HALT And Burnout

I've been moving the last week and dealing with a series of comic errors that have occurred throughout the process. At various times, I had to stop and think, "wait, am I really able to deal with this problem right now?" And a lot of times, the answer was "no."

I learned a while ago of this acronym HALT. It stands for:

• Hungry
• Angry
• Lonely
• Tired

I love the American efficiency of these kind of acronyms. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that it came from the military.

HALT captures the conditions under which you are unable to cope effectively with stress. If you find yourself very stressed out from your situation, it's likely that you're experiencing one of more of these conditions.

Conversely, no matter what is going on in our current situation, as long as we avoid the HALT conditions we can keep making good decisions.

Note that half of HALT are physical symptoms while the other half are social. So half of HALT is just making sure you are getting enough rest and food.

Let me comment briefly on the A – anger. I used to be a very angry person when I was younger, especially as a teenager and into my early 20s. When I felt and acted angry, I was actually experiencing a noxious cocktail of fear and humiliation, but I was responding to that feeling with anger. It's the classic "fight or flight" response. When something feels threatening, we either run from it (fear) or we attack it (anger).

Most of the time, when people are angry, they're masking another emotion like shame, embarrassment, humiliation, or fear. Anger is the response to the feeling of being threatened by the primary emotion.

I don't have many problems with anger now, because I realized that anger is not usually my primary emotion. I just deal with the primary emotion instead. Of course, learning to understand the primary emotion is not easy. Sometimes the primary emotion is so painful that it feels easier for the person to "push it away" with anger.

Circling back to HALT, I realized that HALT also describes the conditions of burnout which is the subject central to this journal. I've been thinking of it as a "burnout journal", a place to unwind the last 4-5 years. HALT is exactly what I experienced from 2020 until the recent present, which made my normal daily activities very, very difficult whereas previously I was pretty happy in life. Let's go through each one.

H – Hungry

This first one is the least applicable. I've mostly been able to keep up with my nutrition, but at my lowest I definitely let my habits slip.

A – Angry

As describe above, anger is usually a response to a primary emotion, not the primary emotion itself. In my case, the primary emotions were fear starting with my layoff in November 2019, and then ramping up in March 2020 as society began to collapse around me. I was very afraid of something terrible happening to me. That fear led me to become more hostile and aggressive.

In some ways it feels like "A" should be a stand-in for strong emotions in general.

L – Lonely

With the pandemic came crushing loneliness and isolation. Previously I had a very active social life. I worked hard during the day and almost every afternoon and evening I had something going on outside work. I went to the gym, I went to a game meetup, I got dinner with a friend, or went to a new social event.

With the advent of "lockdown", my world became very small. For 2-3 months, all gyms were closed. I still talked to friends online and had a few recurring video calls to play board games and so on. But the novelty quickly began to wear off. My exercise routine had to change to a completely solitary one, running in the parks around Austin and doing kettlebell exercises at home. I had started a new job in February of 2020 and intentionally picked a team that seemed friendly and worked primarily in the office, so avoid the issues I had seen before with "work from home" company policies. And all the fun social meetups and events around Austin vanished overnight, as riots and homeless camps moved in to replace them.

T – Tired

I stopped being able to sleep in late May 2020 when protests started around the downtown and capital areas of Austin. I experienced something like night terrors after that point.

My work performance suffered, as I was unable to get 7-8 hours of rest to recharge for the next day.

On and off, for the last 4 years, I've had the same problems sleeping. I moved out of my downtown Austin apartment to a new one in a lower density urban-like neighborhood. For a while I did well here because I could finally sleep and relax at home. But then the apartment building began to experience problems. We lost water for a week during a big winter storm. Then we experienced false fire alarms. Finally, the building started doing construction on the exterior of the building, and my unit was affected by this starting in January 2023. So I began losing sleep again. In an effort to recover, I moved to another apartment in the same area, but found there was even more noise in this place because of trash collection occurring at 1-4am several times per week.

I also was placed on-call for two different systems at my job. I had been on-call before, but this came right as the new executive had decided to fire my entire team, minus the IC engineers. The engineers were helpfully allowed to continue on in the company in different roles, but retaining their on-call duties for their old projects. This resulted in me losing a lot sleep, having to cancel holiday plans last-minute, and missing events that I had bought tickets for due to being busy fixing on-call problems.

Having sleep disrupted is a big problem, because if you cannot rest and recharge for the next day, the next day is guaranteed to go even worse. This becomes a cycle where your work performance gets worse because you cannot recover from the previous night/week of unscheduled on-call work.

HALT As Burnout

This quickly becomes a burnout situation. My state from March 2020 until the recent present was like this:

• I was constantly terrified I was about to a) lose my job due to economic uncertainty from markets crashing and then funding for everything I do drying up; b) lose my home, due to the housing market going insane, with rent prices almost doubling in 2 years, finding myself unable to buy a home, and constant on-going problems with my apartment; c) be victimized by criminals, as the crime rate doubled in a short period of time; or d) suffer from some large-scale disaster such as a winter storm or viral contagion.

• I was always exhausted because I could not sleep due to all of the factors listed above, plus the constant 24/7 on-call work I was assigned to do, with minimal support from the company or my manager.

• I was extremely lonely and isolated because of the pandemic disrupting my personal life. It took me over two years to get back together with the friends I have in the area. The gym ended up being my lifeline here as I had at least some socialization time after work. I actually trained a lot during these past 4 years because I had literally nothing else to do at times!

Well, that's not exactly HALT. I suppose I could make my own acronym – LET – to describe burnout. (And describing and defining burnout seems like an important thing to do in a burnout journal.)

LET:

• Lonely
• Exhausted
• Tired

If you want to burn people out, make sure to keep them in this state as long as possible. No matter how tough they are, eventually they'll crack. I did!