[shoo]

Jennifer Senior's article about burnout is worth reading: https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/

Reading through that article was one of the things that helped me frame things when I noticed I was starting to feel symptoms of burnout a couple of years ago -- one line that really struck a chord for my situation was "level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results".

I caught my burnout fairly early, what helped me was (1) switching to part-time work for a month or so (mix of taking annual leave & some time in lieu for overtime, my boss was understanding when i had a frank discussion that stress from work was negatively impacting my mental health and i needed to triage that immediately) and then (2) switching away from the project and role that had been stressing me out to a new project and a role with less responsibility. Initially I found it difficult to talk about this and start taking actions to change the situation, but once I started taking action to change the situation things gradually started to improve. In hindsight it would have been better to talk through the problem and then take action to change the situation earlier.

I had gotten my head into a bad place after mentally assuming responsibility for the outcome of a work project in an environment where I had very limited control over the outcome. I was stressing myself out thinking about about work outside of the hours I was paid to work. When I was recovering, my mental model when thinking about the situation was that I'd constructed some black box in my mind full of work-project-related-concerns, and that when I wasn't working I'd habitually start thinking about stuff inside the box and then the box would start radiating stress and ruining my day.