Day 172: Working Myself to Death

You know things are bad when you can see the sky brightening with the early rays of sunlight when you decide to head to bed.

You know things are really bad when you wake up an hour a half later at 6:30 AM and aren’t able to fall asleep because your mind started working on Browserflow the moment you gained consciousness.

At what point does a healthy passion become a self-destructive addiction?

I’m back in the crazy work phase, which is funny because it was just a week ago that I said I felt like I was working at a snail’s pace. I’m putting in 14 hour work days again, except this time, it seems I’ve reached the running on fumes stage much more quickly.

My mind is foggy and sluggish; my body feels terrible; my healthy habits have once again crumbled like a sand castle trying to hold up the weight of a beached whale.

These period of hyper-focus also lead me to withdraw from social interactions and go entirely offline. I basically haven’t checked email, Slack, Twitter, and even more personal channels like Messenger and my text messages since the beginning of this week, nor have I felt a desire to. It’s not even like I’m checking to see if I have important messages and putting it off for later — I just don’t look at all. (If you’ve messaged me in the past week and haven’t received a response, please know that it’s not personal — our culture of constant connectivity makes a response time less than a day or two seem like I’ve decided to ignore you, but I go completely offline like this for long periods of time. Most people’s “time since last checking messages” is on the order of minutes and hours; mine is on the order of days and weeks) I imagine I’d seek more social connection if I were living alone, but I live with seven wonderful housemates who I interact with every day so that might be why I also feel more comfortable completely disconnecting.

I’m blazing brightly, but the pile of space poop that I’ve become is about to burn up real quick. I’ll definitely crash sometime today since I’m running on 1.5 hours of sleep after several days of < 6 hours of sleep, and then it’ll be time to recharge. The thing is, I don’t necessarily feel bad about working this hard — it’s fun and incredibly productive — but it’s clearly hurting my baseline health and stability.

I’m thinking about setting a rule for myself like no working after 8PM or something along those lines so that I don’t re-enter this vicious cycle of death and rebirth. The path to enlightenment continues.