I burned out. Now I don't know how to start again.

Burn out duration varies from person to person and it does happen at random moments where it happens suddenly.

Just continue taking breaks. Maybe play some games or talk to friends here and there. Eventually, your fire will come back. You could start writing on dev.to in the meantime lol. Mind as well :)

The most shocking "snap out of burnout" I ever had was when I took off mid-day to see an afternon showing of the movie Captain America: Winter Soldier. I was so burnt out, took the afternoon off, wasn't expecting for it to be so cathartic, but I just watched the movie by myself in theatres, had fun, left 110% rejuvinated. Still not sure why.

I've burned out many times since, but that one still stands out.

I went through something very similar. Even taking a vacation did not really help. and after talking to a few coworkers, I realized I was definitely not the only one dealing with this. 🥳🥳🥳

What surprisingly helped me was moving somewhere with more sunny days. I started noticing that on grey days I did not even want to work, and on sunny days I wanted to go outside for a walk and also did not want to work. 😂 So apparently I am just very weather dependent. 🤷‍♂️

Jokes aside, I realized that changing what I see around me actually has a pretty big effect on my motivation. I might be completely wrong, but for me, changing where I live once in a while or even just going somewhere new every weekend helps a lot. New places, new streets, new scenery, anything that breaks the routine.

When I stop doing that for too long, I eventually burn out completely!!

Another thing that helped was starting a tiny side business buying and reselling different things. At first it gave me a bit of extra motivation because it was something completely different from coding. Now it has just become part of my routine, but I still think having something outside of software helps a lot.

Anyway, I hope you @embernoglow find your own reset button. Sometimes it turns out to be something completely unrelated to coding!

Burnout works differently for different people. My advice might not fit your situation at all, or it might help at some level, depending on how similar we are in the way we think and experience things.

I've burned out several times over my ~10-year career, and each time was pretty bad. It was worse because I couldn't afford to take time off to reflect and reset. When I was a junior developer, I was so stressed out that I'd spend whole weekends replaying GTA 5's story mode over and over again just to escape reality for a while, and try to feel something other than stress and that feeling of being lost. I didn't even want to try another game. I was looking for comfort, and I wanted something I already knew. It kind of worked, but every time I went back to real life, things felt even uglier.

Gosh, it was a nightmare.

Slowly, I realized the burnout wasn't coming from working hard. No no no.
It came from working without a specific goal I was excited about.

Think about it. "Becoming a better software engineer" and "completing my work assignments" aren't real goals, in fact, they're not goals at all. They're the baseline, and they should be in place anyway. The questions I actually needed to answer were:

• What's my primary goal right now? (And I had to be very specific.)
• What exactly do I need to learn right now?
• What projects do I need to build on my own?
• How can I make real life as exciting as the game I keep escaping into, or even more exciting?

I also had to step back and look at where I was. Especially coming from a very disadvantaged early life I never thought I'd become a software engineer, even though it was my ultimate dream. Now I was one, a junior, with the chance to build the life I'd always wanted on top of it. That realization changed my whole mindset. I told myself: "dude, you just walked into the room you've always wanted to be in and now you're going to give up?! There are even more door in that room that you can walk into. Wake the hell up!"

So I started answering those four questions and acting on them, while working even harder than before. And the burnout? Gone. Completely vanished.

Sure, I was exhausted at the end of the day. But being burned out and being exhausted are completely different things. I can be exhausted and happy at the same time, because I know that exhaustion just brought me miles closer to my goal. That's one of the best feelings in the world.

Now, whenever I feel burnout creeping in, I ask myself one question: Am I excited about something I can work toward? If the answer is no, I go find something.

That's why I:

• Always have a project to build
• Joined the DEV Community
• Always have an article planned
• Take part in DEV challenges
• Never turn down an opportunity or challenge, at work or outside of it

And when I'm tired, I do something I genuinely enjoy. Recently I played Mafia: The Old Country, an amazing game that I absolutely loved. I also watched Better Call Saul for the first time, and it became my favorite TV show of all time.

Mix things up, and don't let yourself stay sluggish and down for long. Take breaks whenever you feel you can't keep going. Last night I got home from the office planning to write an article, but it was late and I was completely drained, so I pushed it to another day. And that's OK!

Every now and then, look back and notice how much you've already achieved, and how much more you can build on top of it. Not just more. Exponentially more.

And when burnout hits again, talk about it. Talk to someone. Sometimes saying it out loud makes it fade faster than when you keep turning it over in your head alone.

The DEV Community has got your back! 👌

In my experience (and sadly I've had some pretty nasty experience with burnouts) this happens because I want to achieve too much in limited time. First I get very motivated, I tell myself all of the cool things that I'm going to do and then I rush to it. I try to learn too many things at once, too fast, and this usually goes on for several months, and at some point my energy tank is empty, I can't perform that well and when my performance drops, I get sad and usually burnout. But those are my triggers, it's good to know yours.

What I've found to work, is control your time, be realistic with your goals and be fine if things take more time. Don't rush, that was what helped me the most. And something that I see most people don't do - celebrate your wins. Every day you achieve a lot of stuff, that goes under the radar and you don't give yourself credit for it. We're all busy rushing to the next thing hah. So my personal advice is: create time-boxed sessions, no work outside of them (this is harder than it sounds, but it's key), and at the end spend 2 minutes to see what part of your work you're proud of.

For now, take some rest (try some hobby, instead of doom scrolling, because that in itself drains a lot of energy) and when you feel ready, try again slowly, applying some strategy that works for your specific case. Everything I've listed is my experience, so you need to track what's going on with you and find the solutions to your specific causes.

And if at some point you start to feel tired (your body will tell you), be ok to slow down even more. In my fitness routine I workout for 4 weeks 5 days out of 7, and then the fifth week is a deload week, which is deliberately easier (I'm right now in this week haha). You can use this in the long-term to prevent burnouts from happening.

I'm now on my probably 5th attempt at learning Java and test automation, and every time I start it over I feel that horror in my stomach. But now I'm building a routine to prevent that, and I'm going to write about it in some time (6th week so far, no burnouts haha). If I survive in the next months, I'll definitely post it, so you can check it out.

I hope this helps!

I faced a burn out problem after made the mordorjs, and spend my free time on house renovation so fare from the online word. Even I decide on winter I will be back. But in this week the I got some strength to realize one of my old ( 3 years ago ) ide, and now try to solve with AI help, so I do that way.
dev.to/pengeszikra/use-this-pipe-t...
This project is a fork of TS and make |> as real working language element in TS and TSX also. When I used pipeline operator a 5 years ago in work that is was a real great programming experience, becaause need a bit different - but very natural logic. Maybe this will help you also.

Been there, exact same symptoms. Years ago, I tried to work on something, had the IDE open, looked at the code and... nothing. My brain just blocked everything entirely. I literally didn't know how any of this worked anymore and nothing made sense. In psychology, this phenomenon is called "pseudo dementia". My brain connected coding to extreme levels of stress and reacted by not being able to code anymore - that's the moment I sought professional help and I ended up on sick leave for a couple of months.

And that's when things got better: Actually taking a longer break for once helped tremendously. I then started again, but slowly, working a day a week, then two days, then three days.

If you experience a burnout, take a long break. Immediately. And then start out slow again and try to build healthy habits (as in: take weekends off, get some hobbies that don't involve anything even closely related to work and without any deadlines) and reflect. Reflect a lot. What caused the burnout? How was my workload over the last couple of months? Did I do it because it was fun or because I, for whatever reason, had to do it? Is there a way to reduce the workload over the long run?

And: Get professional help rather sooner than later. Therapy helps and works!

well ... burnout is no joke.
There is this movie, called "My Octopus Teacher". Highly recommending it.
The path he took is something that all people who are in deep burnout phase should consider IMO. He started doing things for himself, for his own amusement and own curiosity. Not for money or push from management to just get it done. Eventually he found his resolve again.

note: the longer you are in a burnout state, the longer it takes to get out from it. Sometimes it takes years.

I’ve been through this too. I stopped coding completely for two, almost three months. I spent a lot of time outdoors, read about things that interested me, and thought a lot about life and what I actually wanted to spend my time doing.

What I eventually realised was that I wanted to build things that were useful to people who don’t already have money, expertise, or someone fighting their corner. Giving something back matters to me, but there’s definitely a bit of a punk streak in it too. I like the idea of giving the little guy better tools to take on the system :-)

So I started working on small apps and services to help people challenge rejected welfare benefit applications here in Norway, help people organise themselves into groups, and make political processes easier to understand and influence. I went digging through every open public data source I could find, looking for things I could turn into something people could actually use.

That gave me a reason to code again. I wasn’t trying to become more productive or prove that I was still a developer. I had found problems I cared about, and coding happened to be a way of doing something about them. Helping someone push back against a decision, get access to information, or not feel completely powerless—that gets me interested.

But that came after the break. I didn’t get there by forcing myself to open VS Code every morning until the enthusiasm returned.

So, honestly, I’d give yourself permission to take a longer break, as much as your circumstances allow. You don’t need to turn the break into another project with goals and a deadline, either. Read, get outside, follow whatever catches your interest, even when it has absolutely nothing to do with programming.

I don’t know what will bring you back, but for me it wasn’t another coding challenge. It was finding something worth making a bit of trouble for.

I have so much to say about this I cant even get it out. 🤐