This is going to be a quite sad update on the article “The cost opportunity of my energy“, so if you missed I suggest you read that first in order to understand this one.

A year ago I started logging my perception of energy consumption. I have been focused for some weeks but then I dropped the task couple of months into the experiments.

The different colors you can see in the graphs represents how intensive was my involvement in the specific category during that day. When I logged “Overworked” you’ll see a red cell, while the grey cells are days in which I didn’t log any value:

I gave up five months into the experiment, not exactly a clear success...

Right now it really doesn’t seem to be enough data to prove or disqualify my thesis.

Anyway, it did not help me prevent or avoid distress, since I got myself into another burn-out period. I am much better than last time, but still…

In the past 12 months I had at least 3 major down moments. August, December and the last one at the end of March. Something is clearly not working, I think I never reached this frequency of deep downs before.

I’m constantly feeling lucky and cursed. I know I’m lucky because many people would exchange lifestyle with me anyday. I’m lucky, but it’s really fucking hard!

To be honest I know exactly whats wrong, it’s the mix of my introverted behavior, my slight and constant depression and the high expectation I have to comply with at work.
In addition, I also got into some “Office Politics” mess since I expressed disagreement with a superior and corrected him couple of times when his mistake was costing money and reputation to the company. There’s a very stressed relationship between this person and me, and I see no solution at sight…

The last time I got into a burn-out I promised myself that the next one I would have allowed myself to look for an alternative to my main job. I actually looked up jobs posting on Linkedin and other platforms, but to be honest I felt like I was kidding myself.

I’m not qualified enough to go somewhere else and find a better financial compensation or office enviroment. Rightly so! I get payed a lot to be just a junior professional and I suffer from a deep Impostor Syndrome, so finding a better deal somewhere else seems impossible.

I feel trapped into a job I like very much, that I have to do with some people I dislike very much.

Please, don’t judge me. I know it could be worse but that doesn’t take away my feeling of claustrophobia when I step into the office.

I’m staying hoping that the problem will fix itself but again, I’m probably kidding myself.

In the future I will review again this Overwork, Achieve, Underwork, Repeat strategy but for now I feel like burnout comes before the Achieve part and that make everything go tits up.