[half0wl]

I've been here. Taking a vacation never helped, because I'd be stressed during the vacation thinking about "work" in an active manner.

What really helped me was fully disconnecting and shifting my mindset to think about work passively: I don't forbid myself from thinking about my work, but I do not action on it. Instead, I keep a physical scratchpad and write ideas and thoughts down continuously. This helps me refactor my perspective and shift it from "active building" to "passive expansion".

I've come to realize burnout is a function of expectation mismatch, and I think of it from thermodynamics perspective. Burnout operates like a pressure differential system where the gap between internal expectations and external reality creates unsustainable energy expenditure. In a closed system, energy imbalance leads to heat loss or system failure. Similarly, when your mental model of "what should be happening" constantly fights against "what is happening," you're burning cognitive energy just to maintain equilibrium.

The passive approach allows me to transform that pressure into potential energy. Instead of forcing immediate resolution (active building), you're allowing ideas to exist in a low-energy state (passive expansion). This mirrors how heat dissipates naturally rather than through forced cooling - it becomes a capacitor, storing energy for later use rather than demanding immediate conversion.

So the answer, for me, is "disconnect from doing while staying connected to thinking". This helps me recover much more efficiently, while keeping myself sharp and free of expectations of doing anything.

[codegeek]

"I've come to realize burnout is a function of expectation mismatch"

This. No amount of break will solve the issue until you adjust your expectations, especially from yourself. I have been burnt out as a founder and taking time off made it worse because I still have a business to run and you cant just switch off as a founder. Can work for employees but not for founders. Only way is to stop expecting too much from you but still jeep the balance of keep moving forward.

Really hard to do. I struggle every day but I cannot quit doing it because i cannot do anything else (EDIT: I mean other than being a founder).

[AznHisoka]

What do u mean you cannot do anything else?

[codegeek]

Sorry I should have been more clear. I meant that I cannot do anything else other than being a founder and run my own thing. With that, comes the burnout that cannot be solved by taking time off because you cannot just switch off like a regular employee can. So you have to solve the burnout differently.

[shoo]

From Jennifer Senior's excellent 2006 article about burnout titled "Can’t Get No Satisfaction" [1]:

Farber had burned out once before. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, he taught public school in East Harlem. He’d wanted to help people, do the world some good. Yet for four years he’d struggled to stop his students from fighting with one another, and in spite of his best efforts he couldn’t even teach all of them to read. His classroom became a perverse experiment in physics, with energy never conserved (input always exceeded output), and he, a teacher in perpetual motion, always craving rest. Eventually, he began to pull away from his students—depersonalization, as the literature now calls it—justifying his seeming insensitivity by telling himself he wasn’t making a difference anyway. It was only when Farber went to graduate school at Yale that he learned that this syndrome had a name: Burnout. “The concept offered a perfect understanding of what teachers were feeling,” he recalls. “It wasn’t in fact that they were racist and mercenary and noncaring but that their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results.”

[...]

To me, the most beguiling data to emerge from burnout research are the profiles of the people who experience it most acutely. In her early work, for instance, Maslach found that younger people burn out more often than older people, a finding that turns up again and again both here and abroad. (In fact, that study from the University of Michigan explicitly said that younger surgeons burn out more quickly than older ones.) This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, because we associate burning out somehow with midlife disillusionment. But not if we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards. Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment. And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately invest emotional and physical capital in the office if you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back.

[1] https://nymag.com/news/features/24757/