Overcoming Burnout

How I burned out, and how I am overcoming it.

In 2022, I noticed something changing in me. It was small at first but there was a nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right. This grew over time into something bigger and all consuming. I started to not enjoy the things that I had felt most motivated me for the last few years - learning, thinking, reading, writing, building and speaking with like-minded people - it became almost painful to focus my time on these things.

Of course, there had been ups and downs before in my career, and there had been times when I had been extremely motivated and times when I wasn't so, but I always had my interests as back up. I could always fall back on the things that I enjoyed and find something new to spur me on, but these things no longer excited me in the same way they did before.

My performance at work undeniably suffered. I found it nearly impossible to start a piece of work and see it through to the finish, something that I could do reasonably well before. It was scary in a way, and as time went on I got more and more frustrated, largely with myself for not being able to stay on top of it and not being able to understand what exactly was wrong. I felt trapped, sad, worried and anxious all of the time and quite helpless in being able to find a way of resolving it.

I confided in a performance coach, who told me that eating better and exercising more was the medicine I needed to make me feel more motivated, but it just didn't help. If anything it made it worse, it was just another list of activities I was not doing well enough and not keeping on top of. Deep down, I knew that this wasn't the problem.

I was in a very bad place and the road out was unclear. I didn't know at the time, but I was burnt out.

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For a long while I wrongly thought burn out was purely a response to working too hard.

As someone who had worked a manual job throughout my twenties as a ventilation labourer, I thought my tolerance to hard work was high. I was used to waking up early, coming home late. My job consisted of lifting and carrying large amounts of ducting up London tower blocks and around the edge of scaffolding sometimes thirty floors up. I used the number and severity of callouses on my hand as a metric for my efforts. It was labour intensive and tough work.

When I made a career change to software engineering, I was immature in the sense that I thought I was somewhat indestructible for proving for X years that I was a hard worker. Teaching myself how to code, I would wake up early and do focused work, often working late into the night. My mental health wasn't something I was worrying about too much, because I didn't understand enough about it.

As time went on and I started managing teams, I grew my knowledge about performance, mental health and people as part of my roles and responsibilities as to being a person responsible for individuals. My self-awareness grew and I picked up good habits like journalling, meditation and looking after my physical wellbeing to a reasonable degree. My understanding of burn out grew, and I spoke to numerous folk who were being impacted by mental health, but unconsciously and perhaps arrogantly I still didn't believe for whatever reason this was something that would happen to me because I was staying on top of my wellbeing.

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The point of realisation came last December when I had an opportunity to make a change in my life. I finished up at MoonPay, where I had been for a year and a half and started looking for what was next - I interviewed for a couple of similar roles but my heart wasn't in it. There was a nagging sense that this wasn't what was next for me.

I decided to take some time going into the new year to focus on myself and switch off completely from work, something that I had only done at fleeting opportunities for the last fifteen years of my career. I took up new hobbies and tried to enjoy myself as much as possible whilst spending time with family. It was some of the best and most valuable few months I have ever had.

One thing that came to me during this period of reflection is how driven I have always been by 'end goals'. My life has been defined by these pivotal moments where I decide to put my all into achieving something in particular, typically being focused on seeing it through for years at a time until I get to a point where I am content with my progress and feel fulfilled. These goals typically will step me outside of my comfort zone and challenge me in ways I haven't challenged myself before.

There have been a few in my personal life that stand out to me, but the first true professional end goal I set myself was to get hired as a software engineer. The steps to achieving it as well as the outcome were crystal clear: get as good as I possibly could at writing code, and apply to jobs until I was hired.

Like an epiphany, I realised that I have come out of this cycle. I had no end goal! Whatever challenge was next was not clear to me at the time, and that was impacting my effectiveness and in turn I was not stepping outside of my comfort zone. I was working hard without really knowing where I was going to next.

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I believe burn out manifests itself differently in people for different reasons. What causes one person to burn out, causes another person to flourish. Our brains are not identical, and no ones mental health looks exactly the same.

The statistics say that 46% of workers in the UK consider themselves close to, or already at the point of 'burn out'. This equates to around 13.7 million lost workdays in the UK alone. That is incredible and terrifying. It's simply not good enough for people to be feeling this way.

We equate burn out to work, and I think for many that is the case because work plays such an important role in our lives, but being burnt out outside of work is equally as realistic.

The key to understanding how to avoid burn out is ultimately being self-aware and having a knowledge of your needs, limits, desires, goals, success criteria and ambitions. Like I eventually realised with myself and my lack of direction, this wouldn't have come to the forefront of my mind without some self-reflection. These are topics I hope to explore more about in the future.

Fortunately for us, these are all things that are teachable and we can make ourselves more resilient to burn out. In fact, my role as a people manager is to help people come to an understanding of these things and build better self-awareness. No matter where we are in our careers or whether we are individual contributors or people managers, taking the time to focus on ourselves is a necessity and ask ourselves questions to better understand how our mindset is.

How are you feeling about your current goals?

Do you have a sense of purpose?

Are you happy doing what you are doing?

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So whats next for me?

The next challenge for me is to build something of my own - my own company. It brings me one step closer to where I want to be eventually in life, as well as being something that frightens me just the right amount (like any good end goal should!). I'm keen to take you folk on the journey with me and inspire you to become more in tune with yourself and step outside of your comfort zone more frequently.

What makes a fire burn inside of me is helping people. Individually I love working with engineers to become more self-aware, and build understanding of personal and professional progression and growth. For companies, I love to build inclusive environments that help people feel motivated and innovative.

This fire was what initially nudged me into people management, and I want to aim to help as many people possible with my content and on an individual basis. This has been the real focus for me so far this year, and ultimately I would love to get to a place where I feel as though my words are having impact on people.

I am going to be focusing on written content, individual coaching, consulting for early stage product organisations and I have some ideas for products that I would like to create later down the line.

The end goal is to be able to make a sustained living from my own work. It feels exciting and intimidating, but for me that is a good thing. I can't wait to speak to you about growth, and take you on this journey with me.

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If anything I have spoken about resonates with you, do drop a comment below, or feel free to email me if you want to chat. Hearing your stories really motivates me even further.