Typical story I imagine-- ambitious, smart, promising career, was a technical co-founder at a small startup, and things seemed fine. Then I found myself wandering in the woods all day, crying for no reason and looking for non-existent fossils, which I found. I eventually saw petrified sea creatures everywhere and stopped going to work, or answering my phone, paying bills, etc. Things ended predictably, in horrible slow motion. Now I have a two year hole in my life, and I’ll never forgive myself for what I put my family through.
But nobody else will ever know that. I’m functional and back in the industry, but it’s not the sort of thing people discuss at the water cooler.
So I’d like to ask if anyone else had a secret breakdown? I’m curious if my story is an outlier, or if this is one of those things that “just happens” to some people.
And when I really try to focus I just go blank in my head. Can't explain shit.
I'm trying to slowly get back on the pony just because I'm ashamed of all the salary I've collected for what little work I've been able to do.
Haven't done therapy lately but one thing that comes to mind is how futile everything is. I know it's a cliché but I'm almost 40 so this isn't your regular teenage angst "nothing matters", I thought I was past that.
It might be rooted in the fact that I don't have kids, I haven't found purpose yet. But the thoughts that come to mind is that this could all end tomorrow and wtf are we working for when we could be living?
As a parent: nope, it's definitely not that.
Yes, having children is a rich and beautiful experience. It's also a ruthless grind. So, if you think you're feeling lethargic and it's all a bit futile, imagine doing everything you do now, but also arguing with a smaller, more annoying version of yourself for a couple of decades while sleep deprived, and with 1/4 of the disposable income you have now.
For me, it's a battle between "if I do something, someone's just gonna fuck it up anyway" and "I used to love this. I can still get excited by this, right?" I constantly find myself in a state of paralysis where I know what to do, I know how to do it, I even know how to do it quickly so it can be over and done, but I still just don't want to START anything.
I suspect it's a result of a decade or so of working in startups with borderline psychotic egomaniacs. For instance, one CEO would periodically grab me, walk me a few blocks away from the office and proceed to scream in my face for 20 minutes on the sidewalk. There are many, many other examples, but honestly, it's all too familiar and boring to recount.
At times I feel it may be akin to PTSD. The psych I saw suspected it may well be, but unfortunately there are many more needy patients being treated for far worse PTSD (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, etc).
Apparently, there's a term for this "inability to do stuff": executive dysfunction. That's about as much as I know.
One of the other unsettling things that has recently manifested itself has been stuttering. I've never stuttered and always prided myself on being a persuasive and confident speaker. But since the above horror-show I've often found myself unable to string sentences together, getting tongue-tied, long pauses. Maybe it's just age, but it seems correlated time-wise. Yes, I know, correlation is not causation.
If you find it inexplicably hard to make it to your 9am standup, try making it your responsibility to get two other humans out of bed and ready for school at 6:35 every day and then make it to your 9am standup.
I founded a startup 15 years ago and have done well. It's nothing youve heard of and Im NOWHERE close to owning a yacht or a private plane.
With this mild success I was feeling depressed, didn't know why I was building this company for. Sure I could buy nice things, but it seemed pointless.
Then I had kids and it changed everything, I love every minute of it. Its very clear to me I'm working for their future benefit.
I think the difference is that my mild success allows me some game changing luxuries:
- We have a maid that handles all cleaning duties.
- I'm super involved in my kids lives daily, but we do have a nanny that can care for them if we want to take a break. This allows me to lock myself in my office and play guitar, piano or read whenever I want to. After 60-90 minutes I start to crave hugging my kids and go play with them. Its also not a big deal for me to work out daily.
- I only have to take on work projects that interest me, all the boring stuff I've done 50 times I can delegate to other engineers. Forget building another API endpoint, integration or CRUD.
There's an interview with Steph Curry where they ask him what the greatest luxury money allows him: A Nanny.
So I guess my point is, money doesn't fix everything but it can make things a lot easier and enjoyable.
Wh..why did you even stay long enough for this to have happened more than once?
I never heard the term "executive dysfunction" and always used the term "paralysis by analysis". I'm currently learning Common Lisp and very excited about it, but when it comes to doing any sort of actual programming for my own personal reasons (whatever that is) I have a hard time working on it. That is regardless of what PL I use.
If I have two things that I want to do, say Thing-A and Thing-B, when I work on A my mind says I'd rather work on B and when I am working on B I'd rather be doing A. It is a vicious cycle.
And as a parent I agree that kids would not help the OP situation.
I recently switched jobs (Aug 22) to a huge health care org. The work has way more purpose than my old programming job but I still feel like I am missing something.
The more stressors you have, the less water will poor out and you gain stress until your bucket is full. Then the warning systems kick in, and your brain or body starts giving signals. If you ignore them (motoring through or I got this mentality) you reach orange or red levels. A full PTSD is definitely possible (it’s like a short circuit)
Thing is, you can’t spend what you don’t have. If your reach a limit, it’s a literal limit of your body/mind.
The only to reverse the situation is to have good, refreshing times and periods to make holes in the bucket. Anything fun, creative and/or relaxing will do, and emphasizing it needs to be both for body and mind.
For starters, there are journaling practices for processing emotions. And then there are various kinds of meditations.
Then there is psychoeducation, which will - over time - help dealing with difficult emotions.
Notable authors and researchers in this field: Pete Walker, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Arielle Schwartz.
This would happen to me exactly one time, and never again. I know it happens, but how people put up with such abuse is beyond me.
Another recent speech related development, I'm losing words. I'll be mid-sentence and I'll have a specific word in mind that I want to use but it's like the dictionary entry for that word is blank in my mind. Only seems to happen with verbal speech, haven't really noticed it when typing.
I also think it's age related in combination with past experiences and the fact that I have 3 young kids and everything that entails but who knows.
As a parent, I'm not so sure. I think every person is different, and some people (myself) respond really well to having kids. They give you a purpose in life and make everything seem more meaningful.
Other people absolutely do not get as much out of having kids, and it feels like a grind to them.
People are just different, nothing wrong with that at all. IMO problems may arise when your reality is misaligned with the kind of person you are.
Or it could be something else entirely.
This is a much better explanation of what I was trying to say, you nailed that. I'm not a native english-speaker so I struggle with the right wording.
The kids part probably stems from the classic midlife crisis feeling that I haven't accomplished anything, and I'm sure that contributed to my state. So I'm not too focused on that part really because I've lived my life so far, and chosen my partners so far, with the goal of not having kids.
No instead I'm trying to reason that I need to see more of the world and meet more amazing people. I met an amazing woman last summer who was a digital nomad, and following her around the world has given me the travel bug.
So I need to reason in my head and come to a logical conclusion of how best to facilitate unlimited travel, and for the moment that is to stay with my employer and at least put in enough effort that they continue to be happy with my work. And use my freedom to travel and meet people while I'm still young enough to enjoy myself.
I'm coming from a 20 year long career of over-achievement, overly loyal to my employers and staying up long nights nerding out on tasks. I need to make a big switch from that to more of the do the bare minimum necessary to keep them happy and focus on the life part of work/life balance a bit more.
I'm stuck in the same position you described, except that I want to, but pretty much everyone around me is actively preventing me to work on anything.
Dead Comment
Focus on yourself to get better. As far as work, break tasks down AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE. Do a portion and pat yourself on the back. You'll be able to build up from there.
Part of burnout is seeing a wall of work and your body/mind having an adverse reaction to it. You need smaller portions to get back on the horse.
sorry, pet peeve of mine. usually I have a bit of a controlled inner "aaarrgh" moment and then move past it, but I'm in a foul mood today (hence clicking on this thread) so it couldn't be helped. I'm sorry I'm sorry.
Dead Comment
Searching around for burnout, including on this website, might give you some relatable stuff to read. It's possible that solving it might require you taking a long break (if you can), or reevaluate your life and change careers. These are things that take courage however, and a lot of people just keep going because they hate it, but it's still their comfort zone. Give yourself time to mature a decision, might be a few years, even.
> I know it's a cliché but I'm almost 40 so this isn't your regular teenage angst "nothing matters", I thought I was past that.
Teenage angst has a time. Unfortunately Midlife Crisis also has a time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midlife_crisis
It could be what you are going through, at least partially. I went through it recently - coupled with the pandemic and unfortunate family problems, I ended up depressed. I reached out for help. Therapy took the blunt out of it. Didn't fix everything, but I am functional. I get "you are a good parent" and "you are a good boss" from time to time. Brightens my day.
If therapy isn't for you, try the basics: exercise, diet, hobbies, family, friends. Anything that improves your mood will help you look at life with a more positive attitude. Be gradual with changes and expect short-term setbacks - what matters is improving in the medium-long term.
Good luck!
I've on occasion been in very cold water (cutting ropes from propellors of boats and stand-up paddle boarding).
While my core body temperature is still below normal, I've found myself incapable of going back into the cold water, like my body physically refuses.
The mind works to protect itself, and perhaps that's what its doing with regards to work - trying to protect you from further damaging yourself due to burn-out.
Initially I thought I suffered from "procrastistination", I tried all methods to fight it to no avail. Then I considered "burn out", "existential crisis", or weariness of work, but that was not the case at all. I started going to psychiatrists, initially they considered "depression", but I did not have a low mood. Finally, one of them figured out that I had "avolition" which can be considered disorder of volition or a disorder of diminished motivation.
After a meditation retreat I had a psychotic break, so finally the end diagnosis was "negative symptoms of schizophrenia" (here "negative symptoms" means those involving the absence of something common to most people). It is possible to have "deficit schizophrenia" without positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, etc). However, most psychiatrist are not aware of this, and tend to classify the "disorders of volition" under depression, because that is what they are most familiar with, and because when you have avolition it makes you depressed to not be able to accomplish anything at all. I have tried several meds and I only had a minor improvement with cariprazine, but it caused me unmanageable insomnia, so I had to quit it.
Started at a new company almost half a year ago thinking a smaller company without clients, without time registration and with a single application to focus on would fix all my problems. It did for the first few months, but now I'm having the exact same issue where I really don't have the motivation to do stuff... I do have to say I also moved in to another home a few months ago and spend a lot of time fixing stuff in our new home, maybe overdoing it a bit there, so it can also be that I'm just a bit exhausted right now. Also, I notice that winter time here in Western Europe is a bitch, so getting longer days again would do my mood a lot of good.
I think I have had these moments in the past as well and I think eventually they will pass again. I'm going to take a bit more care of myself by doing some more physical training, eating healthier and seeing friends more. It just sucks for now...
I'm taken to a line from fight club: "We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off"
Personally, I’ve both strolled out of burnout with such combinations, and crawled into burnout without them.
It’s amazing how easily we neglect our most basic needs, and how quickly this backlashes.
But at the same time that employer provides such job security that it allows me to travel the world (which I just started) and still work.
So that's kinda keeping me there. That is also what is motivating me to get back on track because I have a goal now, to travel, and my job is financing that, and the freedom my employer provides is making it possible.
But yeah I have been dabbling in the job market to kickstart my motivation again. But it has to be a remote-only job of course.
I was only able to get through it by completely shutting down the computer for a period, and ended up putting my mental energy into learning woodworking. After a month or two of that, I slowly reintroduced computer stuff (e.g. reading HN), then writing some quality of life scripts for myself, then finally getting back into actual "projects". In my experience, and it sounds like maybe yours as well, it was really important I didn't force the work otherwise I had a severe internal procrastination/aversion kick in.
Deleted Comment
I try to find a balance. I computed based on diminishing returns of income wrt. life expectancy (possibly with a vast error) that the optimal amount I should be working is 2h/d (if I never retire).
Going over that means I'll be able to retire, and going too much (>4h/day) means my life is prolonged increasingly just for work. So only do this if you are crazy about work.
Going below means I'll have to make some sacrifices.
I am thankful for my employer accepting such terms (a variable number of few hours).
Key word there is average though, some days it feels more like doing 2h or none, other days with a (rare) interesting problem it can spiral to like 10h too. The typical full time job fixed work hours are just so too damn rigid.
I mean I have these thoughts too, then I remind myself that I need money to pay rent and food etc. (I try to avoid extravagance and devices, to save as much as possible, but I do still need somewhere to live and food.)
I mean maybe in some alternative universe I might know how to build a shelter in a forest and grow food myself (although tbh that also sounds like a lot of work, not necessarily better than sitting in front of a monitor coding something I don't care about), but in this universe I live in a city and studied computer science and do not know how to do any of those things.
So when I think why I am working and not living, I answer myself with "I am working because I need to buy food".
If I don't feel I have control over my own life I feel exactly like you described but.. that might just be me.
Regarding your existential dread.. my philosophy as someone who is close to Ukraine and feared that the war would spill into my country, is that while it may all end tomorrow for some reason or another.. that possibility is not worth thinking about. If I really knew for certain I would die in 2 years then I'd become totally hedonistic, I'd spend all my resources to just have the most fun possible but we don't know that. Humanity has gone through worse periods than we're facing right now but it got through them so chances are we'll get through it too so why not plan for the future? I've been hedonistic for the past 7 years, it gets old. If you haven't lived your life fully until now and just dread that you've been working your ass off, not going out, not meeting people, not taking drugs or whatever other hedonistic activity you wish you had gone through then maybe go do that, get it out of your system but eventually you'll want to settle down, plan for the future and even though it's scary and your mind will throw a lot of roadblocks I feel you still have to do it to truly be fulfilled.
I quit my job, went to doing something in a slightly different industry. Same thing. I can't explain it, I don't know what happened.
No, really, thank you for sharing your story, it's maybe futile but an original reminder that we are all on the same kind of boat.
Or you come to terms with the fact that your job is only meant to facilitate your life, work/life balance in other words, and just keep doing it just well enough to continue living your best life on your own time.
I'm leaning towards option B.
... once you're using your brain again, all these questions just melt away.
Unless you find out that you want to devote all of your life to being a SAHM/SAHD because it truly fullfills you.
I have tried several types of supplements and could fix some of long-lasting energy problems.
I think people were right that I am stagnating and I feel the need for new challenges.
The catch 22 is that my job is so amazing that it gives me the newfound (newly realized) freedom to see the world while working. So I either stay, find some motivation to avoid the shame of not working, and keep travelling to fulfill my work/life balance.
Or I find a new job with new motivation where I'll be putting in more hours, more commitment and perhaps have less time for travel.
But regarding the energy, I take daily supplements of vitamin D and all the B vitamins, and I do feel that it does help.
Deleted Comment
I got treatment for it.
It means you've had an underlying issue. It probably wasn't entirely caused by the work-related stress.
After it happens, you know somethin's up, or could be up at any unpredictable time. My goal in therapy and with medication is to manage the episodes while being as much of myself as I can without a relapse.
To your point, I think psychological disorders are common in tech fields. PTSD or BPD, for example, frequently have "control compulsion" issues. Being compelled to control works very well if you are managing a fleet of 10,000 servers. It's been difficult to explain to my old friends why I would care about things like latency and GC STW events because a normal person without control issues doesn't find it emotionally appealing. Psychotic/hallucinatory/delusional features have short-term value in certain situations, like coming up with new product ideas or rapidly "pivoting" between market fits. I won't say it's normal, but I will say it's predictable.
It's not to disparage stress and its impact on all of us, but what happens to folks w/ psychiatric illness is a whole other level of devastating.
Deleted Comment
The second breakdown was precipitated by medication - withdrawals from Gabapentin, a medication prescribed for nerve pain. While seemingly benign, this medication causes some awful, awful withdrawals, including interdose withdrawals that are akin to benzo withdrawals. And I’m apparently hypersensitive to this stuff.
I spent two months depressed, anxious, suicidal, and feeling like I have no control over my mind.
It’s 1-1 for medication so far. One short course of SSRIs saved me. One short course of Gabapentin ruined my for months.
If you look up Gabapentin on Google, the top results will make you think its a Nqyuil-tier drug with mild side effects. But there are entire subreddits dedicated to it, and all of them filled with horror stories of people struggling with withdrawals.
Glad to be off it, but that one month of withdrawals was not fun. I’m as such hypersensitive to most medication and Gabapentin kind of broke me.
Anyway, I'm sorry you've had such a hard time, hoping all is well.
Monotherapy's are simple to use much like A/B testing, but time consuming, a type of resource burn for intelligence gathering, but its the best on offer for most.
Keeping a diary, paying attention to your diet, your life, identifying what you like and dont like, what you want to achieve can help but be mindful your chemistry will influence those thoughts. Think back to when you were a child and the things you wanted then and what you want now, they will be different because your chemistry has changed.
The medical profession recognise how chemistry influences our thoughts because SSRI's exist as have MAOI's as a first generation anti depressant, but their primary application as an anti depressant may not always be the intended purpose as the tryptophan pathway can highlight.
You see this with Gabapentin, nerve pain, could be a symptom of diabetic neuropathy. Only the Germans use alpha-lipoic acid as a medicine for diabetic neuropathy according to some online sources. The only sugar the immune system does not attack is starch. Manganese is also related to diabetes. Likewise too much B6 can cause auto immune diseases as can sodium (Th 17 cells) and highlight weaknesses in your body which need addressing, which could be your nervous system, the myelin sheath (histidine).
You dont say if you are male or female, but histidine is concentrated in the chest of males, religions have identified this as the missionary position for enjoyable exercise, which is why we don't eat Roosters, only feminised meat with the exception of beef in the West unless that's also come from dairy stock. From a meta data point of view, males strutting their chest are exhibiting their histidine levels in plain sight, just like grey hair can exhibit tyrosine deficiency and freckles on a kids face exhibits a healthy tyrosine balance amongst other things.
The body is a complex chemical reaction and whilst science attempts to understand it, its limited in a number of ways and shouldn't be seen as a panacea, when history and religion also has much metadata to offer.
For example diabetes, first documented 600 years bc in Persia (Iran), still not addressed in any meaningful way, a useful stealth weapon operating in plain sight, the sugar in a can of coke can reduce testosterone levels by 25% in teenage males as one example to control known threats in society. Religions also use their teachings to control populations, Ramadan, no food or fluids during daylight hours, lack of fluid increase blood sugar levels, increases the chances of followers developing pre-diabetes or diabetes, ergo males controlled as their intelligence increases.
Every system of control, beit religion, govt have stealth ways to control people and using health is just one of those ways which is why I say keep a diary and have an open mind. No one chemical does one thing in the body.
They can actually address the underlying cause. Studies have shown that there may be an overdensity of post-synaptic 5-HT2A receptors in people with depression, and SSRIs causes a downregulation of those receptors.
There are similar systems in the body that can be targeted in this way - adding a GnRH agonist causes the body to downregulate GnRH receptors, making it paradoxically a good hormone blocker.
Dead Comment
I had two episodes like this 40+ years ago. I sought mental health advice and have never regretted it. In my own situation CBT worked fine so I have a strong bias toward it, as does my continuing mental health professional.
Non-CBT therapy especially, but really any mental health treatment should be something you discuss with a health professional. Not that you can't discuss it otherwise, (see first paragraph) but it's important you do seek professional advice for treatment.
100% agree with this. This was, I think, the number 1 thing I did NOT want to do when I was in the midst of suicidal depression (i.e. talk about it) and the biggest reason why it got worse and worse and spiralled out of control.
If I had advice for past-me, it would be:
* It's okay to say "I'm a frikkin' mess. Please help me". To anyone. If they're no help, fine. If they can help, excellent.
* Other people are NOT waiting to use any weakness you tell them about against you to fire you, leave you, disown you, or anything else. They are MOST likely to have empathy and want to help. When you're depressed, that's hard to believe, but it's true. But if they DO, then maybe they're the part of the problem?
* You don't have to have some "justifiable reason" for being in the state you are. The constant self-talk in my head was "I have no excuse to be depressed because my life is relatively easy and other people have it way worse than me". No: you experience what you experience and you want/need to fix it.
To anyone who has tried CBT and felt like it wasn't working for you, know that there are other types of therapy that might be more appropriate for your situation. Personally, I went through multiple CBT therapists before happening across someone who does internal family systems (IFS) work, and have found that to be immensely more helpful for my situation.
In the process of going through therapists, I got to progressively darker places, because each bad experience with a therapist would make me feel that much more broken and unfixable. So, I really want to emphasize to anybody that's been through this, that there are dozens of different approaches to therapy and every therapist applies a particular type of therapy differently.
So, if you're struggling and have had bad therapists in the past, look up your past therapists to see what their approach was, read about different approaches to therapy, and intentionally look for someone orthogonal to what you've been through before. You might find a different approach clicks better with your situation.
And stay away from talkspace and betterhelp.
Just thinking out loud out of curiosity -- as a person with mild but very successful mental help experience (in a tiny European country).
Group therapy was offered as an alternative. I have no idea if that's still done. I did not find it attractive.
Because being gay was illegal a lot of gays were in mental health because of both concerns for their mental health and as a pathway out of stigmatisation. (This didn't apply to me but was an observation made to me)
I had mental health treatment in the UK as crisis health management on the NHS and now have a continuing mental health program, in Australia which is a similar model in many ways.
Perhaps the biggest chapter in mental health is the normalisation of PTSD as a real thing, and the re-emergence of MDMA and psychedelics as treatment paths. It always was a thing with mental health professionals but was treated with scepticism in the wider world. Drug addiction mental health is the other thing to look at but I have little experience there.
In the interest of openly sharing, I've had inklings of psychosis in the past while also being an absolute top performer at work. It's damaged my relationships, but never to the point of a psychotic break. A combination of getting way too focused on work for months/years, burning out, stopping exercising to try and "claw back time" for more work, way too much caffeine to push further, weed to chill and push creativity, and exploring various dosages of modafinil/adderall without a prescription. Turns out that's not something you can do to your brain for all too long, but it was also "easy" to get back to my old self once I stopped pretending I was somehow special and could cheat the system and instead focused on being as healthy of a human as I could muster. My direct boss at work and I have a very strong relationship and so he had awareness of where I was at, but nobody else.
Again, not trying to steal any limelight. Your scenario sounds more extreme and you have my deepest condolences. You're not completely alone in fighting demons.
There are things no one can do for us and we must face ourselves. Only you can take a first step to seek help, or step back onto a known healthy path. Thanks for starting this conversation.
Deleted Comment
I lost my job because the company closed, then my relationship fell apart after 10 years, I somehow managed to find another job but then this company _also_ shutdown, then immediately after COVID hit and during that extreme period of anxiety and loneliness I found out my dad is gravely ill..
I eventually manage to dig myself out but it required a lot of hard work and mental discipline.
There was a Church near my house which remained opened during COVID due to it being empty 90% of the time. One day I was driving and passed by it and for some reason decided to go in (I always considered myself a rational Atheist) and just sitting there looking at the Altar gave me peace. After a while of doing this, I noticed a shift in my mentality.
I started reading and researching things I had never interest in: religious texts, philosophy, history and art. This helped me expand my mind, I realized that instead of licking my wounds, I could focus on my neighbors and those in need and that people in history had gone though harsher times and survived for me to be here, so I owe it to them to keep going.
I finally I made a decision to start exercising, eating healthy, sleeping, setting a routine and slowly recover.
As a side note, I eventually ended up converting to Catholicism but that is unrelated to above, in fact my conversion didn't even start until a year after and it took a lot of effort and convincing.
If you are reading this and are struggling, know that you are not alone. My heart beats for you as a stranger and if anything, I need you to keep going because our survival depends on each other.
I'll say this is even more acute if you're a man. We can't _really_ complain about work. We have to suffer in silence.
Startup. I'm a technical cofounder with a non-technical cofounder (guy with money who wants to build something) and another less technical cofounder (PHD research type, not a builder). Working from home, I did everything. Built, hired, managed, designed product, assisted the ML team with their shit, managed the ever increasing grandiose scope of the business guy.
In the process, I lost my GF, it affected my health (both mental and physical), family things happened in life and I was royally burnt out. I'm back to work now (somewhere much more steady), but there was a 3 month period where things were _really_ touch and go.
It gets better. Focus on you. To hell with everything else. You can't be great (whatever that means to you), or get better, if you don't cultivate yourself first. Everyone outside of yourself with keep taking until you say no.