Ask HN: How do you deal with production issue PTSD?

In this case, since you are an employee, the customer is your company. You are providing a service for them.

If downtime can be fatal, and your company is large, they should actually hire some people to cover that time. You've taken too much responsibility upon yourself. You're caring about it more than they are.

You need to put your health before the health of your company. What do you think will happen to this company if you are unable to continue at work? They'll have to find someone else. Tell your boss that your boss needs to mitigate this risk by hiring additional staff to share the load or cover nights. You will help train.

If you don't think you can have this conversation, it's time to find a different job.

So this post is a great first step to fix it for you.

I was an early employee in one of the companies in the late 00s/early 10s that became a unicorn. Early on there were frequently times that required one of us (early engineers) to wake up in the wee hours to deal with problems. After this period of time I developed symptoms where I subconsciously always expect phone alerts to ring or things to happen in the middle of the night and have trouble going back to sleep if I wake up (which I do a lot even before; am a bad sleeper).

After I no longer had that job the way I slowly recovered from that is to sleep with my phone completely turned off or outside of the room -- letting my mind rest at ease that I'm not going to be waken up by a call or alert. I had to do this for a long time for that sleep paranoia to go away for the most part. I've also held less stressful jobs for a long time for my mind to recover gradually.