Author's note: This is more or less me rambling for the sake of rambling, but it's also a transparent look into my mental health since not many people like or want to talk about it. Enjoy the read, or don't, I'm not your boss.
Honestly, I don't know how to start this off but it's something that I've wanted to talk about for a while. I haven't always been the best about maintaining my mental health and it's led to me going through burnout multiple times over my career as an individual contributor (IC). I had written a similar but long-gone blog post after reading this post on hackernoon ages ago where I felt like I had some of these characteristics and hated what it led me to be. For whatever reason, growing up I had always been one to do things myself whether it was to my benefit or not. I think this also led to me having trust issues with delegation and trusting others on the team to be able to accomplish the task. All of this led to my first bout of burnout and honestly sort of up-ended my life at the time.
I had been a team and tech lead for a few years at that point and stood up three separate development teams including two in Ireland that had to be done remotely, along with my own day-to-day development work. Looking back at it now, that was way too much responsibility for a mid-level developer, even with one that had as much institutional knowledge of our area of business and technology. The teams were okay, but a good part of my work was fixing issues that kept popping up and I had no real leverage to correct those problems at a cultural level and influence only worked so much when there's less than half a working day of overlap. I did end up leaving that team and went into a new area of the business after that, back to a more startup-like culture and back to being a true IC on a team of some of the best developers I've ever worked beside. Things were starting to look up, but I still had the tendrils of burnout holding me back at times which slowly crept into my general mental health because I never really dealt with it. Around this time, a lot of things happened in my personal life due to that and I went through a sorta life crisis and you'll never guess what happened shortly after...
Cue early 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, but it honestly might have been one of the greatest things that could have happened for me at the time. I went from spending my days in the office to working from home, I was able to take multiple walks outside a day which helped with my mental and physical health, and I was mostly forced to cooking decent meals instead of eating takeout. This time also gave me the space to tackle my mental health and identify the problems that led to the aforementioned burnout. I made some habits in this time that I've mostly kept up as well so that I'm not spending all of my day sat at my desk staring at screens. Not only does this mean I'm able to get outside for some light exercise a couple times a day, but it also gives my brain the space to digest the day so far which has led to a reduction in tension headaches as well.
Things seemed to be going well until I caught COVID the first time. I do have some pre-existing respiratory issues that made this much worse, so I had a fairly long recovery physically but thankfully I was okay other than that. Eventually, even with vaccines and boosters, I caught it again and then a third time, each about a year and a half apart and after those I noticed a much larger impact on my mental health as far as my memory goes (which was already bad, that's a story for another day) and the speed at which I thought through problems and found solutions. It never directly affected my work, but it did bother me and I'm honestly not sure if I've made it back to 100% from before then. On the other hand, I've been working on harder problems with more tradeoffs generally so it could all be in my head.
A couple years into the pandemic and everyone acting like things were normal, we got sent back into the office part time. This threw my habits into a bit of disarray and with it went my physical health. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it was also affecting my mental health as well and in retrospect, I've understood how closely those two things are tied.
I was promoted to director of software engineering and given a team of a handful of people to manage which was one of my goals and I was able to take a step back from being a day-to-day developer, at least at first. I had to learn a new skillset and the fun of office politics more closely and felt like I was excelling as I went into this new chapter. Over time though, that position turned more into a 50/50 of IC and Management and instead of delegating more, I reverted back to my bad habits of taking on more IC work myself. This eventually led to my second bad bout of burnout.
As I'm sure a lot of you reading this know, the general state of work in the past few years has been to do more with less resources and I link this directly to my burnout. My team and the other team in our group had to keep taking on more and more with less and less resources which meant I had to jump into more roles and meetings that I didn't have the bandwidth to handle. Retrospectively, I see now that I should have seen this as something that I could have handled better, but it did take a huge toll on me physically and mentally.
I've since left that company and moved to a remote role and am back on track with my habits. I still have quite a few days that I can feel the burnout creeping back in and those are times that I take a step back and evaluate how I'm feeling and adjust my day-to-day to account for it. Sometimes that means I do more work in the mornings and am more sporadic in the afternoons, then sometimes that means my mornings are slower and I do more reading or learning then more hands-on time in the afternoons and evenings.
Looking back at this time in my life has been an amazing experience in defining my limits, being aware of them, and also setting up boundaries so that I don't hit that burnout stage again. Some might say that I'm lagging because I don't take on as many points as others, but with the work I take on, I do so with high quality and create things that I can say without a doubt that I'm proud of and have high confidence in. I've also been able to get back on track with my physical and mental health thanks to some changes from my doctor and also not holding everything inside and forcing myself to let others do things. I've embraced the idea that sometimes you have to kick the chicks out of the nest and see if they fly or fail and with the right processes in place when they fail, it's okay and we learn and move forward. There are also a lot of things in the world today to be mad and/or sad about, but I try to find the good in each day and go into it with a positive attitude so that I don't fall into that trap of spiraling that leads me into engulfing myself in my work and then burnout.
So what's the point of this post? I don't know, it's really just me rambling for however long it took me to write out my internal thoughts. If you want something to learn out of all of this, here's what I've learned works for me:
- Get outside for a 15-20 minute walk at least once a day, more if you can
- Take time each day to rest your mind and let it digest the day's activities
- Do more reading and learning each day
- Take time for hobbies, personally I go between 3D printing, video games, model building, and motorcycles/cars
- Try to have a positive outlook on each day
- Journal your days to find patterns of good and bad, I personally use an app that's in beta, Dots, to do this at a high level and it allows me to look back and find days that were more negative than positive and then I can look deeper into each day as to why and if changes are needed
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope this helps at least one person and if you ever need to chat you know where to find me.
Thanks for putting this out there! So far as I’m concerned you reached your one person. There’s a reason Stardew Valley has the opening story that it does. Letting go of control and allowing others to make mistakes is hard - but it’s selfish to think that I always know what is right. Or I may know what is best from a technical perspective, but if I rob someone else of their opportunity to learn from experience—that is wrong. Also - I bought a walking pad for my desk, not as good as outdoor walks. I tried cold showers in the morning too for a period of time - they’re great but I don’t do them without accountability.
Thank you for putting this out there. I’ve gone through my own version of this mental health journey, and I’m still working on it every day. Reading your reflections, especially the part about giving yourself space, getting outside, and recognizing your limits without judgment, was a reminder I really needed. I've gone through some very hard times these past few years and its helps to hear other people do as well.
You didn’t have to share any of this, but I’m glad you did. It’s the kind of honesty that makes other people feel less alone. Thanks again for putting it out there.