In the latest batch of blog posts, I left this one to the end. I found I procrastinated writing it the most out of all the other posts because of two reasons: 1) it’s very personal to me, and 2) it contains a lot of interconnected ideas that require refinement and organization. As a result, I told myself that instead of writing it out as I want, I would rather write out all the ideas as one big list, and I’ll leave the task of better organizing it for the future. Better to get a draft out there than to keep sitting on it.

This post came out of my reflection over the years, having been in/out of a few burnouts since the 10th grade, and lessons I’ve learned in the past year on how to deal with and avoid burnout.

As I mentioned above, the following ideas are more of a stream-of-consciousness list of thoughts, instead of a well-composed and organized post.

Slow COMT

My background’s not in biology, so the jury’s still out on whether this is legitimate. But the sentiment still holds. This past year I learned about a gene (or set of genes) that supposedly controls the speed at which our brain clears some neurotransmitterrs (in particular, catecholamines: dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline) from our system. The gene is known as the COMT gene. One kind of expression of the gene, known as fast COMT, clears out catecholamines faster from our system after they’re released, and the other, slow COMT, clears them out slower. The result is that the same release of dopamine for people with the fast COMT gene doesn’t feel as good than folks with the slow COMT gene, because people with the fast COMT gene clear out dopamine faster (and thus feel less dopamine overall).

Alas, the amount of pleasure felt is relative. If someone feels more pleasure than you from the same event, it doesn’t really matter to you, because you don’t feel it.

Feel free to google more about the COMT gene. I discovered it when browsing the r/hangovereffect subreddit - a subreddit made for people who feel good from hangovers, looking to find answers as to why they feel that way. I wouldn’t say I quite feel good, per se, but a part of me enjoys feeling hung over once in a while. The long story short here is that when we’re hung over, for those with slow COMT we experience what it’s like to have fast COMT, because somehow or other (I’m blanking on the details here) when we’re hung over we either release fewer neurotransmitters or they get cleared away faster. That’s why when I’m hung over, I feel less stressed. I don’t feel any amount of anxiety, and it’s an enjoyable feeling. All the while, I find it difficult to think too hard about hard problems, because, well, I have less dopamine helping me solve problems.

I warned you that this post would be poorly organized. I’m writing these thoughts as they come.

So I learned about slow COMT. And something clicked. My own perceptions of myself were explained by this simple explanation. Now, I didn’t quite to a DNA test, so I don’t exactly know what expression of the gene I have, and I don’t exactly know whether any of this is legitimate or just pseudoscience, but it matches my experience and intuition. People with slow COMT tend to be more neurotic, stressed, smart, high achieving, sensitive, motivated, passionate. One podcast I listened to said that slow COMT is like being on uppers all day, because the same chemical behind drugs like cocaine (releasing more dopamine) is behind slow COMT (not clearing dopamine out as quickly). And this matched up with my intuition about myself. I didn’t need to take a DNA test to know that I have slow COMT.

Dopamine is behind feelings of pleasure and reward and motivation. Folks with slow COMT tend to be more enthusiastic, passionate, but it comes at a cost of being more easily out of balance, more prone to addiction (addiction is indeed a matter of dopamine — someone more sensitive to dopamine can more easily fall into addiction), and more prone to burnout.

So slow COMT. Another consequence of slow COMT is that they’re more easily stressed. That’s because the mechanism behind the feeling of stress, adrenaline, is another thing affected by the COMT gene. Folks with slow COMT feel adrenaline more strongly, which can make them feel more stressed than someone with fast COMT, given that both people were in the same situation and their brains released the same amount of adrenaline (waving our hands a bit here — in some cases adrenaline isn’t strictly “released” rather converted from dopmaine — the details aren’t as important, and like I said I’m a bit iffy about them anyways). So people with slow COMT are more easily stressed. But in low stress situations (solving a non-life-threatening problem), they’ll feel more adrenaline than those with fast COMT, which helps them solve the problem faster/better because they’re more alert. Pros and cons for both scenarios.

There are two consequences of this realization, of the existence of COMT and that I have slow COMT. 1) If indeed I have this gene, then (barring any hardcore gene editing therapy) I can’t change it. It’s who I am. 2) I would so much prefer having slow COMT than fast COMT. How I view the world, they patterns and connections I’ve made, the problems I think about, the work that I put my mind to, my understanding of people and processes and things, all of that is shaped by slow COMT. That’s because all of it has been shaped by being sensitive to patterns, being motivated to understand, deriving pleasure from making connections and find patterns and solving problems and building mental models of things. I love it so much. It’s totally worth the downsides of being a bit less stable of an individual, and prone to mental health problems (burnout, anxiety, stress). And I know I can attribute those things to slow COMT because all of it is a matter of dopamine and sensitivity (motivation, pleasure, higher order thinking are all attributable to dopamine). My whole immediate family is like this. Sensitive, smart, perceptive, creative, passionate, motivated, but prone to mood problems, easily stressed, irritated, tired.

Burnout & stress

Let’s talk burnout (I’m avoiding the d-word intentionally). Burnout occurs when I feel stressed over a long enough period of time, without any feeling of relief or success or rest or relaxation. One key aspect of burnout is the idea of learned helplessness — a learned feeling that continuing to work towards a goal will not achieve any success. If you think about it, this response makes sense. It’s our bodies’ response of shutting down in the face of repeated failure or lack of success.

Persistent stress/adrenaline is tiring. Our brains need time to clear these out of our system in order to reset, recover, and return to work with energy to put towards goals. I’ve only ever burnt out after a period of time that was highly stressful, sustained over a long period of time. My brain was _tired_, and burning out was my brain shutting down because it sustained too much stress without a break. And this was amplified because of slow COMT — I had more adrenaline than the average person coarsing through my brain. So piece 1 of the puzzle is to try and avoid sustained stress over a long period of time. Give yourself time to relax and clear out the catecholamines.

There’s a bit more to this piece of the puzzle. Anxiety/stress arises between the disconnect between what we want and what we have, as well as *how much we want it*. There are two ways to reduce the amount of stress/anxiety we feel: 1) Lower the bar. 2) Want the thing less. If the bar is too high, or we want the thing so strongly, this causes more stress, and as mentioned if it is sustained this will lead to burnout. Shorter-term goals, less ambitious goals, and a less strong desire for them, all of that can reduce the amount of stress we feel.

Burnout & motivation

Okay, stress is one part of the puzzle. Motivation/drive/pleasure is another piece of the puzzle.

The part of burnout related to being tired pertains to stress/adrenaline. There’s another part, which is motivation. Part of burnout is a matter of having no motivation to do things. Learned helplessness. This is where dopamine comes in. I’d highly recommend Andrew Huberman’s primer on dopamine — that’s where I got all of this information about dopamine. Basically, my argument here is that in order to maintain productivity over a period of time, and to maintain motivation, we need to feel continual pleasure from doing things. That has two parts: 1) we need to feel pleasure on a continual basis, and 2) we can’t feel too much pleasure. A lot of burnout is a matter of pursuing some grand goal, and not feeling pleasure while pursuing it. So even though we might feel motivated to pursue the grand goal, we don’t get hits of dopamine sustaining us through the process, helping us do the work. In order to sustain work over a long period of time, we need to have periodic hits of dopamine. That means that we need to be motivated by small, attainable goals, we need to *feel rewarded* when we attain those goals, and we need to rest between goals in order to allow our brains to reset after feeling the dopamine hits & adrenaline. If we don’t set small, attainable goals, then the dopamine we had at the start of a project will slowly wane and we won’t be propelled to keep working in the midst of our project. Over a longer period of time, we develop learned helplessness, because our brains learn that working on the project doesn’t bring any reward because if it did, we would have felt it already. So, small goals. Short term. Attainable. Kind of like a video game character refilling their energy tank at each checkpoint, lest they run out of energy if they were to skip a checkpoint.

Two more points about dopamine and reward: 1) the reward can’t be too high and 2) we can’t be feeling too much dopamine from other sources. As we all know about dopamine, the higher the dopamine hit, the harder the comedown, and the more dopamine we need to feel the same level of reward. Our bodies adapt to the level of reward that we experience. So when it comes time to have reward for our intermediate tasks, if the reward is too high, then then next checkpoint won’t feel as good, and we’ll have less dopamine at our backs when we go about working. Additionally, we feel the same effect if we get dopamine from too many other sources. It behooves us to have chill evenings instead of going out clubbing every night. Getting dopamine from too many external sources will reduce the amount of pleasure felt from work, and we’ll once again have less dopamine at our backs when we set out to complete the task at hand. Of course, there’s a balance to be drawn, because our lives do not solely revolve around work.

To summarize: 1) reduce the amount of stress felt by lowering the bar and wanting things less 2) shorter, more intermediate goals, 3) not being too stimulated in general, 4) give time to rest & reset our brains.

Of course, not everyone is like this. Some people don’t have slow COMT, and maybe if they do they still don’t work like this. This is how I work, and how I assume many people out there also work. Just my two cents.

A big part of long term achievement is liking the day-to-day work, and not being solely focused on long term outcomes. This is precisely because enjoying the day-to-day allows us to feel the pleasure of reward in a way that propels us through the work in a way that working on something miserable for a long time with a big reward at the end does not.

In fact, that last paragraph described the reason why I've burnt out the past few times. I focused so much on long term goals, and I didn't love the day-to-day. By letting go of the long term goals and learning to enjoy the day-to-day work, I've become much happier with work.

Resting & relaxing by setting shorter-term goals

Also, regarding sustained stress, the stress was caused by my pursuit of some goal, and I could really never fully rest/relax until I obtained it. Resting/relaxing is very much connected to making shorter, more intermediate goals. Remember that feeling in college come winter break, just after finals, being at home, sleeping 12 hours a day, watching tv and movies, it’s winter and cold and dark, and we just kind of *recover*. That’s because we felt so much stress from finals, and we finally got to rest. Resting/relaxing isn’t just a matter of taking a bath, or getting a massage. To truly let go, we need to let go of our goals. This is made way easier if our goals are shorter term and accomplished. We only rested in winter break because we didn’t have any finals to worry about anymore. It’s hard to rest when we still have a goal we’re working towards.

Avoid burnout by 1) setting time to rest/relax, must not be stressful and ideally not super stimulating 2) when working, don’t get too stressed. Ideally, a medium to low amount should be good enough. (No stress entirely is also bad — stress helps us get stuff done). 3) Make sure small rewards are obtained throughout the process. The worst way to work is when intermediate success isn’t visible or felt by the worker, so no relief/reward that can propel the person, fuel/recharge their batteries.

Treating the symptoms, not the cause

Returning to one of my earlier points — if indeed a lot of this behavior is attributable to a gene (or set of genes), then I have virtually no control over it. I have to accept that I am like this, and that the same part of me that’s smart and creative and passionate is the same part of me that struggles with burnout, anxiety, and mental health sometimes.

For years, I sought after a solution to these problems. I thought, maybe if I did X I’d be cured. That didn’t work, maybe if I do Y then I’ll be cured. I’ve found that the solution is to treat the symptoms, not the cause. Yes, you read that right. Treat the symptoms, not the cause. Because the cause is something I can’t change, and I have to accept. The symptoms are easier to treat. When I’m stressed, rest or do something relaxing. When I’m down, do things that I enjoy doing.

Because there’s a meta-problem here. In terms of setting goals and learned helplessness, we can set too high of a goal for ourselves in terms of how we deal with burnout and stress. In other words, we can be stressed about how stressed we get. We can feel down about how we’re feeling down. The solution, of course, is everything I mentioned above. Lower expectations. Set short term, attainable goals. Rest.

Wearables

I was really into wearables a while back, as a way to sort of track my mental health. How well I slept, how much exercise I got, how much I was moving/how active I was, how focused I was on tasks like work. I wanted to track it so that I could measure my mental health so that I could optimize it. There is no optimizing mental health. My mental health started to get better once I started to accept how I was. I am who I am. I’m happiest when I’m not trying to optimize my happiness.

Extrinsic motivation

As a high dopamine guy, in the past I’ve relied disproportionately on intrinsic motivation. This can make it hard to keep the ball rolling with productivity and dopamine checkpoints. Some days I just don’t want to get out of bed, and relying entirely on myself and intrinsic motivation can yield a vicious cycle of inaction, procrastination, and lack of reward due to lack of work. The solution there is to rely on other people to motivate you, to help you get out of bed. For example, having an office to go to during the day can help motivate you to get out of bed, shower, and dress nicely. Working with other people on a team helps motivate you when you’re feeling less excited about a project. Resilience through teamwork.

Childhood trauma

A short sidebar on childhood trauma. They say that the likelihood of depression increases for every major traumatic event in one’s childhood. Here’s my unverified guess as to why that might be. During trauma, we experience stress, and our body adapts by becoming more sensitive to the cause of the stress. And thus we become more prone to stress in some situations, and as mentioned earlier, sustained stress without relief can cause burnout.

Achieving goals by moving slowly

One of my favorite quotes from a movie is from the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon, where St. Francis says, “If you want your dream to be, take your time go slowly. Do few things but do them well, heartfelt work grows purely.” The full quote is a song from the movie. This quote captures a lot of what I talked about in this post. Taking your time and going slowly removes extra pressure on yourself to succeed within a certain time frame. It makes it easier to enjoy the work, which makes it easier to make your dream a reality. Especially because “dreams” tend to be ambitious.

What to do when you start to feel like you’re burning out

One way that I make sure to avoid burnout is if I feel like I’m starting to feel tired or demotivated, and I catch myself going down a bad path, is that I remind myself that it’s OK to feel that way, it’s OK if that kind of thing tends to happen to me, because I would rather have it that way if it means that life is more colorful. Then I try to employ the good habits that I’ve developed (medication, rest, tea, baths, relaxing things, seeing friends, hobbies, doing things that I enjoy to simply feel good about life).

I’ve accepted that this is who I am. I know I can only change so much about myself. And I only have so much control over myself and my life in general.

One day I’ll clean up these thoughts and present them as a clean, concise framework. For now, well, this is what I’ve got.