I’m not sure if it helps so much as allows you to perpetuate a cycle by providing occasional positive feedback.
I should have left my business years before I did, but it was the winning (contracts, technical coups) that kept me on. You end up like an addict, stumbling through the nightmarish days until the next dopamine rush (and crash) comes along.
Stress and burnout don’t just have mental impacts - they can have severe physiological impacts. I didn’t realise, acknowledge, or recognise this until my third hospitalisation, and years of increasing illness, made it impossible to continue writing off as “just food poisoning, again”.
It’s been nearly three years since I left, and while I’m physically better, and no longer spending half my life puking and delirious (it took six months for that to subside), I still have occasional anxiety attacks. My mother asked me about what I plan on doing for a career over dinner a few weeks back and I out and out fainted.
Never used to have any of this. I was the resilient one, the one who could carry the world on his shoulders - or thought he could. Broke me.
I should have left my business years before I did, but it was the winning (contracts, technical coups) that kept me on. You end up like an addict, stumbling through the nightmarish days until the next dopamine rush (and crash) comes along.
Stress and burnout don’t just have mental impacts - they can have severe physiological impacts. I didn’t realise, acknowledge, or recognise this until my third hospitalisation, and years of increasing illness, made it impossible to continue writing off as “just food poisoning, again”.
It’s been nearly three years since I left, and while I’m physically better, and no longer spending half my life puking and delirious (it took six months for that to subside), I still have occasional anxiety attacks. My mother asked me about what I plan on doing for a career over dinner a few weeks back and I out and out fainted.
Never used to have any of this. I was the resilient one, the one who could carry the world on his shoulders - or thought he could. Broke me.