#professional burnout

[fenmere]

Just what is burnout?

Something that really irritates us and troubles us about discussions of burnout is that there are different kinds and levels of burnout, and everyone is always talking about their own without specifying what it is. And that gets confusing. There's professional burnout, where you lose your ability to be creative and make decisions at a given job or task. This might happen outside of employment, but it's kinda rare. We could just call it artistic burnout for that, though. But what happens is that you work too hard at this one thing and then your brain just can't do it anymore for a while.

It might effect the rest of your life in other ways, but mostly, you just really need to move onto something else for a while.

This has happened to us regarding art, for instance, and switching to writing allowed us to continue being productive and seeking nice brain chemicals.

Then there's systemic burnout, which is usually called autistic burnout, but it can happen to people with ADHD, and we think it can happen to anybody. It just happens to autistic people and people with ADHD more because we tend to overload faster, and we have more social and sensory demands on us constantly that most other people don't experience. And maybe it's the same mechanism as professional/artistic burnout, but it happens to your whole damn mind and body.

When it hits, you might not even be able to dress yourself in the morning. It can vary.

And both types of burnout happen on a spectrum of length and severity.

Some people talk about burnout that means they have to rest for a couple of hours. Like a daily limit. We don't consider that burnout, honestly. It's more like a brown out, or just a loss of that days spoons. It's a warning sign for longer burnout. If you keep hitting it, it's gonna get way worse.

But, a lot of people call it burnout, and we can't stop them.

Then there's burnout that lasts a few days. That's more like something we'd call burnout, but, we gotta tell you this, it's still really just a warning sign.

Like, your life and career can bounce back from that. You can call in, rest, and then get back to it.

But, if you keep hitting that wall and keep going back to your usual grind, it's gonna get worse.

Then you'll see a few autistics talking about burnout that lasts a couple weeks to a few months. There you're getting into dangerous territory. That can get you fired from a job, maybe even end your career. It can definitely put you in financial dire straights. But you might still be able to take a two week vacation and hobble back to what you were doing.

Then there's what we got: Burnout that lasts years, or is maybe permanent.

We hit systemic burnout in 2012, but we didn't know what was going on and we kept trying to push through it at half pace until 2014, after which we became permanently disabled. And we started having regular meltdowns and picked up involuntary stimming habits we never had before.

And we're still in it.

Unmasking and crying for help, finding a place where we could live with most of the accommodations we needed, all helped us to recover some of our previous function. And we also now know better never to try to act neurotypical again. But even if we tried, we could not possibly perform like we used to.

Part of our permanent disability is that we've also developed a number of chronic illnesses. More than one. They were actually already there, growing since childhood, but they got much, much worse from the stress.

But our burnout itself shows itself in lower thresholds for all tolerances, emotions, senses, everything. And a frequent blank mind most days.

And we're really starting to feel like it's pretty important that people learn to recognize these different types and levels, because a lot of the time they'll write shit like, "Burnout is like [this]. [This] is what happens during burnout." And they'll inevitably be describing something way more mild than what can actually happen, and they'll make it sound definitive.

And that's not doing anybody any good.

[therealistrreal]

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[wisterianwoman]

How to Overcome Burnout Without Losing Your Progress

Discover the signs of burnout and effective strategies to overcome it while maintaining your progress. Learn how to recognize symptoms, take breaks, and stay on track, ensuring your well-being and productivity.

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[attorney-anon]

Warning: Death, Guns, Alcohol, and Suicide Discussed Herein

Also adding a cut, just to be sure no one sees this that doesn't want to.

I posted yesterday about an OP's potential death. I got confirmation & the full story yesterday evening, and have been processing. We don't talk about it much, but compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are real things that attorneys - especially, imo, family attorneys - deal with. And in the wake of something like this, it's important to take time to process what's happened. It's important to care for yourself, and your needs, even if it means putting other clients on a bit of a hold. In a lot of ways, family law is like an airplane - you put your own oxygen mask on first.

OP was an alcoholic; it was the whole reason we were in court in the first place. He'd had several slips, which resulted in him being on repeated breathalyzer testing before & during his visits with his kid. This came about after several temporary orders hearings about his alcoholism. At the last one, he actually indicated, in sworn testimony, that he believed himself immune to hangovers, so there was no way he could be an alcoholic.

So... yeah. He'd had several slips, but had sworn up and down that he was recovering. The week before Labor Day, he missed a scheduled test, didn't even try to pick up his kiddo (which he wasn't entitled to do anyway due to the missed test). Shortly before the weekend, we discovered that his alcohol monitoring account was deactivated. We knew at that point that he was on a bender, and we figured we'd bring it up to the Court when he came back around.

Instead, over the long weekend, still reportedly on a bender, he ended his life with a shotgun.

I didn't like this man, or his attorney, for that matter. OP was an awful person by all accounts, and his behavior put his - very young - child at risk consistently, to the point where other adults in the kiddo's life expressed concern about what would happen if he had custody of kiddo without his wife present (his wife isn't pleasant, either, but she's at least sober most of the time). OC is a grade-A sleazeball, who never did anything properly by the rules, but relied on his reputation with the judge to get away with it (which, unfortunately, often worked).

I have extremely mixed feelings. On the one hand, I feel relief for my client and the kiddo that the custody battle is over. And that's awful and shitty of me to say, and I understand that rationally, but there it is. He didn't deserve unsupervised custody of his kid, and now he won't have it.

But at the same time, I feel so heartbroken for the kid, and for his wife and other children - this is an awful thing to go through, and no one deserves it. And, already, I can see the beginnings of the losses that are going to continue to occur. Kiddo's not going to be able to see his half-siblings, because OP's widow and our client hate each other with a passion, and this death has definitely not changed it.

I'm pissed at the judge, even though I know it's not fair. We asked for him to be ordered to AA, or IOP treatment, or some kind of substance abuse program. We asked for this repeatedly, but the judge insisted that it wasn't that bad. And, clearly, it was that bad. And if he'd been ordered to treatment, maybe he wouldn't have gone on this bender. Maybe he'd still be alive.

And, perhaps worse, I feel personally guilty. This was really the first time that OP was held accountable for his drinking, every time, without fail. And it wouldn't surprise me if it took a toll on him to know that he couldn't lie his way out of it this time. And I had a hand in that, and in fact I told my client multiple times that the reason for the monitoring was to hand him a proverbial rope so that he could "hang himself" for the judge. I knew it'd be stressful, and that he'd fail and that he'd have to face his failures head-on. I never expected it to end like this, of course, but I know I had a hand in pushing him to the ledge.

And of course, rationally speaking, this is no one's fault. But I keep finding myself going down the rabbit hole of being sad and angry and relieved, and it's actually hard to focus on other things for very long. So, today, I'm focusing on relaxing, and processing, and doing what I can to help myself move forward. I slept in a bit, and went to the office a little later than normal. Because I couldn't focus there, I came home at lunch to work from home so I could work in my pajamas, and I'm making my favorite meal for dinner tonight so I can eat it while I re-watch one of the crime procedurals I like. I e-mailed clients to reschedule appointments while my cat slept next to me on the couch (don't work in your bed, y'all).

And, for young attorneys and law students: You have to do this, too, when things like this happen. It's normal to care about your clients and their families, and it's okay to need to process the traumas you inherit from them. When you don't take time to process trauma - even other people's trauma - then you'll wind up burnt out.

[medicomunicare]

Le sfide degli infermieri nelle case di cura durante il COVID: valutazioni sul benessere mentale compromesso

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A maggio 2022 c’erano più di 620 milioni di persone nel mondo infettate dalla malattia di Covid-19, di cui 6,55 persone erano morte. La pandemia di COVID e le sue conseguenze hanno colpito tutti gli aspetti dei servizi sanitari a livello globale, compresa l’assistenza domiciliare. La pandemia pone ancora sfide all’assistenza infermieristica domiciliare a causa del rischio di trasmissione del…

[unkat]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: ダンジョン飯 | Dungeon Meshi | Delicious in Dungeon Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Chilchuck Tims/Laios Touden Characters: Laios Touden, Chilchuck Tims Additional Tags: BDSM, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, erotic picture taking, Cock Cages, Boot Worship, Humiliation, Pet Play, Spanking, Grinding, Oral Sex, Orgasm Control, Accidental Orgasm, Teasing, Punishment, Established Relationship, Bottom Laios Touden Summary: After keeping Laios in chastity for a couple weeks, Chilchuck lets him burn off some steam, too much. Luckily, Laios loves to clean up his mistakes.

[cadere-art]

how'd you start with your uanlikri setting? i've always wanted to make a detailed fantasy-scifi-speculative bio type thing, and i'm finally starting with it, but it feels so big that i just don't know where to begin.

So, let me preface this by saying that Uanlikri has turned 12 this year. It has been a long haul project and it has been through a lot of changes - I have been working on it all my adult life, literally: I started working on it when I was 17.

With this established, here are two things about how I started: I don't quite remember how I was approaching it when I begun working on it, and lot of the stuff I put in it, especially in the first years, has been reworked, replaced, or removed*.

When I first started working on it, I was mostly trying to worldbuild around this plotline I had in mind, which remains, mostly intact, as the plotline of The Flight of the Winged Serpent, a story I may or may not write someday about the death of the last Emperor of the Namitan Empire. These days, I'm mostly trying to worldbuild around the location of another story, Empire's Wake, which takes place in the City State of Ranai after the fall of the Namitan Empire (which is why I keep going back to Ranai in a lot of my worldbuilding posts).

Regardless of whether you intend to write a story in that universe or not, for me the best approach to worldbuilding is to have a story, or a character, which serves as an anchor to your work. I'm not very good at focusing on Ranai or even the Basin Region, where both Ranai and the Empire are situated, but this still helps me direct my attention: although I've built loads of stuff for the lands south of the mountains which have little to no relevance to Ranai, I keep the level of granularity of that worldbuilding low - none of it is in depth, and I don't try to develop details for it. If I ever want to work on a story set south of the mountains, I'll have loads of stuff to work with, but mostly I'll have loads of stuff to develop before I can write in that part of the setting, because the worldbuilding there is very surface-level.

The other big thing I always and systematically recommend that people should work on and think about more is material culture (this could not possibly be because this is my field of studies). Whenever I don't know where to start, thinking: what's their land like? What grows there? What can they harvest, what can they intentionally grow, and what can they make from it? What do they eat, and how do they prepare it? The materials and designs of our houses, furniture, and tools influence our lives on a completely fundamental level. What does it mean for the rythms of daily life to have tiny houses without windows, or big houses with inner courtyards, or houses without clearly deliminated indoor/outdoor spaces, or communal houses? Do they need to grind their flour by hand, and who does the grinding? Going back to the material conditions of a group and what they can do from there is both an endless source of inspiration and a way to get back to the fundamentals and get a good base going from which to build up afterwards.

Also, and probably most importantly, I'd say focus on what's fun for you at that moment. A couple years ago I spent a lot of time doing a lot of work on colour genetics for a few critters. Is it useful to me now? Not really, but it's kind of nice to have, and more importantly, I had loads of fun doing it back then.

*There's also loads of stuff that's stayed - some that grew with the setting, some that I've never needed to change, and some that I'm kind of saddled with for better or worse. More on old Uanlikri under the cut.

Uanlikri started with antioles, which were initially lizard people with a very agamid / iguana - like look. The fauna in their world was kind of all over the place, but more fantastical overall and much more mammalian. The idea that they might be dinosaurs came quite early, I think, because they had feathers as early on as day 2 of the project (the very first antiole drawing is featherless), but I only decided to take this idea seriously and redesign antioles consequently in 2017, 5 years after I begun working on Uanlikri. I'm mostly happy about how antioles look now, but the strange feather crests are a remnant of the very first designs that, quite frankly, annoy me deeply lately. If I were to design them today, they'd have more sensical feather placement, but the weird crests are staying because I don't feel like invalidating the last 7 years of work and the 40 something drawings in the "antiole fashion" series. Making the rest of the fauna dinosaurian is something I decided on in 2017 as well, but which I've only begun taking seriously in the last year and a half or so - I've done a huge amount of work in the last 2 years on account of many things including a better workspace and also graduating and not being a student anymore.

At the start of Uanlikri, there were 4 ethnic groups in Uanlikri: the greens, the sand-folk, the grey mountainfolk, and the Pale Peoples. This a thing that's really grown with the project as it went: I never scrapped or intentionally revamped it, but it's both remained true and changed a lot in 12 years. The green peoples are now called the Undenau and represent two different colonization events in Uanlikri's history, one very ancient (6000+ y ago) and one recent (250y ago), with some surviving cultural taboos among the two groups which posit a common ancestor. The sand-folk are still kind of mostly beige and brownish (though with a lot more khaki as well), and probably arrived first. The situation with the mountainfolk has complexified considerably with the addition of polar regions and peoples to the South of the continent which did not exist in the first maps. The Pale Peoples are now mostly immigrants of another landmass.

One thing I'm saddled with that annoys me is that, in the beginning of the project, the sand-folk were somewhat (badly) arabic-coded especially in the names of things, and though I've tried to dilute that influence through the years, it's largely remained because I just don't see myself renaming such a huge chunk of the map and the characters which I know by heart. I think it's uninspired and kind of stale, but it is what it is.

Conlanging is truly the aspect of the world in which i've felt the most saddled with old decisions if only because I think redoing and relearning huge chunks of the world's names would be more of a disservice to me and the progress of the project than having a slightly better or more inspired bank of names. I try to avoid indulging the urge to redo stuff as much as possible.

[sheisanimposter]

One of the best pieces of advice a mentor has given me is that perfectionism is just a pretty way of saying "bad at collaboration".

I'm trying to translate this lesson into my student habits now that I've returned to academia.

Perfectionism eliminates opportunities for others to give feedback or contribute, it reduces your opportunities to learn a new perspective, and it limits your final results. Don't be so quick to assume the value of someone else's input even if you're super well informed on the topic.

Ask that question, get that second opinion, schedule that brainstorming session. Be so brave, your mind and soul will thank you.

[seraphim-soulmate]

when my roommates put things back in the kitchen incorrectly it makes me frustrated and angry. apparently, did you know, this is not a thing all or most humans experience ? some people don't have an intense emotional reaction to things not being stacked in the optimal way, or pans not being put back in their "usual" spot. did you know this. did you.

[eternalglitch]

Hey, so I'm the person who sent you the ask three days ago asking how you cope with burnout and such. I just want to say the advice you gave was hands down the best writing advice I've ever gotten, and it gave me so much hope. I have to thank you for not answering how many tend to do with the passive-aggressive "Perhaps writing just isn't for you if you can't push through burnout. 🙃" as well, because I can't tell you how much that has beat me down.

I've now gone from an average of thirty minutes of writing a day until I lose motivation to THREE HOURS. That's the quickest, most drastic progress I've EVER made.

You inspired me so much. I wish I could hug you. Ily.

You've been given silly advice in the past. The only time I would ever warn someone that way (and I say "that way" loosely because that delivery SUCKS) is if they were trying to live 100% off of their writing, because bills are bills and you can't wait for inspiration if that's your job.

But writing as a hobby, as a skill, as an act of creation that humans frequently engage in? Absolutely there is room for everybody. The people that tend to be hit hardest with burnout (in my experience) burn the brightest when actively in the act of creating. They can put together things in a short span of time that would be impossible for other people. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and rather than hold one brain wiring or whatever up as "better" I think learning how to work with what you have will eventually work with you to create something that feels worthwhile. You just need to be patient and kind to yourself until you get there.

I've also had some pretty bad writing teachers. I'm not interested in being that kind of hurdle to "overcome" in anyone else's writing journey by being anything other than encouraging.

Congrats on the progress!! I hope it stays with you, and when it lapses again I hope you enjoy having time to rest and enjoy yourself in other ways so you're ready to go again when the time comes :}

[Sends a virtual hug your way.]

[queer-crusader]

Okay I NEED to fucking get a gyno appointment I'm sick of this shit. Gonna check tomorrow if I can make an appointment online with my GP and if she dismisses me again instead of referring me it's war

[s1xseasonsandamov1e]

oh and also i finally got my offical diagnoses today! turns out i was right about everything and that was a waste of six months and my parents money.

[the-last-dillpickle]

i love it when Julian Bashir's depressed 🥰🥰🥰

[epersonae]

🐙 and 🐍 !!!!

🐙Edward Teach my beloved, the man who invented eyes, brilliant and badass and completely burned out. He's beautiful? I would climb him like a tree if I didn't know that Stede would fully eviscerate me for trying. His expression of grief is literally one of the most important things ever, it got me through an incredibly challenging time in my life. How is he even more beautiful while trapped in despair? But then he gets love and joy, and that too is so important. Also the living embodiment of this face: 🥺 - absolutely could not resist that shit.

🐍I want Archie backstory so bad. She's so weird and cheerful; HOW'D SHE GET THAT WAY? How'd she get recruited to the Kraken-era Revenge?! I don't have the hots for her that some of my friends do but I wanna hang out and listen to her tell stories.

[send an emoji and I'll give you my opinion of an OFMD character]

[romance-incubomp3]

I think I underestimated how prestigious the playwriting conference I’m attending right now is. because it’s in valdez which, while historically significant, is tiny and in the middle of nowhere alaska

[impossibleprincess35]