Ask HN: How do you *actually* recover from deep technical/founder burnout?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
What really helped me was fully disconnecting and shifting my mindset to think about work passively: I don't forbid myself from thinking about my work, but I do not action on it. Instead, I keep a physical scratchpad and write ideas and thoughts down continuously. This helps me refactor my perspective and shift it from "active building" to "passive expansion".
I've come to realize burnout is a function of expectation mismatch, and I think of it from thermodynamics perspective. Burnout operates like a pressure differential system where the gap between internal expectations and external reality creates unsustainable energy expenditure. In a closed system, energy imbalance leads to heat loss or system failure. Similarly, when your mental model of "what should be happening" constantly fights against "what is happening," you're burning cognitive energy just to maintain equilibrium.
The passive approach allows me to transform that pressure into potential energy. Instead of forcing immediate resolution (active building), you're allowing ideas to exist in a low-energy state (passive expansion). This mirrors how heat dissipates naturally rather than through forced cooling - it becomes a capacitor, storing energy for later use rather than demanding immediate conversion.
So the answer, for me, is "disconnect from doing while staying connected to thinking". This helps me recover much more efficiently, while keeping myself sharp and free of expectations of doing anything.
This. No amount of break will solve the issue until you adjust your expectations, especially from yourself. I have been burnt out as a founder and taking time off made it worse because I still have a business to run and you cant just switch off as a founder. Can work for employees but not for founders. Only way is to stop expecting too much from you but still jeep the balance of keep moving forward.
Really hard to do. I struggle every day but I cannot quit doing it because i cannot do anything else (EDIT: I mean other than being a founder).
Farber had burned out once before. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, he taught public school in East Harlem. He’d wanted to help people, do the world some good. Yet for four years he’d struggled to stop his students from fighting with one another, and in spite of his best efforts he couldn’t even teach all of them to read. His classroom became a perverse experiment in physics, with energy never conserved (input always exceeded output), and he, a teacher in perpetual motion, always craving rest. Eventually, he began to pull away from his students—depersonalization, as the literature now calls it—justifying his seeming insensitivity by telling himself he wasn’t making a difference anyway. It was only when Farber went to graduate school at Yale that he learned that this syndrome had a name: Burnout. “The concept offered a perfect understanding of what teachers were feeling,” he recalls. “It wasn’t in fact that they were racist and mercenary and noncaring but that their level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results.”
[...]
To me, the most beguiling data to emerge from burnout research are the profiles of the people who experience it most acutely. In her early work, for instance, Maslach found that younger people burn out more often than older people, a finding that turns up again and again both here and abroad. (In fact, that study from the University of Michigan explicitly said that younger surgeons burn out more quickly than older ones.) This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, because we associate burning out somehow with midlife disillusionment. But not if we think of burnout as the gap between expectations and rewards. Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment. And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately invest emotional and physical capital in the office if you have nowhere else to put it. And the office seldom loves you back.
Paradigm shift
How you accomplish that may vary.
At work, I usually keep a little side project going that is helpful, but that no one else gets involved with. When I need a break or a win, I pivot over to that project to do something fun and easy, which gives me a quick win and my sense of control back.
It does have its limits. I feel like I’ve been burnt out for several years now. But was diagnosed with autism last year, so I think it’s autistic burnout, which would be separate from the technical burnout.
When I’ve burned out at work for technical or political reasons, I’ve normally been able to recover in a few months. This autistic burnout seems to be lasting forever. I’m not sure what to do about it.
[*] I like this definition of "a good therapist", from a book I read many years ago:
> Here’s what you should look for in a good therapist.
> Some good signs are:
> * Someone you know says this therapist has helped them with a similar problem in concrete ways.
> * The therapist offers a plan that focuses on helping you reach the goals you’ve set, and it’s clear to you how what the therapist does will help you reach your goals.
> * This therapist uses a variety of methods depending on your problem and who you are.
> * You have an ongoing sense that this therapist is more often than not helping you feel better in your life and helping your life work better.
> Some bad signs are:
> * There’s no change in your life or how you feel or what you do after four sessions, or things actually get worse.
> * The therapist seems uninterested in the concrete realities of your current life.
> * The therapist is focused exclusively on ways you’ve been damaged, instead of on your needs or strengths.
> * The therapist seems to have one all-purpose theory or “answer” that explains everything.
I hope this helps! Burnout is real, you're not alone, and I'm glad you're taking some steps towards recovery!
Some things which are helping me- writing ( I take out time to write about things/topics that I always wanted to), traveling off grid, most important for a while stopping to take actions on every single idea, thread to close etc
1) It's good to analyze what's the source of the burn-out. In many instances, it's not exactly exhaustion per se, but lack of meaning in what they are doing beyond the money. There are acute stressors, like coming out of an intense sprint, and chronic stressors, like not knowing why you're even doing this. If you had fuck-you money, what would you be doing long-term instead? beyond take a vacation, buy a house, etc.
2) Learning to say no to things. Let go of "hero" mode. Good enough for now is good enough for now. Cut down on complexity to reduce cognitive load. Really assess which things you do are real and which are performative.
3) Better understand how work fits in your long term goals. Having worked in VC, a lot of advice for founders are very investor-centric. The core of the thinking is that some sort of exit will solve all your problems, and is worth grinding for. I see many founders become entrepreneurs to "work for themselves" and not be a corp wage-slave, just to become a VC grind-slave. Their health falters, their personal life implodes (divorce/breakups), and they've no genuine friendships (just business acquaintances). When they do get to a good financial exit, they're still miserable. Do try to make the company/product building process enjoyable too. Sometimes it means slowing down, smell the roses, think things through to avoid problems.
Overall, the right advice is very situational. The most important part may be talking out loud to someone you trust about it. Sometimes just verbalizing it helps.
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