This Song Has Single-handedly Taken Over My Life And It’s Only Been Like A Week

actually what's the worst thing a doctor has said or done to you

Just a quick note from your friendly neighborhood bookworm/indie author

if you use kindle for the majority of your library, they will be shutting down the function that allows you to download your files and transfer them via USB on the 26th of February. Which doesn't sound like a huge deal, but this also means that if a book is taken off Amazon for any reason—like it being banned—they can scrape it off your kindle as well. So maybe backup your library?

drdevonprice.substack.com

You Might Not Recover from Burnout. Ever.

What grows from the ashes of your old life?

The data does not support the assumption that all burned out people can “recover.” And when we fully appreciate what burnout signals in the body, and where it comes from on a social, economic, and psychological level, it should become clear to us that there’s nothing beneficial in returning to an unsustainable status quo. 

The term “burned out” is sometimes used to simply mean “stressed” or “tired,” and many organizations benefit from framing the condition in such light terms. Short-term, casual burnout (like you might get after one particularly stressful work deadline, or following final exams) has a positive prognosis: within three months of enjoying a reduced workload and increased time for rest and leisure, 80% of mildly burned-out workers are able to make a full return to their jobs. 

But there’s a lot of unanswered questions lurking behind this happy statistic. For instance, how many workers in this economy actually have the ability to take three months off work to focus on burnout recovery? What happens if a mildly burnt-out person does not get that rest, and has to keep toiling away as more deadlines pile up? And what is the point of returning to work if the job is going to remain as grueling and uncontrollable as it was when it first burned the worker out? 

Burnout that is not treated swiftly can become far more severe. Clinical psychologist and burnout expert Arno van Dam writes that when left unattended (or forcibly pushed through), mild burnout can metastasize into clinical burnout, which the International Classification of Diseases defines as feelings of energy depletion, increased mental distance, and a reduced sense of personal agency. Clinically burned-out people are not only tired, they also feel detached from other people and no longer in control of their lives, in other words.

Unfortunately, clinical burnout has quite a dismal trajectory. Multiple studies by van Dam and others have found that clinical burnout sufferers may require a year or more of rest following treatment before they can feel better, and that some of burnout’s lingering effects don’t go away easily, if at all. 

In one study conducted by Anita Eskildsen, for example, burnout sufferers continued to show memory and processing speed declines one year after burnout. Their cognitive processing skills improved slightly since seeking treatment, but the experience of having been burnt out had still left them operating significantly below their non-burned-out peers or their prior self, with no signs of bouncing back. 

It took two years for subjects in one of van Dam’s studies to return to “normal” levels of involvement and competence at work. following an incident of clinical burnout. However, even after a multi-year recovery period they still performed worse than the non-burned-out control group on a cognitive task designed to test their planning and preparation abilities. Though they no longer qualified as clinically burned out, former burnout sufferers still reported greater exhaustion, fatigue, depression, and distress than controls.

In his review of the scientific literature, van Dam reports that anywhere from 25% to 50% of clinical burnout sufferers do not make a full recovery even four years after their illness. Studies generally find that burnout sufferers make most of their mental and physical health gains in the first year after treatment, but continue to underperform on neuropsychological tests for many years afterward, compared to control subjects who were never burned out. 

People who have experienced burnout report worse memories, slower reaction times, less attentiveness, lower motivation, greater exhaustion, reduced work capability, and more negative health symptoms, long after their period of overwork has stopped. It’s as if burnout sufferers have fallen off their previous life trajectory, and cannot ever climb fully back up. 

And that’s just among the people who receive some kind of treatment for their burnout and have the opportunity to rest. I found one study that followed burned-out teachers for seven years and reported over 14% of them remained highly burnt-out the entire time. These teachers continued feeling depersonalized, emotionally drained, ineffective, dizzy, sick to their stomachs, and desperate to leave their jobs for the better part of a decade. But they kept working in spite of it (or more likely, from a lack of other options), lowering their odds of ever healing all the while. 

Van Dam observes that clinical burnout patients tend to suffer from an excess of perseverance, rather than the opposite: “Patients with clinical burnout…report that they ignored stress symptoms for several years,” he writes. “Living a stressful life was a normal condition for them. Some were not even aware of the stressfulness of their lives, until they collapsed.”

Instead of seeking help for workplace problems or reducing their workload, as most people do, clinical burnout sufferers typically push themselves through unpleasant circumstances and avoid asking for help. They’re also less likely to give up when placed under frustrating circumstances, instead throttling the gas in hopes that their problems can be fixed with extra effort. They become hyperactive, unable to rest or enjoy holidays, their bodies wired to treat work as the solution to every problem. It is only after living at this unrelenting pace for years that they tumble into severe burnout. 

Among both masked Autistics and overworked employees, the people most likely to reach catastrophic, body-breaking levels of burnout are the people most primed to ignore their own physical boundaries for as long as possible. Clinical burnout sufferers work far past the point that virtually anyone else would ask for help, take a break, or stop caring about their work.

And when viewed from this perspective, we can see burnout as the saving grace of the compulsive workaholic — and the path to liberation for the masked disabled person who has nearly killed themselves trying to pass as a diligent worker bee. 

I wrote about the latest data on burnout "recovery," and the similarities and differences between Autistic burnout and conventional clinical burnout. The full piece is free to read or have narrated to you in the Substack app at drdevonprice.substack.com

stop paying for shit you can pirate

this (OceanOfPDF) is a good website for pirating books thats a lot easier than looking for vk epubs, there are pdfs and epubs for a LOT of books and the site is the easiest to use and most comprehensive of the ones that I've found

the free kindle app (don't pay for amazon kindle) lets you send these files to all of you devices with the kindle app at the same time, you can use this site or find the email addresses for your devices in your amazon account (this is amazon tutorial for how to use the send to kindle email), the files are identical to ebooks that you buy for kindle, you can also upload any epub or pdf files from your device to google books and read them there exactly the same

this (12 Foot) is a good site for reading any articles that are behind a paywall for free, not sure it if works with academic journals and papers but it definitely works for stuff like the nyt

this (the Pirates Bay) is the classic and one of the best sites for pirating movies, tv shows, video games, books, and more, you will need to have a torrent installed to download and use these files, I use utorrent (free)

this (the internet archive) is a site that's good for a lot of stuff, its a nonproft free library type program, the book downloads do not work with the kindle app even if the file type is correct but the pdfs can be opened normally with any pdf reader

this is a cracked spotify apk, I think this one might be for android only and this is a link to spotiflyer which is an app that lets you pirate songs from spotify, youtube, and a few others to put on an mp3 player or flashdrive or cd or just to have them downloaded but separate from the spotify app, works on android, windows and mac

this is a very detailed step by step tutorial on getting ALL of the sims 4 dlc for free (it takes a LONG time to download the actual dlc, set aside at least 12 hours where you won't need to restart or turn off your computer but it works perfectly) you will need a torrent and file extractor but the tutorial links to reliable free apps for both

Dorian/Inquisitor commission for @howdyfromantiva

Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

example: you usually play as a male character, but the character you want to romance is into fem only, so you play as fem character instead.

Autism and the Ability to Hyperfocus

The Autistic Teacher