git log --author=yourself

Using "I'm burnt out" as a cool synonym for "I'm tired this week". Real burnout is a months-long cumulative process, with all three dimensions present — not a bad Monday.

Chronic stress keeps the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) activated, the system that releases cortisol. Bruce McEwen described this as "allostatic load": the accumulated cost of a stress system that never fully returns to baseline. It's not metaphorical — it's real, measurable physiological wear, which explains why "just resting for a weekend" isn't enough once it's been piling up for months.

When you have no emotional resources left, the system applies an emergency patch: distancing yourself. You stop getting involved, you reply to colleagues and users with sarcasm or indifference, and what used to matter to you starts not mattering. It's not that you've become a worse person — it's a real defence mechanism (part of Maslach's own model) to protect what little energy is left, even at the cost of breaking bonds that did matter to you.

Confusing cynicism with "being realistic" or "having your feet on the ground". There's a clear difference: realism evaluates a specific problem; generalised cynicism dismisses in advance that anything will ever improve, in any project, with any team. If you notice you now distrust even the things that used to excite you, that isn't acquired wisdom: it's the symptom, not the conclusion.

The third dimension of burnout isn't "working less": it's the persistent feeling that, even when you deliver, nothing you do is enough or really worth it. A developer in burnout can keep shipping flawless deploys and feel, every time, that they mean nothing. Visible performance and internal exhaustion can become completely disconnected — and that's precisely what makes it so hard to spot from outside.

Sabine Sonnentag (2003, and later work) researched "psychological detachment from work" —stopping thinking about work outside of it— and found it's one of the strongest predictors of real recovery after a hard day or week. Tech burnout's problem is that work rarely "ends" fully: Slack keeps pinging, the ticket keeps running in your head, the production bug keeps running in mental background even after you've closed the laptop. Without psychological detachment, there's no real recharge, only apparent pause.

Make a list of the 3 oldest things you've been postponing "to process later": a pending conversation, an anger you swallowed, a boundary you didn't set. For each one, write a single small, concrete action you could take this week to start paying it off, not to settle it entirely. You don't need a big commit: you need to start merging.

Evangelia Demerouti and colleagues' job demands-resources model (2001) is honest about something uncomfortable: burnout is predicted both by excess demands (workload, impossible deadlines, ambiguity) and by lack of resources (autonomy, support, recognition) in the work system itself — not just by how resilient you are. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter (2008) reinforced this with their six-area model: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. "Set boundaries" without changing anything about the surrounding system treats the symptom, not the root cause.

Make two quick lists about your current job: demands (workload, deadlines, ambiguity about what's expected of you) and resources (real autonomy to decide how you work, support from your team or manager, real recognition of the work done). If the demands list is much longer than the resources one, you already have a clear diagnosis of where to start asking for changes — and that it's not just a matter of "holding up better".

Sonnentag's research on recovery doesn't ask you to quit your job or move to a cabin: it finds short, frequent breaks of real detachment (a walk without your phone, 10 screen-free minutes between tasks) recharge more than waiting for distant holidays that then get eaten up checking the work phone. You don't need to rewrite the whole system. You need to refactor the small pieces you can actually touch now.

Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Schonfeld and Eric Laurent (2015) reviewed decades of studies and found real overlap between burnout and depression: they aren't the same thing (burnout, at least in theory, is work-context specific; depression isn't), but in practice they can coexist or one can lead to the other, and sometimes they're hard to separate even for professionals. Honesty matters here: burnout isn't recognised in the ICD-11 as a mental disorder in itself, but its symptoms can be serious enough to need the same professional help as any other real distress.

If you notice this no longer gets fixed with a weekend off, escalating the ticket to a professional isn't giving up: it's standard practice when a problem exceeds what you can solve with the resources at hand.

Epictetus wrote that the weather doesn't depend on you, nor what others think, nor —to a large extent— how the system you work in is designed. What depends on you is where you place your limits, what emotional technical debt you decide to stop piling up, and when you escalate the ticket to someone who can actually help. You're not going to fix an entire work culture alone. But you can stop being the one staying late in the system that's burning you out.

Pick just one thing to change this week: closing Slack at a fixed time, walking without your phone for 15 minutes, saying "no" to a task that isn't yours, or asking someone for help. You don't need to rewrite the whole system at once. One small, real commit weighs more than ten good intentions that never got merged.