Tag: burnout

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diary Mental Health

Let’s Discuss Burn Out (Part 1)

Beginning of the Week and Yet…

Something I was definitely not prepared for my adult life was to tackle recurrent bouts of burnouts.

Yes, there are many other aspects of adult life that we are not ready and sometimes never will (I’m looking at you obscure admin tasks). We live in a pretty free world, which means that we are free to do what we want. The corollary lies in the fact that there is always more we can (have to) do than we physically can deliver. Depending on the level of commitment to all these tasks, we highly run the chance of burn out by drowning under all these workload.

Today is Monday and I’m already feeling overloaded with so many tasks, ideas, projects; all of which need/should/ideally be finished by ‘yesterday’.

I’ve already touched on this topic of burnout in a previous post and will expanding on this topic over the course of this multi-part blogpost.

The Sinking Feeling

I used the word ‘drowning’ on purpose here.

One defining sensation when a burnout shapes up in our mind is the overwhelming feeling of drowning. It mentally feels like we are running out of oxygen and are surrounded with water. The outlook on the world becomes darker and darker and soon enough we can even lose our bearings of in which direction is the surface. This makes the recovery even more challenging as we lose sight of how to get out of this feeling, further accelerating the piling-on effects as productivity plummets and unfinished tasks accumulates. Soon, our ability to move (aka think) becomes impaired and despair takes hold of our mind.

If all sounds very dark, it’s because it is.

Closing Words

What is your view on burnout? Have you or witnessed someone going through it? What are your short- and long-term tips for coping with it?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary

One More Week of Daily Writing and Ideas

‘Challenge Must Go On’

After the first three weeks of publishing a new blogpost every day, this is what I’ve learned.

First of all, the daily grind of writing daily gets easier, but unlikely to become second nature. This is so far falling within expectations. The grind comes from fearing the writing process and the inherent writing block. As stated in the very first blogpost, the motive for starting this challenge was to learn to overcome this writer block. At this stage, I confirm that writing these blogposts is getting easier in comparison to the very first few ones. Ideas are flowing faster and in greater number. Sentences are forming in my head with less friction.

Furthermore and similarly to any skills, this is unlikely to become pain-free and the dread to write will not disappear, however smaller it becomes. This is both anticipated and in a sense welcomed. Part of what makes experiences enjoyable lies in the efforts that one pays to ripe the rewards. Like in a rollercoaster or climbing a mountain, the joy at the end is fueled by the fear or the sweat (or both ;p) in performing any of these activities.

Another side-effect consists in a lowering of my fear to share out more openly my thoughts and its positive impact on my stress level. A facet of my burn out stems from the harsh job environment of academia where written work (e.g. papers, proposals, reports, lecture notes, tutorials) are heavily criticized through their related review process. This had a massive negative impact on my mental state, already weakened by numerous bad personal and professional events. Some took place over a defined periods of time in the past and scared me till now to the point of more easily triggering burns out now. This is a point the work my therapist and I have been focusing on for the last year and we’ve made good progress on. I appreciate that very few of you are reading these blogposts as of now but releasing them combined with sharing them openly on this blog has tremendously eased the weight on my mind about my ability to write and share ideas. So thank you, the internet.

I thus shall continue to this writing challenge for all this above virtues and more.

‘Blog Will Rock You’

When scared about losing ideas to others, then one good advice surprisingly consists in sharing these ideas, as many more will start flowing; this writing challenge is no exception.

The more blogposts I write, the more ideas are coming to my head; at first during the writing sessions, then little by little throughout the day (please let me sleep at night). The first type of ideas consists of themes to write about in future posts. The second consists of future projects for this blog and general website. The third type is about the methods of sharing these ideas. The first two are self-explanatory and you will most likely see these ideas concretised in near-future blogposts or webpages.

The third type is however more subtle to describe. As much as I stated above that sharing these blogposts in the open on the internet has almost a therapeutic positive impact on my mental health, I also acknowledge that this blog is pretty hard to find and most likely (as confirmed by the website’s statistics) these posts are hardly read. This is the point I’m slowly warming up to improve by gathering the courage to share or advertise these posts more widely, especially on social media (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn). The objective is to gather more views and learn more and faster through exchanging comments with other readers. This can read at first as a contradiction to the point stated at the beginning of this post about how reviews badly impacted me. Rather than that, my view is rather that my mental health has been slowly regenerating through this writing challenge and is now ready to rise to the bigger challenge again.

There are also many other projects about creating a podcast about power electronics knowledge, a YouTube channel about modelling and control, a GitHub repository about open-source projects… You will hear more when these ideas will have more matured.

So, watch that space for more (grand and wider) announcements!

Closing Words

How has your reading experience on this daily blog been so far? Do you have any features or topics you would like me to cover?

For some reasons, the songs of the late Freddie Mercury resonated in my head while writing this blogpost. Did you catch their influence on the section names? ;p

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary

Bad Habits Show their Face Fast

The Challenge in a Writing Challenge

It was pretty obvious when I started this writing challenge that there will be days when it is ‘challenging’ to publish the daily post.

Yesterday, a cumulation of high workload (marking is almost over as well as the looming deadline!) and mental echaustion meant that I went to bed forgetting to finish typing the blogpost. Luckily, I had started it (as with many other drafts) so it only took minimal efforts to finish it the following day (today). The tricky aspect however lies in the fact of not breaking the cycle and keep releasing a blogpost everyday. I’ve had too many instances were a simple lapse in a new habit cycle meant that the streak was broken and it ended there. The excuse was (un)surprisingly always (read never) valid.

Actually, on this topic of forming and breaking habit, i highly recommend you to listen to yet another episode of the Huberman Lab podcast on this very topic.

Closing Words

And what do you think? How do you enable habits or inhibit bad ones?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary

Setting and Achieving Goals

Huberman Podcast

A new podcast has been skyrocketing on the internet over the last few months: The Huberman Lab podcast. Set up by Prof Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology at Stanford university, this (almost weekly) podcast aims to present insightful biological explanations and life tips supported by peer-reviewed research.

My wife and I discovered back in October after his episode on Dopamine made a splash on social media. We have since been trying to keep up with his release; mostly failling since the episodes are often released weekly and are information dense & long (1-2hrs). These episodes never miss to trigger a discussion between us and how we could potentially change of our habits in line with the reported research; my wife now likes to promptly open the curtains to see the sun in the morning!

I’ve got a feeling that his (future) episodes will make a recurrent appearance on this blog…

The One About Goal Setting

The latest episode on ‘Setting and Achieving Goals‘ is again very interesting and thought provocative. Prof Huberman has once again packed this episode (2-hour long!) with biological explanations on what motivate us to achieve the goals we set to ourselves (surprise, surprise! It includes dopamine).

As you may have already experienced yourself, the literature and social media on this topic is very prolific and provide enough claims about overriding the motivation problem that it could solve the World and more.

Prof Huberman focused on the scientific literature and came up with 9 life-hacking tools to approach goal setting and achieving:

  1. The 85% rule
  2. Initial focal visualisation
  3. Aged self-image
  4. Goal visualisation at the start
  5. Failure visualisation to carry on
  6. Challenge/reward balance
  7. Avoid goal distraction
  8. Specificity of goals
  9. Space-time bridging

Some Reflections

As Prof Huberman said in this episode, most of these points have been covered with different names in popular motivation books and some of them even seem obvious once you have experienced them at some points in your life.

I’m not going to comment on every of these points as the best would be for you to listen directly to the podcast. What I’ll share however are some (fairly hot) takes.

The 85% Rule

This one refers to managing the challenge level of the intermediate goal we are currently tackling. The idea consists in setting the difficulty level such that we succeed 85% of the time and fail 15%. The former reassures us that we are not overwhelmed by the task, while the latter keeps up on our toes and curious enough to put efforts into it. This applies typically when learning something.

I straight away thought about my own learning journey and present role as a teacher. Keeping the motivation high requires to make the goal look achievable but not too easy and I concur with this; not too sure about the stated ratio but apparently some research backs it.

This is definitely a point I need to remember when setting up a course and writing a specific lecture. The students should be able to grasp the vast majority of the points with minimal reflection (the 85%) but should nevertheless feel challenged by the new material presented to them.

Visualisation and Planning

All the points about visualisation and specifity of goals can be grouped under the classic project management umbrella. The final objective (e.g. mastering control theory) should feel grandiose enough to motivate us to start this journey in the first place.

However, this long-term vision can quickly become toxic as the goal may feel unattainable when we realise that hardly any (relative) distance has been covered after the first few steps. To counteract this stage, breaking down the journey into smaller steps and visualizing the eventually of failure will help to keep motivate and pushing forward.

Over-commitments

The point about avoid goal distraction rang particularly home.

Having too many concurrent goals (also read projects) turns out to be counterproductive. Since our efforts become divided, our progress on each goal also slows down; potentially leading to a loss of motivation and an endless cycle of underperformance. In extreme (but unfortunately common) cases, burnout can appear and take hold (as I battle with myself cyclically for years).

In the world of university, academic time is often considered by many (including academic themselves) as of free and limitless. This combined with an environment prone to generate ideas (we are all educated in doing research after all) leads to a propension to often accept new projects, big and small.

However, the physicality of life and the absence of cloning (a recurring joke amongst academics) means that we become overcommitted and cannot deliver on all these projects.

This is further compounded by the fact that each of these projects often involves different stakeholders (e.g. students, industrial partners, various part of the administration, other colleagues in and outside our home university) and their lack of global vision on our workload (as well as our inability to communicate it) gives the impression that we are almost purposely making no progress on the project they are involved in.

As part of this year’s resolution, I will develop my assertiveness and let go of some projects/ideas as well as saying ‘no’.

Closing Words

And what do you think? How do you motivate yourself to set and achieve goals? Do you have some good references to share on this topic?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary

Self-Improvement

In Search of a Theme

Being close to finish the first week of this challenge, I realise that future blogposts should have a central storyline.

This came to me as I started writing the blog post for today. Understandably, the first question which popped into my mind was “what will I write about today?”. And invariably, the next question is “what will I write about tomorrow?” and by extension the day after, and the day after. Surely, I will run out of ideas.

This is where reasoning comes to help. First, they are numerous examples of great people out there, who keep producing inspiring content everyday (or at least very regularly) on the same theme. Second, this experiment (or blog) will eventually meets its end; whether because I moved on or the fact that ultimately I will pass away! From the latter, I do not need to worry about finding an infinite number of topics to talk about.

The former is more important as it contains the important key: focus on one story and you will never run out of topics to share.

The Clues Are Already There

But then which story to choose?

Well, this is where starting this experiment, even without this prior knowledge could be useful. In life, we often do not know where we want to go until we are already quite a long way along the path. Babies don’t say they want to be a specialist brain surgeon until they have at least understood the concept of what a doctor is. Sometimes, the path is also not that evident to us and we need to take at least a few steps to start seeing the light.

But ultimately we are who we are from our own life experiences and, within the chaos of our random Brownian motion through life, patterns emerge and we should keep an eye for them. Looking back on the first 5 posts of this blog, it now looks evident that what I am after and, most importantly, what I thrive to share is a story of self-improvement out of what has been a long burnout period.

I’m no expert at this but I’m learning and I hope that you will also learn a thing or two from my takes on this self-improvement journey.

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.