In fact, I don't think it's only work that can lead to bad health issues caused by stress. I have my whole routine designed to have a low stress life. I avoid bringing in anything into my life that might be a major source of stress. I keep everything as simple as possible.
On the symptoms side of things though, I now have to go to the doctor. Again. Reading about the buzzing in the right eye and the tingling was terrifying because I've been feeling something similar for the past few months. So onto my 4th brain scan in the past few years... Sigh. Hypochondria is a bitch.
I had been feeling tingling/numbness/buzzing all over my body, coming on in waves and lasting anywhere from minutes to over a week at a time. I was ~~worried~~ convinced that it was MS.
My (awesome) doctor told me that it was super unlikely to be something as serious as MS, and that it was most likely my anxiety. I had always avoided medications in the past; even though I knew I had anxiety, I thought I could continue coping with it on my own. I finally took his advice and started taking an SSRI (Paxil) and my very physical symptoms disappeared almost immediately even at the lowest dose, after lingering for months.
Before I started on the medication, I was unable to read the news or search Google about anything health related because the simple mention of any random disease would send me into a near panic attack. Now, I can research any disease in depth and feel zero anxiety.
Oh, and did I mention that prior to being worried about MS, I was convinced that I had some type of heart defect. My doctor at the time was not nearly as good as my current one, and she indulged in my anxiety and we went through the whole battery of tests: EKG, Holter monitor, echocardiogram. Everything came back normal, but my worry just shifted to a new thing.
I guess my experience has led me to two conclusions: treat your anxiety first, and try to find a great doctor.
Anyway I also did the same tests as yours. Things looked normal, but I dismissed their tests (a 5min effort test is not enough, you can exhaust yourself in 5 minute, you'd need 15minutes sustained effort to trigger change in heart and vascular regime). After 2 different doctors, I finally accepted the SSRI pill. It did affect my state tremendously for 2 days, mostly brain and lung. Still not good enough on the muscular/stamina side though.
Body is a complex machine.
I really hope you find a way to handle this that doesn't involve very expensive reassurance from doctors. I experience something very similar when I read about heart conditions; I go into a spiral of anxiety where I believe my heart is failing, even though countless doctors have assured me that I'm perfectly fine there. Isn't the human brain just a ton of fun?
After all, the result of that will be that you're under less stress, and less likely to have some kind of cardiovascular event.
We get a lot of training in how to develop and use our minds, but we get very little training in how to step out of the mental chatter when that is needed.... Learning how to get out of your mind and into your life when you need to do that is an essential skill in the modern world.[1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Get-Your-Mind-Into-Life-ebook/dp/B005...
You really, really need to talk to a different doctor.
It took an old friend's suicide to jolt me out of it. I saw a lot of my old buddies at the funeral and started reestablishing those friendships. We played a lot of video games. Xbox Live probably saved my life. The worst thing about overwork is that it becomes difficult to imagine yourself doing anything else when you're in the thick of it, like it doesn't even occur to you that you should be spending your time elsewhere; I wonder if any of you have experienced this. Thankfully, even something as inconsequential as Halo was enough to help me rearrange my priorities.
I spent about 4 years working flat out. If I was awake I was working, trying to keep the income coming after the recession hit. Then something snapped. The now ex-wife had to unwind the things I was part way through.
Since then I can't do anything productive. I spend all the time wasting time with tv, games and online. Or often literally just nothing. If I try and do something productive like finding work again, or even simple like tidying the house I seize up with a mental resistance I find hard to describe. The more effort and willpower, the more the resistance increases. Even if I get started I've dropped out to go back to doing nothing within 10 minutes. Most days start with a resolution and to do list, but end with another day wasted. It's wrecked my career, relationship and social life.
I've been to a few doctors, but I've never gotten anything even a bit helpful.
Think of this like a Paulov conditioning a dog to have an electric shock every time he lights a bulb. At the end the dog avoids the lightbulb at all cost, even when not lighted.
Forcing yourself to do something painful trained your brain and created a trauma with work, as simple as that. Your body wants to help you not letting you work because: 1 work is associated as painful and 2 you can avoid it on the short term, so you avoid it.
A good psychologist can help you easily solve the issue, but probably there are not good ones or are expensive for you on your current situation. A bad one could also damage you btw.
So my advice is for you start learning about psychology yourself and learn how to recover from a traumatic experience using self help info. It is not difficult, basically is facing the traumatic experience but with a good outcome or getting rid of beliefs like "work is painful" that you learned over time. And of course, making work something pleasurable or at least neutral.
Think of this as a curiosity or funny game you play, not like work to do. You could start with "Wake up productive" of Eben Pagan, "The now habit" audiobook and training to remove specific beliefs.
If you are broke you can pirate it. Then pay for it when your life is better.
Forget resolutions and to do list by now. It is making it worse as it is introducing guilt for what you should do, adding more emotional pain.
Start making your life better, independently of your job. Eat well, exercise, enjoy beautiful and cheap places, the best things in life cost nothing...if you are jobless you are lucky and could go to amazing places when people are working, specially in overworked America! Go outside, no inside, and met people.
Start being grateful and enjoying your current situation. It looks crazy but is exactly what you need. Look at it as the opportunity to learn and be a much better person in the future that what you were.
This certainly sounds like depression. Some people respond well to cognitive behavioural therapy, some people really don't, and other therapies are worth exploring. It can be a long slog, and it can get worse before it gets better. I hope you can seek help, and I hope you can stick with until something works.
If you and your doctor decide that anti-depressants are worth trying, be sure to do a formal review with your doc after 6 weeks. Antidepressants are not meant for long-term use, and alone they won't fix things for you, but they may help you find something that works for you. On that note...
I'd highly recommend exercise. It's a hackneyed recommendation, but who cares. It's also been criticised for lack of significant long-term effects. But that's missing the point. Sometimes you need a healthy short-term fix, and hopefully with enough of them you can boot-strap your way to a longer-term solution. Go running, cycling, swimming, play soccer, take up boxercise, lift heavy weights, whatever works for you. Get up and out, preferably outdoors, preferably with social interaction, definitely getting sweaty and panting heavily. If you can hire a personal trainer, that might help, since you pay them to make sure you Do Not Quit. If you can join a class, even better.
Sounds simplistic, and it is. There's no way anything I can say here could encapsulate the issues you're dealing with, and there are no panaceas. This is a complex problem, no doubt about that. I hope you can find a way out of it.
Good luck!
Few things that helped me:
- SSRI - I couldn't recover from the mental pain I had constantly until I visited a doctor and got put on those medications; it didn't solve my problem, but it lowers the pain to manageable levels
- removing distractions - I unsubscribed from every newsletter I could that I didn't absolutely care about, I uninstalled or muted most of the non-urgent push notifications, etc. Not being pinged every 5 minutes lowered my stress levels and made it a bit easier to focus.
- writing - when I find it hard to go forward, I'll dump my thoughts into a text file, and then I'll keep "talking to myself" in the editor; at some point this turns into a list of "next steps" I need to take, and as I'm starting to go through them, things move forward and I feel better
- acceptance - accepting I have those issues and working with them, rather than obsessing over how broken I am, reduced my stress and makes it easier to focus
- calendar - preallocating time for various tasks I want to do, and committing to doing them without distractions (phone set to silent, mail program closed, etc.) for that period of time, regardless of the end output, again makes it easier to focus, and seeing thing moving forward makes me feel better; I stole that one from the "Deep Work" book
But yeah, I still struggle. There are days when I only honestly say I haven't done anything but read HN and respond to e-mails. But more and more, there are days when I'm productive, and I'm beginning to trust my capacity for doing work again, and this improves my self-esteem as well.
#HNPsychology
1. The working routine you build up in the elongated crunch period simply isn't compatible with not having a hard deadline or seven. I get this myself after years of burning the candle at both ends and it is taking quite some time to beat it out of myself. The problem is that my work ethic has for years been fuelled by deadline fear, and those short times when the pressure came off a little I enjoyed the opportunity to procrastinate. Somewhere along the line that became normal but flipped: I find it hard to not procrastinate until there is some deadline pressure. This makes starting new personal projects almost impossible (well, not quite, I have ideas and make notes, sometimes even get around to trying a PoC, but staring proper implementation is the difficult point).
2. Common, garden variety, depression. This is seen a lot in circumstances you describe. It can be very difficult to sort due to how much the causes and effects can vary from person to person. Don't expect doctors to be able to help long term as the problem is often not really medical, apart from extreme cases where you might be given something truly mind altering most of what a doctor will prescribe is simply intended to prop you up a bit while you work on the problem. From personal experience of a very bad year or so in my life (over 15 years ago now, heck I'm getting old!): I found talking to a councillor and select friends/family were key.
I have tried so many things (therapy, meds, alternative therapy, physical checkup, coaching). No solutions. Anti-depressants make it more bearable, but they also seem to suck motivation (and have side-effects) so I use them on and off (for longer periods of course otherwise they don't make sense), recently I've been in a bad place so I'm back on again (which works but it's no progress either).
I wish I had some solid advice to give you. Your story is in fact the first time I hear something quite as similar to my experience (cause it's not quite like a burnout, is it?), except I never got myself to work the hours your post suggests you did, instead using--I dunno--intellect to make up for it, which just leads to perfectionism and pushed me over the edge just as well[0]. Except I wasn't aware I was asking too much of myself.
Going to re-read this thread tomorrow, maybe some of the replies have some good advice that I haven't tried yet (or might be worth to re-try). Never stop fighting, life's too amazing, even if you can't live it like all the other people.
Currently I'm doing the best I can, volunteering at several youth-centres, teaching kids as much computer / computational science I have learned, trying to put my education and knowledge to the best use as possible (also, turns out that teaching and working with kids is a passion of mine I never discovered in comp.sci). Even though I only have the energy to do it 12h/wk, I know I'm doing something amazing for these kids who will remember me when they're old. I also realize I'm super lucky to live in the Netherlands, in the US I'd be on the streets (this resonates http://www.iquilezles.org/blog/?p=2659 ), and possibly a dead junkie.
I wish you the best of luck and to somehow some day find happiness. If there's anything you like like to talk about, my email's in my profile.
I recommend spending your time on your new interests, instead of trying to force yourself to do what "you should be doing". Spirituality and getting unstuck by wasting 6 months building a fun project for my favorite game helped me out of it.
"When I was discharged from the hospital late the next day, the cabdriver asked me, “Where do I take you?” I couldn’t remember the name of my street. I handed him the discharge paperwork with my address on it, arrived home and slept for a long while."
How does someone who just had a stroke get discharged from hospital the next day, to a taxi?
I wish I had forked out the cash for international health insurance, the largest package, before I had a stroke, but I did not as I felt nothing would happen to me. Now that I live in another country and I travel a lot, I get bitten by that naivity a lot. I would recommend, if you are healthy and have enough $ to take an international health insurance package as you will never know what happens.
When my mum suffered a stroke, she was hospitalised for 7 months and had a team of occupational/speech/physiotherapists around here helping her recover as much as possible (which wasn't much, to be fair).
But socialised medicine is evil, and the NHS death panels could've taken her.
Your mother probably had a hemorrhagic stroke, which is much more serious. She probably had surgery, too?
I'm not really sure why he was discharged the next day, but it might not be unreasonable depending on the exact diagnosis. Or maybe he refused to stay - some people do that.
This week I have to be on holiday, so I'll be working on a project I love and "learning new stuff", for nobody else's benefit or entertainment other than my own.
Always greener pastures elsewhere...
Not really fulfillment like we normally call it, I'd say more like acceptance.
Perhaps many of us are seeking love and acceptance from bosses and coworkers, and overworking ourselves to obtain it.
I believe that building your identity on anything that isn't yours is stressful. Building your ego on your job performance or on the positive feedback you get from coworkers isn't healthy.
It's like emotional sharecropping. You are building your ego on someone else's land.
People need to remember that work is the place where they have "human resource" departments, where they will make cut and dried decisions on who to retain and who to lay off the moment they want to adjust a budget.
I would go further than that, because I don't think this gets to the heart of the matter. The main driver of overwork is the promise of higher status that certain cultures bestow on those who pursue it [1]. The respect of bosses and the admiration of coworkers are just the consequences. As are the material benefits, like the increased salary and all the things it might buy.
Yet advising overworkers to stop looking to others for positive feedback is not going to work for everyone. A large proportion of people identify as extroverts, people who need validation from others in order to feel good about themselves. And it's unrealistic to expect extroverts to be happy with valuing their self-worth the way introverts do.
[1] Alain de Botton has a great book on this topic entitled Status Anxiety: http://alaindebotton.com/status/
The writer of the piece, Jonas Koffler, is my co-author for Hustle.
In the book, we address the difference between 'renting your dream' (ie emotional sharecropping) and 'owning your dream' finding your personal meaning, momentum and money.
"I believe that building your identity on anything that isn't yours is stressful."
We couldn't agree more. We also describe how one should diversify their identity/ego into a portfolio of sorts.
https://www.amazon.com/Hustle-Power-Charge-Meaning-Momentum/...
Or looked at from another angle, this is one of the very reasons people want to be seen to be "going the extra mile" compared to their colleagues (not that I'm disagreeing - the point about seeking acceptance is a very important one).
That's exactly it -- people strive for "fulfillment", but find it to be at best a nebulous goal, ever out of reach. So they settle its poor imitations - acceptance and recognition.
Nicely put.
To be clear: number of working hours have not much to do with stress levels: I sometimes still work long hours but since I never felt anything like that kind of pressure I had then. And I never will; it was silly and unproductive but as my first big company and successful startup (which gave me financial freedom early on), I did not have many history to fall back on and the advice around me was of a 'do not stress so much' kind of unhelpful level.
It took me years to get over the anxiety of getting another stroke and my speech is still not what it was before; I cannot pronounce some English words correctly even though I know how to and used to be able to. But it does not impair my life or work: people seem to like that Dutch English accent while my previous English was more perfect.
Uh oh. Does anybody keep stats for YC companies?
[1] http://www.rehmlaw.com/Workers-Compensation/Workers-Compensa...
Compared to people with the lowest psychological scores, those with highest scores were:
86 percent more likely to have a stroke or TIA for high depressive symptoms.
59 percent more likely to have a stroke or TIA for the highest chronic stress scores.
More than twice as likely to have a stroke or TIA for the highest hostility scores.
http://newsroom.heart.org/news/high-stress-hostility-depress...
"One thing we didn’t assess is coping strategies...it’s possible that positive coping strategies could ameliorate some of these associations or effects... We did not inquire about coping. I would say that’s one of the tasks for future studies."
Others work to make income and intellectually and emotionally satisfy themselves. Perhaps you're in this camp? If so, I'm with you on that one.
Granted at some point of income, a certain amount of income without personal fulfillment is preferable to me due to the delayed gratification possibilities.
Don't let this be you.
Could he put it any more directly?
