{"id":292849,"date":"2025-11-15T08:34:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T08:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/292849\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T08:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T08:34:07","slug":"after-i-burned-out-physics-helped-me-understand-what-had-happened-to-me-and-to-move-on-zahaan-bharmal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/292849\/","title":{"rendered":"After I burned out, physics helped me understand what had happened to me \u2013 and to move on | Zahaan Bharmal"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the words \u201cforce equals mass times acceleration\u201d are mildly triggering, I apologise. Newton\u2019s second law of motion<\/a> will be familiar to anyone who\u2019s ever studied physics. For some who struggled with that course, it may bring back painful memories. But for me, as an awkward teenager, it was oddly comforting \u2013 proof of an ordered, structured universe where cause always led to predictable effect. I carried that belief into university, where I studied physics, and even into my career. If I just worked hard enough, success would be mine.<\/p>\n

But nine months into my first job, I got made redundant. It turns out that life doesn\u2019t always obey Newton\u2019s laws.<\/p>\n

Losing your job is tough for anyone. But for me, it was devastating. I had worked so hard, yet somehow I had still failed. It felt like a violation of everything I thought I knew about how the world worked. And on top of this, I was completely burned out after months of manic work.<\/p>\n

My employer was not a company run by sadists who delighted in playing with the hopes of naive young graduates. There was a broader context to this layoff. And once I had passed through the shock and numbness, I could begin to see it. It was the summer of 2001, and all was not well with the world. The dotcom bubble bursting<\/a> had sent financial shock waves around the globe, forcing my company \u2013 a management consultancy \u2013 to cut jobs.<\/p>\n

And the crisis itself wasn\u2019t even unique. Similar things happened during the 2008 sub-prime mortgage<\/a> crash. In 2011, there was the eurozone crisis. In 2013, the rupee crashed. In 2015, turbulence on the Chinese stock market.<\/p>\n

No one saw any of these crises coming \u2013 or at least not precisely. And in almost every case, they weren\u2019t triggered by some enormous, dramatic event but by small, seemingly innocuous failures that snowballed into something far larger.<\/p>\n

And this is where ideas from physics come in again. While Newton\u2019s second law of motion proved an imperfect way for me to analyse the world, there are other ideas from my studies that have helped me understand these crises, and our place within them. All the above events are examples of chaotic systems \u2013 ones that, in theory, can be explained by cause and effect, but in practice are so sensitive to conditions that tiny variations can spiral into radically different outcomes.<\/p>\n

Take the \u201cthree-body problem<\/a>\u201d, made famous by the Liu Cixin novel and the recent Netflix adaptation. If you have two planets orbiting each other, you can predict their paths for ever. But add a third planet, and suddenly the forces interacting between the three bodies become so complex that the mathematics explodes into unpredictability. The system is still governed by clear laws, but an infinitesimally small shift can throw the whole system off balance.<\/p>\n

This idea doesn\u2019t just apply to things as big as the financial system or astrophysics; we can see such complexity and unpredictability in our own lives. For many, the response is control: we optimise our schedules, work harder, operate at maximum capacity. I know I certainly did. I assumed the way to get ahead was to work as hard as humanly possible. But physics teaches us that, for systems susceptible to chaotic forces, this actually makes us more fragile, not less.<\/p>\n

Think of a power grid. Most of the time, it hums along without problem. But during an unexpected surge \u2013 for example, when millions of air-conditioners are switched on at once during a heatwave \u2013 the system can overload and shut down. To prevent this, engineers design grids with slack in the system: surge capacity to absorb unexpected spikes. A grid that operates at 80% survives a sudden spike in demand; one at 100% causes blackouts.<\/p>\n

As a young graduate, I had been living without any surge capacity, at the limit of my abilities. And that\u2019s perhaps why losing my job was so painful. But the truth is, most of us do the same. We convince ourselves that if we just push harder, we\u2019ll be fine. But the more we operate at our limits, the more vulnerable we become.<\/p>\n

A recent report<\/a> from Mental Health UK revealed that 91% of UK adults have experienced high or extreme stress in the past year, with young people feeling it most acutely. Meanwhile, nearly half of young workers regularly work unpaid overtime<\/a>. Among all UK desk workers, 84% feel pressured<\/a> to work overtime regularly and 65% have to work at weekends to get their job done. We\u2019re a nation of power grids running at 100%, wondering why we\u2019re burning out.<\/p>\n

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And from my own personal experience of burnout, I\u2019m reminded of another idea from physics. You can heat water gradually and nothing seems to change \u2013 until you reach a critical threshold, boiling point. And suddenly the whole system transforms \u2013undergoing what\u2019s known as a phase transition \u2013 from liquid to gas. People can absorb strain for a while, operating at maximum capacity, appearing fine. But stress doesn\u2019t accumulate linearly. It builds until a critical point, and then the system flips. That\u2019s why burnout often feels sudden, even though the pressure has been building for months or years.<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve learned techniques to build my personal surge capacity. I try to always leave enough slack in my day for the unexpected. And I\u2019ve learned that recovery isn\u2019t a luxury, it\u2019s essential.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019ve built an economy that celebrates overwork and treats burnout as personal failure rather than as a design flaw. The recent Keep Britain Working review<\/a> revealed an alarming increase in people dropping out of the workforce due to mental health conditions. Could it be that the overwhelming nature of work itself \u2013 the expectation to operate at 100% capacity with zero surge capacity \u2013 is what\u2019s making people unable to work at all?<\/p>\n

Until we recognise that resilience requires inefficiency \u2013 that robust systems must have slack \u2013 we\u2019re just optimising our way towards collapse. Newton\u2019s second law still holds. I just wish someone had told me that it\u2019s not just about how much force you apply, but knowing when to ease off.<\/p>\n

Zahaan Bharmal is the author of The Art of Physics<\/a> and a senior director at Google, writing in a personal capacity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If the words \u201cforce equals mass times acceleration\u201d are mildly triggering, I apologise. Newton\u2019s second law of motion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[199,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-292849","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}