Oh boy, does this one hit close to home!

How do you keep yourself from burning out?  My suggestion is that you keep a solid separation between "work" and "personal life".  Don't let one bleed over into the other.  Don't define yourself by what you do for employment, and keep in mind what is REALLY important in life.  

My burnout story:

You can tell a lot about an organization by looking at its employee turnover rate.  In the case of one group that I was previously with, that rate exceeded 100% annually, as people would quit within months of being hired, and their replacements would soon quit.  We also lost some really good long-time employees - skilled IT pro's with decades of solid experience...

This was in 2007-2009, and the economy was tight.  Management was fond of proclaiming that "Engineers are a dime a dozen these days".  Without going into excessive detail, suffice it to say that 16 hour days were normal, and availability "within 15 minutes notice" was expected at all times, 24x7x365, and getting an uninterrupted night's sleep - even on a weekend - simply never happened.  Holidays were touted by management as "an opportunity to do extra work", with two employees quitting rather than working on Christmas Day. 

Once, after pulling an all-nighter I was seen nodding off at my desk the next morning (having been there since the previous day, and all through the night).  I was "docked" a day's vacation for that.

Some stress here and there is tolerable, but in this place nobody could escape it.  It just kept building & building.  It was miserable...

But I was one of only two employees who stuck with it.

Why.....?

Because my wife was fighting cancer, and I could not abide the thought of myself quitting my job under any circumstances (interestingly, the other employee who stayed also had a seriously ill family member).

She survived.  It's been almost 10 years since then.   I'm still at that same company, but with a different (and much better!) group.  Many ills of the company's past management culture have caught up with it, and there have been some hefty fines, some "leadership" changes, and a lot of media coverage (I don't dare say who I work for, but it's a household name).

Once you get "burned out", I don't think it's possible to get totally "unburnt".  While my work situation is now vastly better than it was then, my heart just isn't in it anymore.  Not like it used to be.   I have learned that there are more important things in life than "work", and sometimes that lesson is a painful one.   I just keep checking my 401k every morning...