The Ice Age Theory of Burnout

The Earth has been entirely covered by ice five times.

Changes in the Earth’s rotation and revolution expose it to different amounts of solar radiation. More radiation causes extreme seasons, which lead to ice ages.

It makes sense that extreme winters would cause ice ages.

Except they don’t.

Russian astronomer Wladimir Koppen discovered the counterintuitive truth: cold winters don’t cause ice ages, cool summers do.

When summers don’t get warm enough to melt the previous winter’s snow, more snow accumulates the following winter, which makes it even harder to melt off the next summer. Compounding this cycle, more snow means more sunlight is reflected into space, cooling the Earth further, which leads to more snowfall.

It takes tens of thousands of years, but that’s how you go from a light dusting of snowflakes to covering an entire planet in ice several miles thick.

I think burnout affects startup founders the same way.

Startups are intense. With limited resources, startups must outthink, outmanoeuvre and outwork their competition. The intensity of work is a feature, not a bug.

It makes sense that intense work would cause burnout.

Except it doesn’t.

The Ice Age Theory of Burnout

Burnout can be caused by many things: a lack of control, recognition or purpose, neglecting sleep, exercise or diet, planned events like moving house, or those that come out of the blue, like a death in the family.

Startup teams are prone to a particular type of burnout: the bone-tired exhaustion, emotional numbness or cynicism that comes from working too hard for too long.

It’s the kind of burnout that led to Arianna Huffington collapsing and breaking her cheekbone after 18 hour days building the Huffington Post. The kind that took hold of Rand Fishkin after four years of working on Moz without a holiday, and that contributed to Elon Musk tweeting Tesla into trouble after 120 hour weeks trying to meet demanding production deadlines. It’s the same kind of burnout that almost led to tragedy at Pixar.

My Ice Age Theory of Burnout goes like this: if ice ages are caused by cool summers, rather than cold winters, burnout in startup founders is caused by insufficient rest, not intense work.

Startups need intensity. I can’t point to a single successful startup that didn’t ask more of its founders and early team than a 9 to 5. But not every founder experiences burnout, which makes me think there’s another factor at play: a lack of proper rest.

Rest is the sun. It melts away the stress and fatigue that builds up like snow during intense periods of work. Without proper rest, stress accumulates. Push too hard for too long without recovering and you risk burnout, your very own ice age.

You may argue we already know rest is important. Ask a hundred founders if they value rest and I’d expect a hundred yes’s.

Observe a hundred founder’s schedules and I suspect you’d see the opposite.

If you’ve taken a note out of Reed Hastings’ book, who used to leave Netflix every Tuesday at 5pm for a date night, you may think this doesn’t affect you.

But it does, because the truth is we’re not resting, not really.

We leave the office, but the office doesn’t leave us. We take days off, but check our emails every hour. In the evenings, we double screen Netflix and scroll through industry news. We make to-do lists for our return, forgetting we never really left.

That’s not real rest. That’s a cool summer that never gets warm enough to melt the snow.

It’s baffling how many entrepreneurs obsess over squeezing every ounce of productivity out of their working hours but barely give a thought to their recovery.

We glorify LeBron James’ work ethic and ignore the $1.5 million he spends on cryotherapy and hyperbaric chambers to help him recover. We forget that Christiano Ronaldo said that recovery was more important to him than training, and that Tom Brady took his rest so seriously he created his own line of recovery sleepwear. All three are world-class performers known for their longevity.

We need to take our recovery seriously. Just as we seek Deep Work, we should seek Deep Rest.

Deep Rest

Deep rest thaws the ice, melting away our fatigue and stress. It can only be achieved by totally unplugging from work. No emails, no calls, no notifications.

It’s not just leaving work behind, it’s immersing yourself in another world.

It’s losing yourself in a book, hiking with your dog, chatting for hours with friends about nothing in particular. It’s listening to your child talk utter nonsense with a smile on your face without mentally drafting that really-important-but-is-it-really email.

Be in the moment. Really be there. That’s the key to slowly melting the residual layers of stress and fatigue that build up through intense periods of work.

Rest has another benefit. When you rest, your results improve. After he became the first human to run a sub-four minute mile, Roger Bannister said ‘I had done nothing for five days. I hadn’t trained. I just rested. And so I felt very full of running’.

Solutions that evaded us become clear. Mathematician Dan Rockmore believes ‘the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil’.

Finally, founders should keep the words of Glaciologist Gwen Shultz in their mind: ‘it is not the amount of snow that causes ice sheets, but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.’

Intensity is an inescapable part of startup life, but if you take rest seriously, burnout doesn’t have to be.

If you’re suffering from burnout or struggling to unplug, book a call with me. I’m not a medical expert, but I am a founder who has experienced the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey, including have to shut down a company and lay people off, while raising a young family. Your troubles will feel lighter when you share them.

Nelson