On Getting Your Energy Back After Studying Computer Science For 4 Years — The Premise

9 min readJul 24, 2022

What Is This About?

I’ve recently come out of a period of “burnout” that has taken me sometime to adjust and accept. This was an unexpected period as I’ve just finished University and was first unsure of what I started feeling. I realized I had a lot of internal stress and negativity that I needed to get rid off.

Overall, it has gotten better, I got to learn from it as well, and it struck me out of nowhere when I started to feel so tired and demotivated to do anything other than rest.

This article talks about what “burnout” is, how I may have reached the stage, what if felt like, symptoms, and why it may have persisted over a longer period of time.

I assume this is a very common problem in the tech industry. Here are some statistics I was quickly able to find related to burnout in the general workforce,

In short, some general findings were,

77% of professionals have experienced burnout at their current job
91% report unimaginable amount of stress/frustration degrading quality of work
83% report burnout at work negatively impacting relationships
66% reportedly frequently skip at least one meal a day because they are too stressed about their work

You can find the info-graphic and its origin of source by Deloitte here.

· Table Of Contents
· So What IS Burnout?
· But how did I reach this stage?
∘ … And Where Did This Lead To
· I know, I know, there are people that have worked harder than me…
· How do I know I’ve burned myself out?
· What Does It Feel Like?
· Unconsciously Ignoring Burnout

So What IS Burnout?

It’s a stage where you feel completely demotivated to do much, when you really want things to be slow instead of being so fast in this digital age, when you want to give yourself a break because the reward does not match the amount of effort that it now takes to do something.

It’s when you feel work and career is taking over every aspect of your life without you understanding how, until it completely does, and now you want to go back to a cycle of actually enjoying life and doing what you do.

It’s symptoms include feeling really tired to do anything, much less the ability to constantly focus and push yourself to accomplish something. Or when you have a large pile of work to do, but you no longer feel the same energy or zeal to accomplish that, so the work keeps piling up. Or when you fall into the trap of multi-tasking, and no matter how much effort you put into different things all at once, it feels like nothing much has changed.

It’s when you feel it is really hard to appreciate yourself because deep down you no longer have a very enthusiastic nature. Instead it’s just emptiness and some obsession about things that have not yet been done instead of what has been done.

Overall, it stems down to the unhealthy relationship we have with work

But how did I reach this stage?

My University ended just last June (15th). Since then, I have had some time to retrospect about where to go and what to do next. I have been having this feeling over a couple of months where I would come across,

An innovative idea, something very technical but very helpful to me and my career growth
A great lifestyle or mindset change where I can better organize my time and energy and be more positive or have different perspectives about a certain topic that required more deeper introspection than rather on a high level surface
An idea or soft skill or a practice that will help me be a better communicator in times to come

What would ALWAYS happen is that I always felt so busy that I could never spare any time of the day for it. Anytime I would try to, I started feeling guilty about things that were immediately on my plate.

And immediate priority things would be followed by other “immediates” and it kept working like that.

The principle didn’t work in practice. There would be no constant number of tasks I was doing. In practice, one task would spring many other tasks, and that would happen recursively.

In short, I never had free time to focus on the things I actually wanted to.

… And Where Did This Lead To

This feeling was cultivating for more than half a year. The way I imagined things to be, it didn’t happen that way. I often did not find the motivation to push myself and work longer. Overall, it was constant stress, the lack of a proper lifestyle and a sleep cycle, no boundaries between my “work” and “not-work”, and being constantly occupied every day with work on my plate put me in a cycle where I could not stop thinking.

What I think what made me more upset internally about my situation is that I had nothing to show for it.

Some projects I was hoping for didn’t work out in the end as I had hoped.

On the same end, I had rejected the ideas of good working opportunities for the sake of some projects — and then I saw other people working at those companies and more, both locally and internationally, and I kept wondering about my choice of actions and my own end goals.

In the end, I felt like I didn’t have much professional experience to show. For the most part, I only have a few projects under me that I can see are something worthwhile of discussion.

It’s not comparison with others as much as it was, “Man, I wish I was aware of all these other opportunities, and that I was in a state to approach them, and that I had the energy and the time to do them, but I don’t and I haven’t worked with it”

Since then, I have grown out of this mentality and have started to think about what to do and where to go next. The truth was that I loved what I did, I love software engineering, I love solving problems, I love networking, meeting people, sharing what I know, writing, reading, but I had never the time to think about my lifestyle, priorities, and how to align all my goals together because I was in a rush to “do all” — in the end, I got none done.

I know, I know, there are people that have worked harder than me…

… people who have accomplished more than me in their 4 years pursuing a bachelors in Computer Science, but regardless, I did honestly feel burnout. Many at times, with no words to describe it is like no feeling I’ve ever had in my life.

It feels lethargic, tiring, feels like no routine, not sure when I’ll stop feeling it, not enough energy for much. It’s a cycle where you have things you promised yourself you would do, but just can’t anymore, like something (you) is pulling you back.

My experience in no way reflects the education that I’ve had, and I realized it was more of a lifestyle habit of mine than an actual problem with an institution. It was about being very fast and rapid with my knowledge, moving onto the next after the next, after the next, and never staying in one place.

As a result, while I learned a lot, I have also realized I suffer from not being easily able to describe what I know, and what my thoughts are as easily as I wish I could.

How do I know I’ve burned myself out?

Burnout is different for everyone, but here are a few signs that indicate that I have or had some level of “burnout”,

Everything, from opening the computer to typing replies to text, to reading and writing code all feels so tiring now. It’s not just code, it’s any hobby or interest I’ve had before.
Becoming very rusty with my knowledge. Even though I know how it works in the back of my head, I sometimes struggle to explain it easily. If you woke me up in the middle of my sleep, asked me to solve an SQL or a coding problem question, I would sit down to solve it. Ask me how I was thinking, I would be clueless
My schedule is something I struggle to fix everyday, it is neither healthy or productive, I feel like I don’t have time for anything, even when my 24 hours are uncommitted to work. I don’t I know how to properly relax, how to shut my brain off. I am often forgetful, find it hard to pay attention to anything happening around me without immense effort, and it’s me making a conscious effort in my head to think of a thought to make me do something meaningful. My eyes feel hot and tired most of the time.
Sometimes I don’t know what I look forward to — usually finding it hard to focus on a single task for long. More so, I don’t know when I’ll be back on track — also not sure know how long this would take
Some part has been feeling empty and not excited towards anything any more. I still like the things I used to do, but I don’t have the energy for it anymore.

What Does It Feel Like?

It feels like my head is burning, and I “detest” any attempts at work. My brain flares up, feels dreadful, severely dislikes it. If I have to and I am committed, I need to get it done. However, I no longer have the capacity to sit by myself for long hours learning something, or working on a problem for more than 2–3 hours at most continuously. Sometimes 1–2 hours is even too much. I cannot self-motivate myself anymore, I realize and acknowledge and feel bad for a lot of things I need to get done, but I am not because I just “don’t want to”.

Unconsciously Ignoring Burnout

I have noticed this bad habit over the past few years. When I’m not in the best mode to work or not thinking clearly, I started to put on earphones to listen to music because that might motivate me further.

In truth, I was so disinterested in what I was doing that music was the only way I felt I could get things done. It felt crazy to sit down in silence working on my project with a calm body posture. It sometimes feels very hard if you ask me to sit for a long period of time at the same place with a calm body posture. I would twitch, and want to move or I started feeling “hyper aware” .

I started sometimes adding more and more things (projects, articles to read, communities to be a part of) to do on my plate, even though I often (everyday) found it hard to focus on something for more than 5 minutes at max. That eventually started to add more and more stress on me, as I felt I was doing a lot, but in reality was jumping from idea to idea to project to project to feel busy, without having to actually work on something for a very long amount of time.

And then I would feel angry at myself for doing that at the end of the day, but repeat it all again the next day.

I would feel super charged when I was not sitting at my machine, and then dull when I was. I would purposefully think about what to do to recharge myself, only for the sake of getting back to work.

I started becoming aware of these habits soon, but I was too afraid if I confronted them, I would become not so serious, and thus the problem becoming even more serious.

I realized later I was burning myself out in the pursuit of doing so much, that I got nothing done, and was left so stressed out in the end it was hard for me to communicate properly sometimes with others.

On “Fixing” It

That part is part of the next article. This is already quite long to read in one sitting, so I thought I should split this into a different article.

You can find that article here, “A Short Discussion For Suggestions About Solving Burnout Facing It & Moving On”.

Thank you!