What does a Programmer Burnout look like?

If you constantly feel stressed, helpless, disillusioned, and completely exhausted, you may be on your road to burnout. Learn what you can do to regain your balance and feel positive and hopeful again.

What is a Programmer Burnout?

Burnout is a state of extreme physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged and intense stress. It is characterized by a decrease in motivation and performance. Stress without let-up leads to a burnout, wherein there already is a sense of negativity building up while performance in many area of your life are breaking down.

Coding is one of the most interesting things for programmers and software developers. It is a profession that offers a great opportunity for career advancement, many benefits and excellent earnings. Coding can start as a hobby, it then becomes a passion and later your passion becomes your job. Software developers usually choose their profession because they like to think and solve problems.

Burnout is common in software development fields since programming is more of a mental work than physical work. Programmer burnout is emotional and mental tiredness in doing computer programming caused by many reasons. Programmer burnout more since they are always working with their brains. In the early stage of your career, you might have enjoyed doing long hours and late night of coding. You continued doing it for years but after sometime, you feel demotivated and lose all the enthusiasm that was there before.

Burnout is a very common and serious issue in the IT industry. Programmers feel stuck working very hard for long periods on projects. Unfortunately, many programmers do not push through this stage, and eventually, they quit.

Keeping passion and motivation is very important in a field like programming. Precautions to avoid burnout must be taken.

Symptoms of Programmer Burnout

There are various reasons for burning out, and the symptoms vary from person to person.

· Loss of interest is the most common symptom of burn out.

· Feeling fatigued mentally and physically.

· Feeling of isolation

· Lack of accomplishment and ineffectiveness

· Feeling of depression and anxiety for weeks

. Insomnia

Causes of Programmer Burnout

· The most common reason for burnout is sitting on your desk in front of a computer for long hours per day looking at the computer screen.

· Overworking - Programming is a highly cognitively intensive and stressful job. Your brain has to think a lot to solve complex problems.

· Monotonous work - Doing the same type of project every time.

· Lack of social interaction commonly for Remote Workers

· Lack of professional results

· Failure to meet deadlines

· Little or no time to rest

· Lack of exercise, or not eating healthy food.

How to avoid Programmer Burnout?

It’s very hard to fix once you’ve been deep in burnout for weeks or months. You should try to choose a lifestyle and maintain a work habit that works for you so that you can prevent yourself from it.

· Cultivate the habit of starting your day with relaxing exercise

· Prioritize your tasks for the day. Check the amount of impact and efforts for each task.

· Develop healthy eating habits

· Take regular breaks throughout the day to help your productivity

· Find new hobbies. Take a break from coding every few months and go on vacation.

· Get enough sleep

· Strengthen relationships with partner, family and friends.

How to recover from Programmer Burnout?

You must be truthful to yourself. Trying to deny exhaustion and continuing as if nothing happened, will only cause more emotional and physical damage. Take your burnout seriously.

· Take some time off programming and find a new hobby. Do more of meditation, it clears your mind and put things on the right track.

· Do not overwork. Learn to say no when you are assigned multiple tasks.

· Slow down. When you eventually come back make sure your start slowly and don’t repeat the same mistake of burning out

· Change your coding environment. You can change your room and you can code outside with your laptop. You can change your laptop or Operating System or Text editor.

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