An Engineer's Guide To Preventing Burnout: Jacquelyn MacCoon (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Jacquelyn MacCoon’s talk titled “An Engineer’s Guide To Preventing Burnout”, at TEDxUofT, December 7, 2025.

Using Engineering Principles to Design Your Life

JACQUELYN MACCOON: Thank you everybody. That was epic, by the way. So, what if I were to tell you that the principles for designing your ideal life are happening right now? It’s what’s holding your seat off the ground, the ceiling in place, and my pants from falling down. Knock on wood.

Hi, my name is Jacquelyn, and we’re going to talk about using engineering principles to design your successful life. All materials, from plastics to wood, metals to ceramics, are all designed to explore and endure the same experiences that we as people have to experience. So, things like fatigue, crisis, and even insecurity, we know how to engineer for that. So, let’s throw a wrench into these sticky areas of life and use engineering to engineer our life.

Fatigue

Fatigue is something that a brilliant professor of mine explained as this. Picture this: you’re driving on the highway, there is minimal to no traffic, and you have a perfectly uneventful drive for 30 minutes. Getting out of the car, your energy is going to be fine. Depending on your playlist, it may even be better.

But now, picture this: you’re driving on the highway, minimal traffic, and there is this perfectly uneventful drive, but this time it’s for four hours. You getting out of that car is going to feel different than after half an hour. But why? It didn’t take any more stress, it didn’t take any more skill, and regardless of how epic your playlist was, you’re going to feel more tired. The only difference between those two situations is time.

Luckily, we know how to engineer for this. In engineering, fatigue is known as fatigue. It’s very complicated. And that is when you use stress repeatedly over time on a material. Great examples are bridges, elevator suspension, or your chair.

So the way that we actually want to prolong the material’s life and keep performing the way that we need to, there are a couple of things that we can do from an engineering perspective. Number one, we avoid overloading the system. This is where you want to minimize how much stress you’re putting on that actual material so that you’re not pushing it towards failure. And the second is where you design them to actually reduce stress. This is where you optimize the material characteristics so that in its use case, in its environment, it can withstand what’s going on.

So for the overloading, picture the elevator saying “maximum 400 pounds.” We will not put it to 100,000. We won’t. And for designing to reduce stress, picture wanting to build a bridge out of strong steel instead of breathable fabric.

Engineering Your Life Against Fatigue

So let’s use the exact same principles to engineer our life. The same tools we’re using to mitigate fatigue in a material we can use to mitigate fatigue in our own life. Some examples like back-to-back meetings or lectures, long road trips, systemic relationship problems. We can engineer for that.

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One, are you experiencing repeated stress over time? Avoid overloading and high stress. Take breaks between your meetings. Take some time to do energizing activities and strengthen the overall system.

And two, design yourself to reduce stress. Practice things so that it feels automatic. And if it feels really stressful, choose a different way to do it. Minimize your time to failure.

Crisis

Unfortunately, this is something that we may experience in our life. Picture this: you’re at work. You’re having your regular day, regular activities, and you get a phone call that says, “Hello, you’re fired.” It is extremely stressful and sudden. So what do we do as we are swiftly escorted to a nervous breakdown? We can engineer for it.

In engineering, a crisis can be linked to something we call catastrophic failure. This is when the system is overloaded with such severe stress that it breaks in a massive irreparable way. Great examples are dropping glass on the ground, snapping wooden chopsticks, or a nuclear reactor exploding. All the same principle. So the way that we can extend a material’s life and keep it performing the way we want to, we have a couple of things we can do.

In engineering, we want to avoid overloading the system. Exactly like fatigue, we do not want to push that material to its breaking point. And then we want them to be designed to leak before break. What this means is on its way to this catastrophic event, there are going to be massive signs that something is wrong.

For example, in a nuclear reactor, there can be huge cracks in pipes and walls throughout the environment, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to explode. This allows maintenance crews to see that flaw and mitigate or remediate that issue before we see it on the news, hopefully.

So let’s use the exact same tools for our life. If we are experiencing sudden high stress, examples, break up, break down, anything that really breaks us down to a, “oh my god, I just can’t even” moment, we can do the same things.

One, avoid overloading. It’s the same. We’re going to reduce our stress. We’re going to take breaks. We’re going to take that load off and we’re going to stop doing things that stress us out.

And second, we’re going to design our ecosystem in here to have leak before break signs. This is an introspective exercise. This is where you go in and you check what’s not working, what feels shaky, what feels unstable.

For me, eczema, 100% is my leak before break. I get a sudden red itchy patch, I’m on my way to an eye twitch, weird hair loss, boom, nervous breakdown, nuclear reactor. So see those signs, act on those signs, and then you can mitigate something catastrophic.

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Engineering for Insecurity

And last but not least, insecurity.

The number of examples of insecurity are everyone in this room and tenfold. So it can really be summarized into, “I’m not good enough for whatever.” And that’s really it. This illusion that something needs to change or be improved so that you qualify for what you want out of your life.

Luckily, we can even engineer for this. In engineering, insecurity can be related to what we would call suboptimal material integrity, low integrity materials. And we look at it in a few different aspects. Composition. What’s it made of? Selection. Where is it going? And design. What’s its profile? And are we going to swipe left or right?

First, composition. What’s it made of? This is in materials where we mix the right ingredients that we want to perform optimally in any situation. So when thinking of the optimal characteristics, I can pick what I want. And for example, if I’m talking about an airplane wing, I would much rather have a strong and somewhat flexible aluminum alloy compared to aluminum foil. Simple seems obvious. It’s a design choice.

Selection. What’s it made of? So sorry, where does it go? This is where we’re going to pick the material in that environment. This is where we want to make sure that if it’s in a car or a plane or actually aluminum foil, we’re putting it in an environment where it is going to thrive.

For example, when cooking, I much rather have a durable, non-toxic, thermally conductive material versus something that is toxic and might melt as soon as I turn on the stove. Seems obvious. Engineering choice.

And third, design. What’s its profile? What’s it got going on? And is the form that it’s in ideal for the environment that it needs to be in? For example, coming here, I much rather be in an Aston Martin compared to a horse and carriage. Seems obvious. Engineering choice.

Engineering Your Own Life

So let’s use these exact same tools to engineer our own life. If you are feeling less than amazing, you can look at these three key areas any time you are feeling insecure.

One, what’s the composition of your life right now? What’s going on work, professional, social, relationships? Check the whole thing holistically and make sure that you’re putting the ingredients that you want into your recipe for success.

Two, selection. Where are you in this life right now? What environments are you in?

And pick the environments where you are going to be appreciated and understood and genuinely set up to thrive.

And third, design. What’s your profile? And in that, look holistically, look spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally, and see which of those buckets you can actually strengthen to improve the overall success of your material.

Now, deep breath. We just covered a lot of engineering and you did a great job. You’re still awake. But to solidify these concepts, we’re going to do one slide.

Applying the Framework

So fatigue. If you are experiencing repeated stress over time, avoid overloading. Don’t do it. Just take a break. Relax. Do something energizing. And two, design yourself to reduce stress. Practice those things that make you feel confident and make the system easy. Doing those things will literally help you mitigate burnout.

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Crisis. Are you experiencing sudden high stress? One, avoid overloading. Seems like a pattern. Avoid taking on too much stuff and do energizing activities. Stop doing the things that stress you out. And two, look for those leak before break signs. Check in with your mental, physical, emotional cues and act on them. Emphasis, act on them. The eye twitch does not go away on its own. And these things can help you from going and having a nervous breakdown.

And last but not least, insecurity. If you’re feeling less than amazing, check these three core areas. Composition. What’s going on in your life? What’s it made up of? Check the nouns, people, places and things. Are they energizing and strengthening your system or are they actually weakening it? And keep what you want and ditch the rest. Two, selection. What is your environment and is it setting you up to thrive? Pick the ones that do. Ditch the rest. And three, design. Check in with yourself holistically. Mental, physical, emotional, spiritual. See what the strengths are of each of those components and increase it as much as possible.

Here is a quick cheat sheet for all of my nerds out there. This is going to be great. And we’re going to put it up at the very end of the talk as well so that you can take a picture. So the idea behind this is keep it on you, have it in your pocket, whip it out in public, send it to a friend, do whatever you need to do because now you have the tools to get yourself out of some tricky situations.

The Beginning of Your Journey

Also, know that this is just the beginning. We have just covered a few engineering concepts that can actually be applied to your life and there are many, many more you can tell because I’m still excited. Know that we covered three that get you from negative to neutral but there are so many more that can take you from neutral to thriving.

So thank you for joining me on the beginning of your nerdy journey of engineering your life and please know there’s much, much more that we can transfer to your life. So thank you and please keep engineering your life.

An Engineer’s Guide To Preventing Burnout: Jacquelyn MacCoon (Transcript)