Welcome to another episode of the Testing Peers. This episode is special to us for two reasons. Firstly, this is being released exactly a year since we released our first episode and it is humbling to see how far we have come in that year and how many of you have listened.

Secondly, and more importantly for this episode, it’s Mental Health Awareness Week from 10th-14th May which means it felt like a good time to release an episode about our own experiences around Mental Health, specifically Burnout. This is something we have all experienced in recent years and we talk about the characteristics of what burnout can manifest like.

Before we dived into the main topic, Chris lead us into a discussion of our favourite video game franchises, tenuously linked to the topic by Chris’ love of the game “Burnout”.

Burnout is a very real thing and as we discussed, it can present itself in very different ways. You can become disengaged, overworked, lethargic, emotional and many other feelings. What is important is that once you recognise it, or lucky enough to have people around to help you identify it, is that you find someone to talk to and help change things to alleviate the feelings.

There are lots of resources out there which can help you, below are some links to some of these which were mentioned in the episode:

• mind.org
• Simon’s Baptism of Fire talk – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC9Koh71Ols
• Chris’s mental health Blog posts – Here and here
• Another resource, although not mentioned in the episode would be this talk by Maryam Umar

Don’t struggle in silence, reach out to family, friends or someone online, you’ll be surprised how many people would be willing to talk over zoom/teams/hangout etc and support you. The Testers hangout is a great place to find people to chat to, whether about your struggles or just someone to socialise with, sometimes, that can really help.

Any of the Peers would take time to support too, feel free to contact us via the usual channels.

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