[burned_out]

Makes sense. We have set up the on call schedule, but there are situations when I get called in outside the schedule. Less often than say a year ago, but it still happens.

I guess that is the core of the issue. I am never switched off of work, and it caught up with me. I am not sure is it just my personality.

[noneeeed]

That has definitely been my problem in the past. I'm having trouble with it again as we're having to homeschool, so I'm spending more evenings working than I would normally. I barely get any real downtime and my sleep is disturbed. It sucks. The only way I'm managing is by being disceplined with myself about making some time when I get to switch off from work. My days are very regimented right now, but it's working. Having a clear divide between work and not-work really helps. At the small-scale, I've taken to using a pomodoro timer during my working hours, I have a jigsaw that I work on in the rest periods.

Something I've found as I've got older is that I simply can't manage without good sleep the way I seemed to be able to when I was younger. My younger team member is in his mid 30s and we were talking about this last week. He'd been pulling all-nighters (he's working around homeschool too), and it had been affecting his work, stuff was getting done but it wasn't great, and he was useless the next day. He's been operating the same way he used to do in his 20s when he was doing a PhD and didn't have kids. I think I've finally convinced him that the price you pay later is almost never worth it, but it's taken him a while to admit he just can't maintain that level of effort.

Getting older sucks in a lot of ways, a lot of them are quite subtle and happen slowly. I think the ability to run at maximum effort for extended periods of time is one of the things that you lose to some extent. That isn't to say that younger people don't get burnt out, but I think we recover quicker when we are younger, a bit like how we physically heal faster.