gave me time and space to reflect on how I’d got to this place.
My mood immediately lifted, although my energy levels took a little while to return. Brain fog started to clear a bit too. But I felt myself in a very strange state: not working, but actually feeling OK due to not being at work. I wasn’t on holiday, just milling about at home. I started tidying things up, and finishing some paintings and music.
What became clear to me was this: the torpor I had been experiencing wasn’t depression or medication withdrawal, it was occupational burnout.
What is burnout?
Occupational burnout is defined by the World Health Organisation as follows:
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:
- • feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
- • increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
- • reduced professional efficacy.
Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
Source: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases
I discussed this with my GP and counsellor, but needed to get a handle on how bad it was. I had no experience of burnout, though I had heard of it, nor did I have anyone to compare notes with.
Digging around the internet, I found some useful resources.
The most helpful book I found was “Burnout: A Guide to Identifying Burnout and Pathways to Recovery”, which contained details about the Sydney Burnout Measure . This is a questionnaire devised by the authors to help diagnose the severity of burnout.
A score of 50 indicates burnout, I scored 80/100, which is severe burnout. This revelation made things all the more “real” for me, and more usefully it gave me a term that I could use to help describe what was going on. If you get a demon’s name, you can (hopefully) get them under control.
This led me to ask myself: had I perhaps come to the end of my natural life as a developer? How did I get here?
What caused it?
I can only think of this in terms of the “boiling a frog” metaphor. The pressure had built up over the last 12 months slowly but surely: another new project here, another request there, each one looking perfectly feasible in its own right.
I’d assess what needed to be done for incoming requests on a high level, sense-check them for feasibility, then schedule these changes in to the team’s plan, create a ticket in ClickUp/Jira or Linear, maybe do a bit of preliminary investigation to assess effort, assign a developer and talk them through it if they had any questions.
But at this workplace, our priorities were constantly changing from one moment to the next. This made it impossible to gain any traction on any given task, or make any progress.
One week website speed would be the most important priority, the next day it would be UI/UX, the next week an urgent new website build would be needed. Work was piled on top of other work with no overarching plan or schedule, and no consideration of what we were already working on.
As such, no matter how much I tried to get the incoming work into some kind of sensible order to avoid duplication, something would come along to scupper my plans. It was like trying to build a sandcastle only to have someone come along and kick it down half way through.
At some point, I stopped caring about my work. Each piece of work became just another hunk of machinery to throw together and chuck over the wall. I’m usually very conscientious with anything I do, as I like to produce good-quality, scalable code. But with everything moving around so much something inside me died and, to put it bluntly, I stopped giving a shit.
The end… What next?
I’m currently working through my notice, finishing off existing work and preparing handovers for the team. I am also working with a Mental Health Recovery worker to get myself back on my feet.
Right now, I hope I never have to see another IDE or curly bracket ever again. The thought of coding in another company environment makes me feel somewhat ill.
I have handed in notice on my job and will be looking for a non-developer role going forward. I intend to start working in the field of wellbeing, complete my counsellor training and start my own private practise. But in the meantime I’ll be happy working in a garden centre or as a barista.
I have no intention of returning to development work or any other kind of work with code or websites. I’m happy to work on my own website(s) or projects, but at this point I really don’t want to be doing it for a living any more!
References
All taken on Friday November 8th 2024.
- Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990). “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224927532_Flow_The_Psychology_of_Optimal_Experience
- “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress”. https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf