Is it a common thing to realise you are burnouted in front of the kitchen closet? It was the same for me, stuck in front of food and didn't even know why I opened the door. Then I get scared.
For instance, it's now Wednesday, I haven't got around to putting food in myself since Sunday. I've managed a few hundred cups of coffee though. Kept going into the kitchen last night, and rather than eating kept finding myself chores to do until I gave up and went to bed - which is the place you lie until you hear the birds start to sing, then you close your eyes for what feels like five minutes, your alarm goes off, and you start all over again.
Life is hell, but that's OK. I've made peace with being permanently anxious, stressed, and tired. Sure, it's cost me all of my friends, relationships, etc., but that's OK, they're only things, and nothing really matters anyway - everybody ends up dead eventually.
Cut the coffee immediately, throw it out if you need to. Your hunger should return in a few hours. Take a shower, wear clean clothes, prepare a nice filling fatty meal, pizza is a good option. Has to be a high fat meal to make food appealing again.
After this you're gonna crash hard as your mind and body recovers. Go to bed.
"Your hunger should return in a few hours" after cutting out coffee is just plain wrong. Coffee is not the issue here though it may be a good idea to cut out potential appetite suppressants - but don't act like it's that simple. Nor does eating fatty food make food appealing to someone who has trouble eating due to anxiety. Nor does forcing yourself to eat in this situation make you "crash."
I've been there, too anxious and depressed to eat, couldn't taste food, puked it up if I tried to force myself to eat. I was able to eat again with the help of a medical doctor, which is what this person needs. This is not as simple as cutting out coffee and eating a pizza, this is a big deal and very, very difficult to get over.
The coffee is effect, not cause - although I am fully aware I've a raging caffeine addiction.
No chance to go to bed, I have conference calls, staff disciplinary meetings, budgets, strategy sessions, and contracts to sort out.
As I said, it's OK. I've made my peace with gnawing anxiety, stress and suicidal depression as normal facts of life. It's like being bedfellows with a axe murderer - just fine, so long as you never relax and let your guard down.
Sure I'm neurotic, but who isn't?
The anxiety, stress and suicidal depression are not normal. Consider, is you life worth the pay you're getting for this? $150 a day to be driven insane? Most would say no, except to self deprecate, which your neurosis predilects you toward.
As a Stoic I recommend this: http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e...
As a friend, i'd say it's time to see a therapist, doc, or talk it out with someone close or who can help.
The truth, what you're doing now is unsustainable and makes you unhappy. Step 1 is acknowledging that. Step 2 is realising you can change anything. Imagine if you'd never chosen this career path. It could have happened, so why stick with it?
So that's the rub - do I cave and leave a large number of people in the lurch, and deal with the much greater stress and anxiety that that will cause, or do I keep going.
There's not really a choice - but there isn't really any such thing as choice, we just fool ourselves into thinking that we make decisions. In reality, shit just happens, and you roll with it.
Edit: Oh, on the Shortness of Life is one of my favourite essays - but Seneca was Nero's chief advisor, and never had any particular responsibilities in life, so I take his rather epicurean for a stoic advice with a hefty lump of salt.
Holiday, I need one. I was meant to have two weeks off last summer but instead spent six weeks in and out of hospital, trying not to die from an infection.
Sometimes you just get dealt a bum hand, or you fuck up and make things hard for yourself - you just have to keep playing - leave the table and you've just got a boring cab ride home.
If lieutenants are subordinates (that part is not clear to me) lay out what needs to be done by who. If they are unwilling or unable to do the assigned tasks then fire them and replace them with people who will do their job. They are your employees not your bffs.
If lieutenants are peers then this doesn't apply.
Don't think making yourself literally insane is the best way to help those people.
I'll second the recommendation of stopping with the coffee. And seek help. (And no, choices do exist - we are not completely free, but not completely unfree either. You can make your life better.)
I've been where you are, and I'm really, really concerned. I'm not saying give up work or anything like that, but I'd really urge you to seek out a medical professional if you haven't already. There's a tipping point where things get so bad you won't be able to function, and believe me it's far, far better to get in front of it than to need to get help after that tipping point.
Sorry if I sound preachy, I say this out of genuine concern for your well being :-)
I'm torn on seeking professional help, as while a therapist I saw last year practically begged me to see a psychoanalyst, I demurred, as I know that in the eyes of a practitioner I'd fall into the "risk of harm to self" category (except I don't self harm - apart from my sustained "lifestyle" choices), and being sectioned and chucked in a facility would be a fate worse than death.
A good friend went to the NHS regarding depression about 15 years ago, aged 17. They put her in a facility for 18 months, and gave her a hysterectomy. No way am I going anywhere near that particular hell.
To try another angle, do you have a mentor/supervisor? If not, maybe look out for some experienced (potentially retired) manager that you trust. There are also professional services in that space. They may not know your business, but they know the responsibility you feel for keeping things alive.
They might be able to help with the culture shift issue you mentioned elsewhere but also with management in general (including "how to make sure that the company doesn't have a bus factor of 1: me") and self-care - one low key strategy in that regard might be to hold you accountable to certain habits that you agreed on (eg. "eat twice a day").
Speaking of which: got something to eat yet?
Feynman was deemed mentally unfit for military service when he was quite fine.
The rest of my post is some advice, but please feel free to ignore it if it's not wanted.
You say you would consider treatment, but that you have two worries. 1) That they would detain you under section 2) that they would subject you to treatment against your will
1) Detention under section:
There's no chance you'll be detained under section of the mental health act unless you have a definite plan to die by suicide and you intend to act on it soon. And even then it probably wouldn't happen. Currently there just aren't enough beds available, for one thing.
The other reason is that most trusts should have moved to a "crisis resolution and home treatment team" model. These teams provide short term interventions and are specifically designed to keep people out of hospital - we know that hospital in-patient stays tend to make things worse, not better. You would do most of your work with a community treatment team with CRHTT help when needed.
2) Forced treatment:
Mental health treatment is very different today than it was 15 years ago. The Mental Capacity Act came in in 2005, so it wouldn't be possible for them to detain you under section and take out your womb (if you had one) today unless there were very unusual circumstances. Here's a case where a man who lacked capacity in some areas was deemed to have enough capacity to make a medical decision that resulted in his death: https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2015/10/13/court-of-protection... That's a gruesome case but I hope it shows that forcing treatment only happens under certain circumstances. There are some powers under MCA and MHA to force medication, but those are not common.
Nationally less than 10% of people under secondary specialist MH care ever go inpatient. Something like 92% of people in secondary care get that care in the community - either at their home or by appointment in a clinic. It would be unusual to force someone outside hospital to take treatment. There are community treatment orders, but they tend to be a justice system thing and not a mental health system thing.
If you did decide that treatment would help you might want to look at the various guides to the Mental Health Act. (Mind do one; Rethink do one; the Government does a nice guide too.) Then:-
Make an advanced directive; work out who your "nearest relative"[1] is (and then change that to someone you trust, and make sure that person knows to always say "I object to the section" to the AMHP if anyone does ever talk about detention under section (although that's really unlikely)); then go see someone.
If you think a short form talking therapy would help you should be able to self refer, or you might need to get a referral from your GP to "IAPT" (Improving access to psychological therapies".
If you think you would benefit from long form therapy, well, those waiting lists are very long pretty much everywhere. Some places are maybe 6 weeks for assessment and then 18 weeks to start treatment. Other places are much longer. The sooner you start the referral process the sooner you'll get to see someone. You'd go via your GP, then probably to a gateway team. (Although this process varies across the country).
Or you could just go privately. That could be expensive (£30 to £50 per session is reasonable). But it gives you some more control. You might want to check professional registration - BACP is often recommended. I'd stll recommend the advance directive stuff and the nearest relative stuff.
[1] this is a person defined in law and they have some power, so it's important to have someone that you really trust.
Doesn't taste like much (this is a feature here), doesn't induce sickness easily, takes no time to prepare, is very mobile (can be carried around while getting dressed), gives sufficient energy and is easy to eat without appetite. My go-to solution when I need to have food but really don't want to. Plus it stores really well if you use water, so no need to get fresh ingredients.
Us Americans (or if you arent American, the same applies to other first world countries) eat too much and they freak out when they hear someone else fasting. Now, your apparent depression does sound worrying to me, but you should be free to fast for a few days without the judgment of others.
But on actually eating something: Are you a fruit person? Try buying a container of raspberries, blueberries or strawberries (or whatever fruit you like) Ideally, also pick up something green (I like steamed broccoli sprinkled with garlic powder) Or have some oatmeal and throw any of those berries and a banana in (perhaps with some seeds/nuts - I quite enjoy hemp seeds in my oatmeal lately)
These foods are delicious to me and provide actual nutrition. Sometimes I fast for an extended period of time (skip a few meals to a couple of days,) but if these foods are lying around I tend to enjoy them greatly.
Also try peaking at the sun during sunrise. Great way to start the day in my anecdotal opinion. (And there is a lot of scientific evidence that sun helps with "blue" moods)
"trivially actionable" is worth a lot when stress is crushing you.
There's also a difference between a conscious decision to fast for a few days and just not managing to eat for days at a time.
Your advice is great (although I'm personally not so fond of "your body is telling you" interpretations) when basic needs are met and there's room for a bit of cognitive effort.
You'll be a lot healthier, therefore feel a lot better, if you go to the nice grocery store (not the discount store or walmart) and buy the pre-made fancy salads, the ones with meat protein and dressing and all the stuff ready to eat in the plastic box. They're cheap, taste great, incredibly fast, reasonably filling, and keep in the fridge a couple days until they're questionable.
If you're not leaving the house a minimum of every other day you're probably doing something wrong right there. If your commute doesn't go past a nice grocery store, again, a sign you're doin life wrong.
They'll have names like "Asian style cashew chicken salad" or "cobb salad" or whatever. Just open the box, dump the sauce glop on top, shovel down, and you're done.
I must have eaten thousands of those things, no exaggeration, when I was going to school and working two jobs at the same time. I bet they were 75% of my calories around exam week.
The only thing worse than being stressed all the time would be being stressed and fat, or stressed and sick, or all three.
Otherwise things will happen like described up-thread: standing in the kitchen, looking at the cupboard, but not able to decide whether to pick the left or the right coffee mug.
"Get a burger and fries" is about as unambiguous as possible without knowing the context. Sure "go to the artisan organic salad bar across the street and get their salad of the day menu" is the preferable option, but that requires contextual awareness, and less specific tasks are a problem in such situations.
It's a case of "don't make me think" to get a bunch of processes started (in this case: energy intake and getting back the sensation of hunger), not an optimized diet plan.
Nobody is suggesting this be part of a normal diet, but with what appears to be done pretty dark thoughts and not having eaten for several days it's probably more important that he eats something ASAP.
Instead, ask "what am I going to have for lunch tomorrow?" Having a packed lunch is awesome: it's effortlessly right there when you need it and will make you happier throughout the afternoon. Tomorrow-you will be incredibly grateful to tonight-you. And tonight-you, being the productive chore-monkey, is probably quite happy to make a meal someone else. In the process, if you eat some "leftovers", that's a bonus :-).
Have something, one thing, available, and then you've taken the choice out of the equation. Then you just get something, possibly heat it up, and eat it. Presumably the microwave wouldn't be an overwhelming task since the coffee maker isn't.
I'm actually very concerned. Please, please talk to someone about how you are feeling! I fear you are at crisis point and don't realise it :-(
It is similar to when people suffering from it first notice the onset of dementia: they notice themselves forget things that should be automatic, how to operate a can opener, the name of someone close, and so on.
In both cases there is the scared reaction. Of course sometimes it is an overreaction (you are just being a little forgetful, everyone has that from time to time especially when tired) and you almost instantly pull yourself together. It will have probably happened to you many times before you had the true scared reaction that lasted long enough to make you notice the seriousness of the problem.