What I Learned from a Stroke at 26: Make Time to Untangle

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.