You Are Burned Out And Don't Even Know It

▼ Timestamps ▼
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0:00 - Preview
0:37 - Lecture begins
5:46 - Where does burnout come from?
12:19 - Burnout is not depression
19:51 - What can I do about it?
23:51 - Factors of burnout
44:43 - Medical Perspective
54:04 - Conclusion and questions

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Today Doctor K talks about what is burnout, how does burnout work, where does burnout come from, am I depressed or burntout, how do i know if I'm burnt out, burn out test, burn out symptoms, burn out solutions, how to stop being burnt out. HealthyGamer also talks about what to do about burn out, how to prevent burn out, how to create balance, and more!

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DISCLAIMER

Healthy Gamer is an online community and resource platform for gamers and their families. It does not provided medical services or professional counseling, and it is not a substitute for professional medical care. Our coaches are peer supporters, not professionally trained experts, and they cannot provide medical service. If you or a loved on are experiencing an emergency, please call your nation's emergency telephone number.

All guests of Healthy Gamer are informed of the public, non-medical nature of the content and have expressly agreed to share their story.

[WeekzGod]

"A system that does not allow your efforts to be seen." This is it. 100%

[chaii_latte]

Thank you for clarifying something for me... Ive lost Empathy. A lack of ENERGY for other people. I was starting to wonder If I was just a bad person . Because I only want to focus on my own shit right now. Despite my whole life being told I'm too sensitive, and I'm a pushover, who cares too much about helping others. Yet this year, my parents died, after my fulltime caregiving for them finally ended, I've got grief, I face homelessness, my job is minimum wage hell, I have a toxic roommate, going back to school at 33.. and I just don't give a shit... Its true... I often think, when there's drama happening around me "how tf do people have energy for this shit!?." I don't even have energy for Netflix drama let alone real life.

I have depression too... Some days if all feels so.. doomed. I have nothing.. my future feels dark...

[davidbarko]

The timing of this video is uncanny. It’s 3am in Australia and I just woke up from another stress dream about my job where I was STILL doing it in my SLEEP. 13 hour days 6 days in a row really cooks your brain, so this is exactly what I needed right now at the end of my work week. Thanks Dr K. 🙏

[the_markoman]

Burnout is easy to miss IMO because it's not just one thing, it's the result of longterm stress over many little things that by themselves aren't enough to complain about. And eventually we get overwhelmed.

"Gotta go to work, oh I slept bad last night so the morning routine is harder. Missed the buss by just a minute. The customer has a billion tiny things they wanna change in the project last minute. The customer doesn't speak the native language well so it's hard to even communicate what they want. The boss now needs me to prioritize another task that needs to be finished today. I'm worried of all the other tasks I'm falling behind on now. I mess up one of the tasks so my colleagues have to correct my mistake. Now I'm tired and falling behind on personal projects in my free time as well. Family and friends are badgering me because I didn't call them lately. Tried to squeeze in some gaming but there's so little time for it that I end up staying up too late."

Rinse and repeat until you're fed up with it.

[mohamedabdulla]

Burn out to me is something that kinds of lurks in the background: It makes time seem longer, verbal exchanges with others become more of a show to get on with it rather than an actual human moment, makes you cut corners on tasks, and I am never even sure if I have burn out or not until I notice consistent mistakes and lapses in judgement. It sucks.

[artofwar]

Burnout is the most insidious and secretive mental issue plaguing workplaces. People don’t notice until they’re snapping at their friends or just not doing anything every day they’re not working. Just a few examples.

[jonhadley]

I think I've been burnt out since 17 because none of my jobs have ever paid enough to meet my needs in life, barely scraping by from paycheck to paycheck is literally the only thing I've known and it caused me a severe nervous breakdown last week

[DebraJohnson]

What’s burning people out “the other factors” is all of the administrative work now put on professionals. They have eliminated admin assistants and now professionals are expected to complete the redundant and time consuming admin tasks AND the thought work and problem solving we are actually hired to do. I’ve noticed this change over my ten years as a lawyer. I used to have a secretary and a clerk and now I have to do everything from start to finish myself. There is also a LOT of technology to keep up with and clients expect immediate responses all the time. You also have to network on LinkedIn, etc. It’s a lot.

[noski]

I think the scariest part is when you start to realize that you really can't trust yourself anymore. I've reached the point where I have a lot of cognitive symptoms - worse memory, worse concentration, can't find words etc. I've messed up so many things in the last couple of months simply because I read something wrong, forgot something, or couldn't prioritize. I'm forced to ask people to double check my stuff and that inability to be independent feels awful. Thanks for a well-timed video!

[muddy-one]

There's probably a correlation between a rise in burnout and the fact that since 1950, productivity has gone up 253% but salary has gone up 115%. Talk about a disparity between effort and yield.

[saga]

The real question is how do we address this on a societal level? Because it seems like people are overwhelmingly burnt out, but for all their talk of promoting Mindfulness, companies don’t want to talk about burnout and their role in it.

[spaghety]

"working against a system that won't let them"... nail on the head for my experience. I'm a dev for a living and faced burn out about 5 years ago. I loved the job with a passion for years until a new manager joined who had micro management problems - made the job instantly miserable. I can remember most of the symptoms you described there very vividly. I ended up quitting on the spot after a meeting one day and it took 2 years working part-time as self-employed contractor before I was healed enough to go back to a corporate job again.

[mitthrawnuruodo]

For me burn out happens when I try to take on too much work that I don’t want to do. I get overwhelmed trying to catch up to society’s standards and having adhd that’s extremely difficult. I also go on “hustle culture” binges where I do an extreme amount of work but then crash hard when I trip. A few burn outs in the past even resulted in melancholic episodes. I’m much more careful now and am now doing better everyday.

[cokebottles]

Damn, this is the best description of burn out and I felt attacked directly. I love what I actually do, and get paid reasonably well, my life isn’t completely awful, I really like my peers, and I feel bad for complaining… but I’m declining financially slightly, doing less of the things I love at work, the workload keeps me from the things I love outside of work, I lack control where I need it, and the person I’m doing it for is literally making 10x what I am from my labor while not caring about the things I care most about… yeah, I’m burned out AF.

[SoffyChannel]

I usually don't comment but this really hit home for me right now. I'm 26 years old and burnt out. I'm so ashamed. The society in my country is all work-driven and I've always been an overachiever. I was never really poor but my family couldn't afford going on vacation every year either. Fast forward to my 20s and I find myself with 3 family members in need of care and somehow juggling my fulltime job (which was more than fulltime because of working overtime) and caring for them together with my mother. In January this year I had a breakdown. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat anymore. I didn't want to wake up anymore. I also experienced the lack of empathy for a long time that was described in the video and I felt horrible about it. I quit my job and haven't been working since January, I'm just so overwhelmed and therapy isn't helping me immensely. Although my boss' demands were way too many and unrealistic and although I'm aware that my mother, siblings or uncle should have taken on way more responsibility, it's my problem now. It's my responsibility to get better and honestly I feel like a failure.

[oliviaaloe]

I don't usually comment. The moment I watched this video was actually so perfect. It made me realize that an special person in my life is most likely experiencing burnout. I tried not to take how their lack of empathy personally, but I set a boundary and told them that maybe we can pick things up again when they can settle those things and be present. It's quite hard being on the recieving end of someone burnt out too.

[firefly]

I would be interested in hearing your perspective on autistic burnout. I think there are some similarities to what you described in terms of the circumstances and factors leading up to typical burnout, but the consequences and experience of autistic burnout are markedly different. For e.g. many of us are hyper-empathetic - for me, my default state is empathy. I did not lose my empathy when I entered into a state of burnout (in some cases this can make symptoms worse, since we feel things more intensely - and have to process not only our own trauma but the feelings and needs of others as well, even in that low energy state). I was in fact still empathizing with my abusers even as they were knowingly inflicting trauma.

Also, autistic people can end up with what amounts to brain damage in burnout - loss of skills and abilities that can sometimes be permanent. And in many cases we do know what is causing our burnout but we are unable to change the circumstances to make it better, for e.g. when we are affected by other people's biases and targeted hostility against us for aspects of our identity that we cannot control (hence the 85% unemployment rate among us). I experienced an extremely traumatic work environment where every attempt to better the situation - communication, requests for feedback, attempts to adapt, to advocate for reasonable accommodations, etc. ended up increasing the hostility and damage directed at me.

The circumstances where harm is directed at you by default, yet action of any kind to mitigate that harm causes a backlash and even more harm, induces a state of complete paralysis and destruction. There is not enough research to paint a clear picture of the road to recovery for autistic burnout to help people like me find our way out. I have been unable to return to work since that experience, and every time I read a job description in the tech field or sit down to try to code again, it triggers my PTSD from what happened to me. It has been over a year and I don't know if I can get better, especially since I cannot imagine a scenario where anything I did differently could change what happened to me. I even tried to leave but they gaslit me and convinced me that my perception was wrong - until it was too late and the damage was already done. It's foolish to knowingly enter shark infested waters without any protection when you know the sharks are starving and have already mauled and fed on you in previous instances.

In autistic burnout there is the twofold question of how to heal the physiological and neurological damage as well as how to address the psychological damage - and going forward, how to cope in circumstances where you will be harmed no matter what you do. What is the healthy adaptive response when one needs to engage with a debilitating environment and malicious people in order to obtain basic sustenance? Most allistic people can change their circumstances, avoid people or dynamics that are causing harm, and start over. But we autistics cannot (at least not to an effective enough degree) - we encounter this sort of bias and hostility in most work environments. Some of us can successfully mask, so that we are not identified and targeted directly, but that just drives the damage inward and prevents us from taking measures to meet our physiological and psychological needs.

I'm curious if you've looked into autistic burnout and if you have any thoughts about how we might navigate out of it.

[FS-yqef]

Man this hits hard. I work a 8-5 job but most days I start at 5am and end at 11pm!
So I'm just in a bad cycle of:
I don't finish work because I'm tired and not rested.
So i work on weekends to catch up.
And then comes the week again where I'm tired and unrested.
Then work through the weekend again to finish.
And it's not healthy.

[BlueJeebs]

I was listening to the list and realized that I kept working while burnt out for 2 years, unfair treatment, overworked with no community and complete lack of reward. This comprehensive breakdown was more valuable than most of my research on the topic. It also clarifies how much of burn out is personal which I also noticed while going through the list. Thanks 🙏

[dancingram]

Hi! Im a nurse and work in psychiatry. Im am currently burned out and I can only say that you described it perfectly.
Ive been home since september and I still get triggered if I think about work. The exhaustion is better but its sooo slow! I did wait until I couldn't get out of bed.
I do love my job and my patients. I have a high work ethic and I was told to not be as invested and just be good enough. To me that many times implied negligence and I can't. I tried to work things out with my boss for at least a year and I turned myself backward until I collapsed.
I knew better, I just could not stop.