Something came up in conversation recently that I keep thinking about — how many of us only realise we were burning out after the fact. Looking back and going: “oh. That’s what that was.”

So I wanted to write up something on the early signals, and a few of the trickier patterns that make burnout hard to catch in yourself. None of this is medical advice, just things backed by research that might help you put words to something you’re experiencing. As always, every person’s journey is different.

—

The early signs — before the crash

The World Health Organization defines burnout as “a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” characterised by exhaustion, growing mental distance from your work, and a sense of reduced effectiveness.

The challenge is that it rarely arrives all at once. It tends to start as a collection of small things you can explain away individually:

You feel tired at the end of the day, but “everyone’s tired”
You’re slower to get into a coding session, but “it’s just a boring ticket”
You dread a Monday morning, but “who actually loves Mondays”
You’ve stopped caring much about the outcome of your PR, but “it ships, doesn’t it”

A review published on PMC looking at early warning signs in health professionals noted that burnout was first conceptualised in the 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger, who described a progression starting from excessive drive and ambition, moving through chronic stress, and eventually arriving at full burnout. The early stages — still driven, but quietly eroding — are the ones most likely to go unnoticed.

Some signals worth paying attention to:

Physical: Persistent fatigue that doesn’t improve after sleep, more frequent headaches, trouble sleeping despite exhaustion, loss of appetite.

Emotional: Increasing irritability, cynicism creeping into conversations, feeling detached from work you previously cared about.

Behavioural: Losing the curiosity that drew you to development in the first place. Not exploring, not tinkering. Code reviews feeling like a chore rather than a conversation. Withdrawing from team interactions.

A 2023 paper on impostor phenomenon in software engineers noted that reduced perceived productivity is often an early signal — not that you stop working, but that the work starts feeling pointless or disconnected from any outcome you care about.

—

The boiling frog problem

Here’s the uncomfortable part: burnout is specifically hard to notice because it builds slowly.

You may have heard the boiling frog metaphor — the idea that a frog dropped into boiling water jumps out immediately, but one placed in cool water that heats gradually won’t register the danger until it’s too late. (For what it’s worth, biologists have since shown that real frogs do try to escape gradually heated water — but the metaphor persists because it captures something real about human psychology, not frog physiology.)

As clinical psychologist Shannon Swales writes for Psychology Today, burnout is “a slow progression that often goes unnoticed until it has a significant impact on our health, work, and relationships.” We adapt to rising stress incrementally, normalising each new baseline along the way.

Researchers studying human responses to gradual change point to a few psychological mechanisms that make this especially tricky: habituation (repeated exposure dulls our perception), cognitive dissonance (we rationalise staying in uncomfortable situations), and incrementalism (we accept changes in small steps that we’d reject all at once).

For developers specifically, this often plays out like this: overtime becomes occasional, then occasional becomes regular, then regular becomes “just how things are here.” The burnout doesn’t announce itself. It becomes your new normal — and by then you’re already well into the pot.

A useful question to ask yourself periodically isn’t “how do I feel today?” but rather: “how does how I feel today compare to how I felt a year ago?” That comparison across time is often more revealing than any snapshot.

—

Imposter syndrome’s role in all of this

Imposter syndrome and burnout are often discussed separately, but for many developers they’re deeply entangled.

Imposter syndrome — the persistent belief that your success is undeserved and you’re about to be “found out” — was first described as the “imposter phenomenon” by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. It was initially thought to mainly affect high-achieving women, but we now know it’s far more widespread.

Research surveying 624 software engineers across 26 countries found that 52.7% experience frequent to intense levels of imposter feelings — with significantly higher rates among women (60.6%) and among Asian and Black engineers. The study explicitly flagged that imposter phenomenon “may lead to mental disorders such as depression and burnout.”

The mechanism that connects the two is worth understanding. As summarised by the Super Productivity developer blog, drawing on Langford and Clance’s 1993 research: “fear of exposure leads to overwork, overwork leads to burnout, burnout reinforces feelings of inadequacy.” It becomes self-sustaining.

There’s another angle specific to our field. The Stack Overflow blog spoke with Dr. Cat Hicks from the Developer Success Lab, who identified that the relentless pressure to upskill can trap developers in a stress cycle — one where learning becomes associated with high-stress environments, making you want to avoid exactly the thing that would help you feel less like a fraud. The arrival of AI tools has made this worse for many people, adding yet another thing to feel behind on.

If you find yourself working longer hours not because of project demands, but because you feel like you need to prove something — that’s worth sitting with.

—

Perfectionism: the slow burn

High standards in software development are generally considered a virtue. Clean code, attention to edge cases, caring about user experience. But there’s a point where those same standards start eating you alive — and it can be genuinely hard to tell when you’ve crossed it.

Research distinguishes between two kinds of perfectionism: perfectionistic strivings (setting high personal standards) and perfectionistic concerns (focusing on mistakes, fearing falling short, harsh self-evaluation). A meta-analysis covering 43 studies and nearly 10,000 participants found that it’s the concerns dimension — not the striving dimension — that is “medium-to-large” positively associated with burnout. Setting high goals isn’t the problem on its own. Treating every imperfection as evidence of inadequacy is.

Longitudinal research by Childs and Stoeber found that perfectionistic concerns “predicted increases in burnout over time,” and that self-critical perfectionism had a positive relationship with emotional exhaustion.

In practice, this can look like: never feeling like your work is actually done, reluctance to ship because it isn’t perfect yet, ruminating on code review comments for longer than is useful, or feeling a vague sense of failure even after a genuinely good sprint.

Perfectionism also interacts badly with imposter syndrome. If you already believe you’re not as capable as people think, then every imperfection feels like it might be the thing that finally exposes you. That combination is exhausting in a way that’s hard to measure but very real to live with.

—

Brownout: the quiet one

This is the one that gets talked about least, and I think that’s partly because it’s the hardest to name.

You’re still functioning. You’re still showing up, still writing code, still attending standups. Nobody on your team would flag anything obviously wrong. But something has gone quiet inside. You’ve stopped caring about the outcome. You go through the motions. The spark that made you actually enjoy this work has dimmed to something closer to indifference.

This is sometimes called brownout — and it’s distinct from burnout, though it can precede or follow it.

Welcome to the Jungle describes brownout as a “professional disengagement syndrome” characterised by a loss of meaning in work. Unlike burnout, which often arrives with visible exhaustion, brownout is stealthy — the disinterest creeps in rather than crashes in. The French occupational psychologist Christophe Dejours was exploring related territory in the 1970s, and it’s seen renewed interest as a distinct phenomenon.

Research on burnout dimensions offers some supporting context here. A study published in PMC found that the “disengaged profile” — characterised by cynicism rather than full exhaustion — may actually be more central to the burnout experience than exhaustion alone. You can be in trouble without feeling destroyed.

A 2024 Gallup global study found that the percentage of engaged younger Millennial and Gen Z workers declined by 5% — while those who had already “emotionally checked out” grew by 6%. Disengagement is increasing and it’s often invisible in productivity metrics until it isn’t.

Some questions that might point toward brownout rather than classic burnout:

Do you find yourself completing tasks without any emotional investment in whether they go well?
Has the curiosity or problem-solving energy that brought you into development mostly disappeared?
Do you feel present at work but not there?
Are you doing the minimum rather than what you’d naturally do if you cared?

None of these are failures. They’re signals. And they’re worth taking seriously even if, on paper, you look fine.

—

A note to close with

Recognising any of this in yourself can feel uncomfortable. There’s a version of reading something like this and immediately finding reasons it doesn’t apply to you. That instinct is understandable — none of us want to admit we might be in trouble, especially in a field where capability feels so tied to identity.

But recognising it is genuinely the first step. Not because it immediately fixes anything, but because you can’t navigate something you haven’t named.

If any of this landed for you, we’d love to hear about it. What did burnout start to look like for you, before you had words for it? 💬

—

Further reading: WHO on burnout as an occupational phenomenon | Impostor Phenomenon in Software Engineers (arXiv, 2023) | Multidimensional Perfectionism and Burnout: A Meta-Analysis (PubMed) | The Boiling Frog Syndrome — Psychology Today