Occupational Burnout in Games: Causes, Impact, and Solutions

[Music] thank you hi gang so uh it's either appropriate or ironic that we're talking about burnout on day four right so let we've got a lot to get through a lot of great personal stories to share some science uh and so we're gonna hit the ground running and really kick this off uh so burnout is one of those words which much like crunch is talked about with a lot of assumed understanding uh on the part of other people so it's one thing to be a little bit you know burnt out but it's another thing entirely to be struggling with full on occupational burnout which may last you know months or even years after you leave the job which caused it now the latter of which that's what we're going to be talking about today

and after listening to these talks and getting a full view of the seriousness and the impact of Occupational burnout I hope that if you use the word burnt out you you think about the seriousness of that but also think about kind of I'm feeling depressed versus I have a depression okay they're different uh but still burnout is very serious uh so my name is Dr Rafael okamotso everybody calls me Dr B for long Italian name reasons um I'm a clinical psychologist in Washington state who's also The Clinical Director of the oldest mental health nonprofit in games take this and sharing sections love it uh and I talk about burnout a lot in our workshops I'm here to Define it talk about its causes and its effects so we're all on the same page before these three share their deeply personal stories and just really knock it out of the park and contextualize burnout for you all uh

Alicia Fortier is up next and after me and she's going to talk about her early career experiences as well as Lessons Learned in the process oh samadorius it follows and we'll talk about his experiences with the long-term effects of burnout as a senior level employee and Anna branberg is going to round this all out and talk about how to address burnout in a multi-modal manner only part of which involves self-care and afterwards we'll do some q a as a reminder please leave reviews so we have more talks like this in the future you'll get an email please leave those reviews we want to see more conversations about this and from a lot of different voices so before we get started with all of this uh this talk is not going to be Wine and Roses people are going to be sharing their deep personal experiences with some details uh that's we're going to be frankly discussing medical topics mental

health topics depressive symptoms recovery processes so if you're feeling uncomfortable if you're feeling overwhelmed please guard your own limits step out if you need to we're not going to judge you badly in fact we're going to applaud you for taking care of yourself so let's talk definitions research psychologist Dr Christina maslak's model of Occupational burnout has been the most commonly and widely researched model since its Inception in 1981 and it's the basis of the World Health organization's inclusion of Occupational burnout in the icd-11 by her model occupational burnout is a chronic syndrome due to exposure to overwhelming long-term stress in the workplace and it has three dimensions all of which she argues are necessary for full on burnout now exhaustion is the one that everybody probably knows everybody probably talks about it with some Gallows humor but it's more than just being physically tired you take a few days off and it

goes away we're talking about a kind of pervasive bone deep soul-crushing cognitive and emotional weariness that paradoxically interferes with our ability to rest and recover now ineffectiveness is the second dimension and it's not just self-doubt or imposter syndrome with burnout our Effectiveness is measurably decreased and not once or twice our performance is consistently not as good over a long time and the third dimension has different names depending on which research you might look at of cynicism or personal Detachment with that we might see mood shifts like anger at yourself other people around you you might see cognitive shifts like a lack of investment we might force ourselves to physically do the work albeit badly but we're mentally checked out and again over a long period of time so basically when it comes to burnout we're exhausted and can't recover we're detached don't care maybe even angry

we're working but not effectiveless and not effectively and all of it is chronic and we can't shake it and it might extend outside of our work lives into our home lives into our family lives into our social lives so a couple of caveats about this there's other models of burnout um this is just the most commonly researched one and a good chunk of burnout research is based on service Industries like medicine and teaching I actually don't know of any direct research in the game industry researchers call me um not all research uses all three dimensions in its measurements some will only focus on things like exhaustion and if and cynicism or personal Detachment they may leave ineffectiveness out or maybe one of three and despite maslak's model being validated across many countries there are still some cultural differences in how distress is expressed as we might expect for example a study of the

Portuguese language version of the maslak burnout inventory showed alas a lack of cross-cultural stability when looking at Native Portuguese speakers in both Portugal and Brazil and you're going to learn from Anna that the Swedish Healthcare System conceptualizes burnout a little bit differently but even with those differences I think we can learn from their systemic approach to remedying it especially given that the contributing factors in this model are systemic so however you may think of burnout if you find yourself chronically struggling with the effects of workplace related stress you can't shake it and you don't know what to do reach out to a qualified health professional in your area who specializes in working with workplace stress now if we are looking at maslak's model research points to six factors which contribute to burnout through chronic mismatches between a person and their work environment the first one's probably the most obvious and that's

workload specifically if a person is given consistently more work than they can realistically do that contributes to this think of cultures of overwork we know of no one in the game industry who overworks right think of scope creep or think of increased responsibilities due to layoffs job consolidation anything that can add to this number two is reward and this is a mismatch between what you put in and what you get out and I don't just mean Financial though please pay people appropriately I also mean intrinsic rewards like recognition in a personally meaningful ways pizza parties don't cut it third is control our perceived ability to affect how we work and what we work on are your tasks and work methods consistently dictated by a top-down approach or do you have any input on things like your schedule your work location do you feel empowered to not answer

emails on the weekends and evenings and fourth is community this is where we get into the stuff not a lot of people think about for this community do people have a sense of belonging at work or are there divisions subtle or overt based on things like identity disability status job role or department or even full-time employee versus contractor status anything that reduces belonging contributes to burnout and the fifth is fairness are the policies rules and procedures promotions disciplinary measures applied equally to everyone or are there certain people who seem to be disproportionately impacted are there people who work twice as hard for half the reward are there certain people in your company who are above reproach and finally values are the company's goals in alignment with your values as an employee and is the company consistently enacting its stated values think of companies who

overtly talk about putting employees first but whose policies repeatedly prioritize productivity and profit over employee well-being now there's overlap in each of these six factors and by the way this chart is available at takethis.org with a lot of other free information on burnout in case you're scrambling for notes there's overlap on a lot of these factors but I think it's safe to say that if you're consistently overworked under rewarded have little control don't feel like you belong see unfairness in the workplace and are working for a company that talks out of both sides of its mouth you are going to burn out eventually now I would also challenge each of you to look at any one of these factors and find even one of them or individual self-care fixes the problem most people cannot increase their own wages or change their workload without support from leadership people generally can't self-care their way into feeling accepted and welcomed by others people definitely can't self-care the company into being consistent with its

values and its policies every Factor here is contributed by Elite is driven by leadership and so is the change which is needed at a systemic level to fight burnout so when it comes to occupational burnout focusing on individual resilience and self-care without changing the system is a bit like suggesting people just need to learn how to swim better in a leaky boat learning to Swim is great but we have to fix the boat and in various studies burnout or its individual Dimensions have been linked to increased intention of turnover or turnover itself it has been increa it has been linked to long-term medical absences and just overall absenteeism and increased presenteeism each resignation of an employee caught can cost you a third of their annual salary when you think of recruiting costs productivity retraining time temporary hires and burnt out employees talk I really wanted to include the

who's coming with me thing from Jerry Maguire they are twice as likely to take other people with them and the I don't even have a figure on the reputation cost because Through the Grapevine you know which companies you don't want to work for burnt out employees talk and regarding medical leave and absenteeism one Finnish study noted that their male participants with burnout over a two-year period had an average of 52 excess absences over a two-year period that is five weeks more per person per year that's a lot of lost productivity and if you don't know what presenteeism is uh I bet most of us have done it at some point uh you're at your office you're staring at your computer you're not doing anything you're there physically but that's about it uh about 20 years ago an estimation of absent presenteeism cost in the United States alone was 150 billion dollars in Lost productivity and it's only uh increased in concerns

from about 20 years ago so but fiscal costs notwithstanding there's also the impact of your Studio's ability to be Innovative and creative something I assume you would like to be in a creative industry masslax burnout model also has notable conceptual overlaps with factors that increase affect creativity which relies on people often feeling enough psychological safety and support to voice nascent ideas which is extremely vulnerable I mean for anybody who's ever done that people who don't feel a sense of inclusion or interpersonal support as well as people who anticipate unfair treatment in the workplace these are people who cannot give you their best work nor are they likely to speak up if something isn't working on a project which also costs you money in the long run think of extra patches productivity or excuse me production delays because no one felt safe enough to say anything and what's more they might not care anymore in the work that they do give even when they try isn't quality work so whether you want

to look at burnout from a moral and human issue and I hope you do or you want to look at it from a perspective of cost and product there's no shortage of reasons to take it seriously and address it and because occupational burnout is causing the industry to lose so many talented and capable individuals who under other circumstances may have made a positive impact on your games and this industry and now to illustrate some of those personal impacts and then hand it over to Alicia to talk about lessons from her early career hi uh I'm Alicia um this is my first time talking at GDC so it's really exciting to see all of you uh um what I want to share today um is let's unpack some trauma uh I want to look at some of the pressures both we we internalize and that exists in our general culture that push us to ignore our own limits and to

ignore our own feelings and maybe bring some nuance and uh some context to challenge ourselves and how it impacts our actions that we take um my talk is really going to be super relevant for people just breaking into the industry or who want to and who are Juniors and I love you and you're all in this room I see you um and of course anything that's basic it continues to be useful even as you are established in your career because we always need to be reminded of the foundations and you know it's stuff out there take this uh take what works for you leave the rest this is coming from my experience and my perspective um and as Dr B said I hope that we'll get more and more perspectives on this issue um so that everyone finds something that helps so who am I uh Alicia Forte I'm a lead game designer right now I work at spray Fox um which just got acquired by Netflix games it's actually really cool so far uh and uh before that it worked seven years in AAA um and I taught game design and game

production in five years which gave me a really like interesting look into the psyche of our wonderful ambitious next generation of game developers and I relate because that was me I was a full-time student I pulled all-nighters I did game jams I got high grades because I cared way too much and I went into this industry eager exuberant and exhausted um you know I wanted to learn I wanted to give and I wanted to prove myself and my place here and that meant that I'm sure like some of you I had no sense of self-preservation um and how to guard myself so let's contrast some of the pressure and some of the Nuance that we can bring to those pressures hey I need to prove myself constantly anything I don't know is a flaw well the reality is I will learn with time practice and experience the truth is there's infinite things to learn right and so we'll never learn

them all at once and what's important to learn to develop is evaluating when is enough for now I hear my students all the time be talk to me like as they're graduating oh I'm gonna do this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing and to be prepared but you just graduated from something relevant you have all your projects you have your portfolio we've already seen it you are ready for your opportunity and you're ready for now and maybe just appreciate the time before you start being in school and it'll be really hard to take vacation go to a beach um and even in our careers right be patient with yourself give yourself Grace um with where you are now and what you still have to learn games are marathons and we talk about this right Sprint after Sprint to a milestone and think of how much your energy you're spending at every part of that Journey if you're already burning all on cylinders at the beginning what's going to be left at the end of that and even if you manage to scrape it out and get to that game what's left for the rest of your career that's just one thing you've made what's

left of your creativity for the next game and the one after that and have you even taken this time to take a step back and look at that Horizon and see where you would like to go I invite you to think critically about where you spend your energy what are you learning and how much extra effort do you have to learn to learn just a little more and to put in that extra effort what are you sacrificing is it your sleep your friends your family for how long will you sacrifice them our industry is a creative one and it strives with iteration right we never get it right the first time and we need to give ourselves time to be able to do multiple passes to learn from our mistakes if each iteration is taken too far well then there's going to be a big portion of that that's just going to kind of evaporate and not have been worth the time you spent into it right and so you have to understand that everything you do is going to grow and grow and grow and a trick that you have to learn because it's not easy we're always learning how to optimize this but you want to focus on what's delivering what's essential to prove the goal of

your current iteration my trigger professional professionalism that I like to keep at heart is to identify the minimum necessary quality and learn to deliver it reliably and that's not to say don't do good work um minimum necessary quality does not mean bad it means functional is this enough to represent my idea to communicate with my team to prove the basic idea that we had set out for this iteration and then you're probably fine and if you have extra ideas and things to explore write them in a notepad do them later this is a story about a cat this is Sab um she was my childhood cat and I loved her very much One Day in 2016 um I was working on wireframes I was in ux at the time and for reasons lost the time my wireframes were no good anymore because the feature I was working on completely pivoted and I made the decision to stay late and

to work on those wireframes to accommodate the new pivot and that meant that I was missing a Veterinary appointment to say goodbye to Sab it wasn't until the lights were turning off on me in the building and I was walking out into the dark to wait for my Uber home that it occurred to me that I was never going to see my cat again and I had missed that chance to say goodbye to her days later I went to visit my family and who's walking around the house but Sab um it turns out that day was the day David Bowie died and my brother decided that was too much death for a single day and they had to reschedule the cat but no one's thought to send me the memo so I had already like felt really really guilty and I was lucky in a way because I got my second chance to say goodbye to her and to learn from that mistake I made but what I want to leave to you is that you don't always get a second chance if work is being assigned to me I should

be able to complete it all as requested learning your limits how to ask for help and when to say skill uh when to say no are all important skills and I say skills because it doesn't come naturally to all of us but when you practice it it will get easier the concept of buckling down and powering through and especially doing so without saying that's what you're doing can set the expectation that that's a normal amount of work to achieve and I really want to highlight quietly because you know it's a creative industry I would be such a hypocrite if I said never work hard for something you care about but it's just acknowledge that you are doing an extra effort and then talk to your manager whoever's organizing your tasks to make sure that they understand that because if you give everything what's going to be left for the rest of your life that needs you so the goal is to learn to advocate for yourself and it will take practice so practice it but just as Dr B said you don't have full control and this can be really hard to do if you don't have the

support of the leadership around you if you're in a position where you try to speak out and it's not well received and you don't have support and you don't have the tools and you don't feel like you have options those in reasonable deadlines and expectations all I really want to say to you is that you're in that very difficult position do not reflect your worth do not reflect how much you deserve to be here do not reflect your skill or your Merit it reflects the bad decisions of the leadership around you the way to advance my career is by exceeding expectations every time the Nuance here is that each workplace has its own culture and criteria that I need to figure out a question to ask yourself is this the right place for me to grow do I have the connections do I have mentorship do I have people who are helping me navigate this strange and weird space do I have opportunities to grow in the ways I want to grow is the work I do meaningful and visible to the rest of the team am I getting credit for it and do my values align with the values

of the company I'm in the answers to these questions can change as you grow within a company and as you grow in your seniority and that's really healthy and natural pressure house is fine I'm overreacting and I just need to work harder Nuance I need to listen to my own emotions and they are valid and important and when I speak to you I'm really speaking to myself put aside how you think others are coping I know for myself I use it to deflect from how I'm feeling um but really we can't know what other people have going on and how they present themselves could be completely dissonant with what they have going inside and so the question I want to ask is how are you and more than that how are you really is there something scary is there something dark in a Crux and a little Nook of yourself that you're afraid to question and how it might unravel other parts of your life I won't ask you to do that right away it

takes time it takes courage and I hope hopefully professional help um to unravel that but at least acknowledge that it's there and that that is actually where you're at if I don't finish this I won't be a team player and I will have failed Nuance I am allowed to leave you do not owe it to anyone to ground yourself down into a nub of your creative self take a step back from deliverables and expectations and promises and deadlines and ask yourself the real hard question is where I am helping or hurting me we don't all have the chance to just drop our jobs as soon as it's not going well but if you look at this frankly you can start to think I deserve better I deserve another thing start to look on that Horizon where can I go that might be better for me we live and work in a vibrant ambitious and passionate industry and personally I

love it I love making games and I put passionate in red because it can work for us and against us it's a dangerous Flame and we give so much of ourselves into our work and in fact it's very hard not to care so many times I find myself saying I just don't care anymore I was lying I always cared and I think that's beautiful and precious and it needs to be protected and so long as we're working in the systems that we're working I hope that you all show yourself the same care that you put into your work thank you [Applause] [Music] hello everyone I'm really happy to see so many of you here because you're taking this subject very seriously I have to apologize I lost my voice it hurts to talk but I'll do my best um so my name is Osama dorius and I'm a

career game designer currently I'm the lead content designer at blizzard um I'm also a game design teacher at Dawson college and I'm one of three habibis on the habibi's podcast we drink good Arab tea and talk about games and make fun of each other it's a lot of fun you should listen these are some of the places I've worked in my 15 years in the industry and these are some of the games that I've shipped I've had the privilege of working on about 30 games on across different platforms and genres I love making games I'm sharing my story because I hope that it can help people know what burnout can look like a little bit of a public person when it comes to the industry and a lot of people didn't know that I burnt out until I came out on getting emotional already oh my God I'll tell you until I came out and told people they thought everything was going great in my life and it wasn't and I thought it was extremely important for me to put

that aside and to talk openly and freely because it's important hopefully through my story we'll be able to extract some signs so that you could all prevent the same thing from happening to you but I know the reality I've spoken to so many people I would tell them I had a burnout and the answer is usually so did I but we just do it alone quietly sorry I didn't expect it to happen already I thought I could have got at least get through two-thirds of the talk so in 2019 my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer it was a very difficult time as a result I scaled back my work from five days a week sometimes way more to four days a week the other three days I took care of my mom and we took turns with my siblings and this was of course a very difficult

time for her and though I didn't admit it to myself at the time because I couldn't it was a very difficult time for me and for my family thankfully she went into remission right as the pandemic hit as an extreme extrovert I mean really off the charts extrovert it was extremely difficult for me to stop all the things that gave me joy and energy I was a teacher I stopped that I stopped going to the gym I stopped organizing events I stopped public speaking I stopped all of that almost no social calls whatsoever really only when I felt like I was drowning that I go see friends so um I stopped everything that gave me joy and purpose in life I panicked at the thought of going into a lockdown I had just gone through one at the time we were living in a spacious three-bedroom apartment

it felt spacious before the pandemic did not feel suspicious afterwards so it was more than enough for us then this is a picture of me celebrating my birthday two weeks into the pandemic from my bedroom slash office with a very thin door I could hear everything that happened outside I had to work out of my bedroom obviously because we didn't have enough rooms to go around but what people didn't know is I spent almost my entire day there I mean I'd wake up a roll over start working roll away maybe to have lunch usually not I did at my desk in my room and I'd finish work with maybe an hour or two that I spent outside watching a TV show or something and then go back to the same room where I was working to sleep again I developed insomnia as a result I couldn't sleep I'd walk into the room and I could think about his work some days I would be able to sleep five and six hours I count myself lucky other

days it was one or two or none staring at my wall trying not to look over at my computer and I no longer got any Joy from any of the activities I used to get joy from before I didn't enjoy playing video games I didn't enjoy watching movies or you know reading books or anything all those felt like a chore I need to disconnect from work I gotta do something else I gotta do this and that felt like work too and this put me into a depression I started getting migraines and intense intense bouts of fatigue and panic attacks that came out of nowhere I reacted by cutting out what little I had picked up from when my mom recovered at that point I had started teaching remotely and I was mentoring people pro bono and I was speaking remotely and I'm like well I gotta cut that out too I gotta focus on work

I never thought ahead it was always survive the day survive the hour survive the minute survive this task whatever I had to do and every day got harder than the day before I had less and less energy carried less and less about anything and couldn't focus what would that be don't worry about it so of course I forced myself to work even harder to compensate work was piling up what do you do to solve that problem right you do more work my entire life and every waking moment was spent thinking about work the work I wasn't able to do not that I was doing a good job at work anyway you spend more time and you accomplish less and you make more mistakes and you spend more time to fix them and I have no confidence in anything at this point either I felt so disconnected people would ask me things that anyone in my position should know and I would

check the notes because I had no idea anymore I started getting angry and I don't have to tell you that I was completely out of character for me I'm not an angry person I never was from my childhood my anger like really expressed itself usually as sadness I wasn't the person who yelled or through things and all of a sudden I would wake up angry for no reason I was really confused by this so I would wake up and I would leave my family and go for long walks because I didn't want it to affect them took a couple of times where I was like why am I yelling no one did anything it wasn't until I started preparing this talk that I even like realized that this was connected to the burnout at all I didn't understand

it it was an alien thing I started talking to Dr B and he mentioned that anger and cynicism uh was a symptom of burnout and that it started making all all the sense all of a sudden I'm like okay this is all connected but in the moment you can't think about any of that you don't understand it and um it started actually seeping into my work life I am the eternal optimist we can do this I'm that the cheerleader even when it's not good to be a cheerleader I was working on that and trying not to be but it's still that was the natural way that I expressed myself we could do it we could accomplish it this is good enough don't worry about it go to the next thing I was the positive person and I became not the positive person everything was destined to fail even when it was in the game while something's going to go wrong I became the biggest sinnest it became harder and harder to wake up and start my work day I took longer and longer breaks where I would just be present I'm not really there and eventually I started taking days and

weeks off at a time then one day I was back to my old self again full of energy I was driven I was happy I did an impossible amount of work in one week and I had whiplash from it what is happening here and then the next week I couldn't get out of bed I took that day off on the one after and the one after and when I finally got the energy to just roll over to my computer I spoke to my bosses and I told them what was happening and they forced me to talk to my doctor who immediately put me on sick leave it turns out that it's normal to get a burst of energy before collapsing it's not unlike the thrashing throws of someone who's drowning before they get submerged and aren't able to move

anymore and this is called having an over engagement before having a disengagement I started taking walks and when I tell you it was painful to take walks I wasn't moving the entire day I was sitting it was five minutes and I ran out of stamina and my knees were hurt like crazy it was so embarrassing but I started taking walks I saw a personal trainer and she helped me a lot I saw a physiotherapist and that hurt a lot but I started seeing a lot of progress I started going to therapy and that helped a lot I started picking up Hobbies I started cooking for the fun of it I started biking I was prescribed a lot of pills happy pills and anxiety pills and sleeping pills and blood pressure pills and all the other things that were wrong with my body and they helped me a lot you don't

know how bad things are until you feel them good again for just a little bit and you realize how helpful it is I started looking for a house because obviously our space wasn't big enough uh we really needed the room because my kids are kids and even though they fought before they really fought during the pandemic it was extremely difficult and her walls are really thin when I was unmuted my my co-workers heard everything which was frustrating and embarrassing for me and we eventually did find a house and we were able to have the room that we needed and each of my kids had their own room and I had for the very first time in my life my own office and this helped with psychological disengagement I was able to leave and it took time but I was able to stop thinking about work which is the thing I wasn't able to do before and now my kids had their own rooms so they fought less a normal amount a pre-pandemic amount

which was good But ultimately I was unhappy all these good things were happening and I was happy for maybe five minutes at a time but the reality is I I Associated my self-worth to productivity and I wasn't being productive I was useless and therefore I was worthless and so I misrepresented my situation to the doctor and I went back to work too early it was the stupidest thing I've ever done I went back to work and I felt like my old self again for a week and then I realized how much of a mistake I made I stepped down as lead and even with a reduced workload I wasn't keeping up even with my team being understanding and loving it didn't make a difference

my wife was with me throughout she's a saint she was extremely understanding and very helpful and she was supportive and I'm incredibly grateful to her I started speaking to my industry friends and that's when I was learning that so many people suffered in silence that I had no idea one of the people I looked up to the most the one of the best narrative designers slash directors to ever work in our industry who'd been there forever told me that when she had her burnout she couldn't read a book for six months this is a person who used to pick one up to drop it off to pick up the other one she was a chain reader and for six months she could not pick up a book and speaking to her it let me it gave me permission to just take a step back guilt-free I also reconnected with industry friends because the problem is at this point most of my friends were industry friends and they were supportive and they

understood but every time I got together all we did was complain about the industry so reconnecting with these old friends I was able to also disengage this also contributed to psychological disengagement and we talked about boring things like mortgages and Loans it was beautiful I took time off to avoid getting sick leave again I had about three months of un like vacation time that I didn't take red flag at the beginning of 2021 and I had zero by the end of it I was completely unable to do anything creative or to solve any problems at all at this point like it was from bad to zero I hit rock bottom you give me a problem I couldn't fix it and so I was looking for a job outside of game design and this caused an identity crisis because up until this point I was a game designer what am I if I'm not

and so I found a job at unity and as a partner relations manager I did that for nine months I still don't know what it is they uh started telling me I was doing a good job months later I actually believed them and then my creativity came flooding back and my energy came flooding back not to you know the levels it was before but to a point where they were actually measurable and I realized that I started healing I'm very grateful to that team because they gave me the support I went into the interview telling them I'm bird tout and they're like welcome it was beautiful very eternally grateful to them and now I'm happy to say that after nine months of Hiatus I'm back in a design role at Blizzard Entertainment super happy I joined them in October last year it's been just shy of six months same thing I told them I went through a burnout told them what happened because you have to explain that Gap in your you

know in your Evan's there I interviewed with him and I told him the same thing I told literally everyone I had to set expectations because I used to be an overachiever and now I'm just an achiever so I'm trying to be kind to myself um but I still have relapses I have days where I wake up and I can't do it and uh thankfully now it's more like hours that I can't do it it's getting better and when my brain is firing on all cylinders I'm the old Osama again and I designed three things in one day and I finished them and they're great so I still have whatever whoever I was in me there somewhere and I'm extremely grateful to everyone who helped me through the hardest parts I love you all and many of you are here and I hope that my story helps people struggling with creative burnout to learn the warning signs and to know that we're not alone I can thank you

[Applause] so before I begin I have a lot to cover and very little time so I am going to go through my slides pretty quickly uh don't stress about taking notes uh there's a link to everything at the end of my slides so eyeballs up here please oh there rather Okay so I've done a bunch of stuff at a bunch of places and none of which I'm going to talk about here today but happy to chat about it some other time um I live in Sweden which is one of nine countries in the world where occupational burnout is an actual medical diagnosis and I learned this the hard way

I moved across the world to Stockholm for a new job just before the pandemic broke out and I quickly found myself isolated in a foreign city everything shut down around me and work was all I had left so I threw myself into it at my West I'd become a sheller myself I was constantly exhausted I'd be running at 120 Monday to Friday and then on weekends I would literally not be able to get myself out of bed and then I'd beat myself up for being so unproductive and I would go back to pushing myself to extremes again I was so stressed that I couldn't wind down at night or stop my brain from racing long enough to even attempt sleep the anxiety and insomnia became so intense that I was prescribed sleeping tablets I was having daily panic attacks and breakdowns I'd be washing the dishes and suddenly I would just disintegrate into a puddle of Tears On The Floor sobbing until I couldn't breathe and I didn't understand why I'd forget about meals or be too stressed to eat which resulted in a dramatically scary weight loss I was getting weird nosebleeds and my hair

started falling out and it was when the brain fog took over that I got real scared I'd have entire days where I would lose hours of my life I'd finished meetings and I'd have literally no idea what was said not even me I'd be mid-sentence and suddenly I would just lose the entirety of the English language I realized I couldn't trust my brain at all and anytime I allowed myself a little break I would feel so guilty because there was so much work to do and I was so behind on everything I was newly diagnosed with ADHD and I struggled with clinical perfectionism so anything less than perfect felt like failure and I didn't want anyone to think that I couldn't do my job it got to the point where I actually stopped I actually asked people to stop asking if I was okay because every every time they did I would just start crying and I didn't want to let them know that I was falling apart near the end of summer when I was when I started leaving my apartment again I was

in constant pain I have ellis-damlow syndrome and the lack of exercise for almost two years meant that my muscles had atrophied so much that I actually couldn't walk more than 30 minutes at a time fun I'd stop doing all the things that I used to love doing in fact I didn't even want to do them but I was keeping up the facade for everyone around me because I'd always been the person that others go to for help I was the strong one and I was so ashamed to admit that I was a fully grown adult that couldn't even seem to take care of myself if all of these criteria feel familiar to you you're probably not just being overly dramatic I've got them listed in the document at the end so you can read through them properly but the thing is and this is important you do not need to fill in all of these criteria you don't need to match all of these before you speak to your workplace you can and you should speak to your workplace before you get to that point the earlier the better for everyone I promise but this whole time I was telling people I was fine

looking back at how I was communicating with my team there were endless red flags about my mental state and yet I was telling everyone everyone that I was fine and I had it all under control the first step was realizing that I was in fact not okay I had to admit that I was drowning and I needed help and I learned that help was available as soon as I asked for it I booked a doctor's appointment and she first did a verbal assessment and then we did a physical examination had a blood test to rule out the possibility of being of there being something else causing the symptoms and then I was sent on to stress rehab yep that's a thing in Sweden and I'm super privileged to be living in a country where we have public health care which meant that stressery had doctor's appointments everything I needed was free I was also assigned a caseworker from Sweden's social insurance agency who had meetings with my company to ensure that my workload and my responsibilities were adjusted to enable my recovery in a sustainable way and this is super important because I wanted to be the best rehabber ever and I wanted to get back to work as soon as

possible they were all very adamant however that I calmed down and take it slow all research has shown that returning back to work full-time too quickly is actually directly counterproductive it is harmful because the fact of the matter is there are no awards for being a good burnouter sorry so some of the stuff that I learned are stress rehab well burnout happens in four phases first up we have the buildup phase which can last for several years with fluctuating system symptoms then we have the acute onset phase which involves more severe exhaustion and escalating symptoms and then comes the crisis phase which has debilitating symptoms both cognitive and physical and it usually subsides within a few weeks which leads us to the recovery phase hopefully this can last for many years with lingering symptoms and a pronounced stress intolerance this is something that I am still struggling with today several years later I can no longer handle the amounts of stress that I used to I fall apart way faster than I used

to and it's so frustrating because it's like I I should be able to handle this and I can't but all right let's map those onto a curve so in the build-up phase we have more activity than recovery which leads to us compensating the symptoms start to worsen until we Crush and it's at this point that we realize that we can't keep going like this anymore and we're forced to stop battling and start allowing ourselves recovery time and naturally it's not a straight upwards Kev setbacks will happen and it's important to be aware of them and be aware that from the get-go that they're gonna happen accept them as part of the recovery process and instead analyze what caused them and what their effects were and I want you to understand that this doesn't happen overnight for me it took over nine months to get back to working full-time again the doctor wanted to put me on full on 100 sick leave straight away but I refused because of course I did I insisted on still working part-time

for two months until I realized I couldn't do it anymore and after that I was completely out of commission for two months before coming back to working 25 while I attended stress Rehab on the side and then we carefully increased my workload to 50 again before coming back to 100. but I wish that I had listened I wish I had taken time off straight away perhaps I would have avoided the crisis phase altogether and I wish I would have allowed myself a gentler return to work but what do you do if you're already experiencing or approaching burnout first and foremost remember burnout is a systemic failing not an individual one it is your workplace that has failed to you not the other way around that said if you're currently in the thick of it here's some things you can do to keep yourself from drowning first up chat to the person responsible for your work and ask them to help you put a recovery plan together ideally the very first thing on your plan should be to take some time off

I know this may sound shocking to the Americans in the audience but the vast majority of countries are entitled to more than 10 days of vacation per year yes even poor ones in fact research has shown that we need a minimum of two weeks away from work for the brain to stop thinking about work that means not just a few days you need a proper long period with adequate time for your brain to detach from stressful work thoughts and then when you return to the workplace remember that it's your workplace that is responsible of ensuring that your workload and responsibilities are adjusted going forward to ensure that you don't just fall straight back into crisis mode it's not on you to adjust to your workplace it's on your workplace to adjust to you and if your workplace isn't willing to help you with a recovery plan consider whether you should even stay in your current job or not and I'm aware that this is said from a position of privilege but is your job worth risking your entire health for and for all the managers in the room do

your employees actually have options or are they stuck there as is it's much faster and easier to help a current employee recover than trying to find hire and train up an entirely new employee so getting into a little stress rehab Theory there are various forms of therapy that are proven to help with burnout recovery many of you may be familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy and I don't have time to go into the details but for us at stress rehab they focus heavily on Act acceptance and commitment therapy and lots and lots of mindfulness which is not the same as meditation meditation expects you to empty your mind mindfulness expects you to fill it you're asked to become aware of everything happening in your body as well as in your mind I suddenly became aware of the amount of pain and stress that I was constantly holding in my body by the way this is your reminder to unclench your jaw but I'd normalize feeling like this to the point where it had just become white noise to my brain and I also became aware of my thoughts I realized that I

was constantly criticizing myself constantly beating myself up and I realized I need to treat myself the way that I treat others something that we kept coming back to is the three Circles of emotional regulation your different modes in your brain so we have the drive system which is dopamine driven and the purpose is to motivate you and help you accomplish goals and then we have the soothing system which is oxytocin driven and the purpose of that is to manage distress make you feel safe bond with others and the last one is the threat system which is adrenaline and cortisol driven you may know this as the fight-or-flight mode the purpose is to detect threats to protect you to keep you alive all three of these are equally important for human survival but they have to be in balance the problem arises when they go out of balance because as you might know the fight-or-flight mode deactivates the other two the problem happens when all those

things that you used to love doing all those things that used to be I want to do this I want to do these things they turn into an endless guilt driven list of things that I have to and I should but then how do we recharge is that you can plug in and leave alone until they've magically become fully charged again you can't just plug yourself into the couch and watch Netflix for two weeks and expect that to fix everything sorry it's important to find a balance in our activities where things that restore our energy are greater than those that cost energy so how do we identify it these things how to identify which modes our time is being spent on they taught us this by making us villain this activity tracker I've also linked this in the document we printed this out in a 24 on a on a A4 page and did a 24-hour log and filled it in hour by hour as we go what do you do monitor it for a full week I thought this was going to be tedious it takes no time and at the end of the week we came back

and we had to identify what activities were blue green or red for us and then take a moment to reflect on the result I highlighted each section with this corresponding color and realized oh my God it was so confronting to be met with a wall of red and I realized my week is not balanced and I needed to adjust it but recovery time doesn't just appear out of thin air you have to explicitly make time for it we were firmly told by a rehab psychiatrist that our free time was only allowed to be used for green activities so look critically at everything that you feel like you need to do that thing that's stressing you out do you actually need to do it do you actually need to do it perfectly revisit your expectations but also what things can be outsourced set your life up to reduce activation energy where possible I'll link to examples in the document as well and identify your support network what people do you have around you both in and outside of work that can support you through this even just having someone to vent to and get things off your chest

can be super super helpful and you'd be surprised at how many people would be more than happy to help offload simple things for you and I swear you're not being an inconvenience for them often people want to do things to help you become less stressed write down two or three people that can drag you out kicking and screaming on your stupid little walks for your stupid little Mental Health I actually asked my friends to do this I told them I'm gonna need to be walked like a dog and you bet they did they showed up at my door and they called and they said Anna put your shoes on I'm outside we're going walking and I was so grumpy and it was great within 10 minutes I was like oh wow this is actually really really helpful but it's also good for accountability because Lord knows if anyone is bad at respecting my boundaries it's me so after all this what happened to my job I was so worried that my burnout would be used against me somehow but instead They promoted me turns out prioritizing your health pays

off in more ways than one so things I'm trying to be mindful of going forward this is my new mantra my colleague wrote this and put this on my desk she's amazing how fast it it's similar to a challenge that I got from my psych she asked me to uh be mediocre for a week and I was very offended mediocre is a four-letter word for me and uh and I was like I can't do that I've got professional integrity and she said okay well what do you need to do in order to accomplish this and I said I need to tell everyone on my team that I've been told that I explicitly have to deliver mediocre work so that they know and she was like that's fine do that then I was like okay cool so I did that came back a week later and she was like how did it go and I was like it was fine it was fine no one noticed no one cared and I hate it when other people are right another thing I'm trying to do is to neutralize my inner critic my brain is a jerk and I'm learning to listen to it less and I do this by asking for regular

feedback I ask my team and my manager for regular feedback because often they don't think that you're doing as badly as you yourself think that you're doing and no one is as critical of you as you are everyone is focused on themselves people don't notice the things that you notice something else that I'm trying to do is learning different ways to say no because saying no is hard and so I'm finding better responses things like yeah I'd be happy to help but then you have to decide which of my other tasks get de-prioritized and to no surprises no surprises to anyone very few of your other tasks will get de-prioritized but recovery is never linear the goal is simply to gradually have longer better good periods and shorter less severe bad periods instead of focusing on what happened focus on why it happened our stress rehab sites were constantly reminding us to turn self-criticism into curiosity listen to your body take things slow

I'm still in Burnout recovery two years later recovery generally generally takes years but you can make huge changes within just a few weeks and a gentle but firm reminder nobody's expected to do all the things that we've spoken about even if you only manage to implement one thing that's a huge step forward and I'm proud of you overworking is a very fast way to have a very short career there seems to be this thing among game devs nowadays where we brag about how badly we destroyed ourselves for certain projects as if that grants us some form of credibility but honestly burning out sucks there is nothing cool about pushing your health to such extremes and don't forget to maintain perspective we work in video games it's easy to forget but nobody will actually die if your video game is slightly worse than it could have been in a perfect world no game company or project is worth your health remember this guy everyone knows this Frame but not everyone knows that this is

actually how that comic continues if things are on fire then things are probably not fine and most of the time there actually isn't a reason to let things last that long and get that bad thanks There's the link if there is a slide that you should take a picture of it's that one and uh yeah we thought we were going to have time for questions but we have been we are at time right now we are going to be available for a couple minutes over in the overhang area uh so if you want to talk with us ask questions we will be hanging out there briefly but please remember to fill out your feedback forms thank you for being here please don't burn out [Applause] [Music]