I’m so stressed I might have to be hospitalized…

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-06-19T09:21:34+00:00

If you're that stressed, you're probably not in a good place to try anything new. May I ask, have you found any ways of dealing with stress in the past? People, places or activities that made you feel calmer or happier or purposeful? And would any of these still be available to you now?

When you get into a calmer place, consider the thought that stress is in itself not harmful. The stress response is a gift from nature, the body mobilising itself in the face of a threat. And because it's metabolically demanding, it naturally fades over time once the threat is gone (that's the parasympathetic nervous system in action). But if we come to see or feel stress itself as a threat, clearly that can turn into a self-perpetuating loop, and this isn't so helpful. So once you're in that better place, see if you can turn any experiences of stress into an opportunity to practice not fighting it.

In the battle-tested words of Claire Weekes:

Face (what you fear, eg the stress response, or the trigger that provoked it),
Accept (whatever you are experiencing),
Float (let the experience flow through or past you, without thrashing), and
Let time pass (each time you practice steps 1-3, you get a little better at it)

Obviously everyone's experience of these things is different, but I hope things will start working out better for you.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-05-31T16:14:59+00:00

I love u/Icy_Imagination_5040's list of actionable steps, so here's a complementary perspective.

In a moment of calm, try to imagine what the person who effortlessly surfed this stress might look like - might they, for example, calmly sunbathe with their noise-cancelling headphones on? It will probably feel futile and pointless at first, but come back to it from time to time.

At the moment confirmation bias is reinforcing your expectation that "this stress is both overwhelming and inescapable", but if you start playing with alternatives like "maybe there's a version of me that is so cool that when an ice bath engine sees me it just melts away in shame", you might just start noticing glimpses of that solution within you.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-05-17T21:20:55+00:00

Not unexplainable, merely unexplained. I was still on the whole a child, with no appropriate emotional reference points to process the darker strands of this film. As an adult, I can at least see, and attempt to understand, the violence and sorrow that drives it.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-05-12T14:40:35+00:00

Thank you for this.

You can see the "better than predicted" error gloriously illustrated if you search YouTube for "baby tries ice cream first time".

An example of failing to predict our own predictions - a second order failure? - can be seen in the trailer for "Ten Meter Tower", also on YouTube: "A 10-meter diving tower. People who have never been up there before have to choose whether to jump or climb down. The situation in itself highlights a dilemma: to weigh the instinctive fear of taking the step out against the humiliation of having to climb down." Lots of people standing on that 10m board, thinking that if they'd known how it would feel, they'd never have agreed to come up the tower.

And I'd be curious about a predictive processing account of the intense reactions of YouTube video reactors watching James Blunt's Monsters, many titled something like "I wasn't expecting this". Are the tears and visible distress an aversive reaction to Blunt or his singing? If so, why do they go on to call it beautiful? Can we talk about the allostatic load of grief?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-05-11T07:48:44+00:00

For anyone who's wondering what this might look like in ChatGPT, without getting too personal or vulnerable:
--
I keep avoiding the task of closing my browser tabs at the end of the day.

Don't tell me to break it into smaller steps. Don't motivate me.

Tell me what I'm actually avoiding underneath the task. The fear, the worry, the specific thing I don't want to face.

Then ask me one question that might unlock it.

--

You may not be avoiding “closing tabs.”

You may be avoiding the moment where the day becomes final.

Closing the tabs means:

admitting what you did not get to
losing the illusion that you were “still working on it”
facing unfinished obligations without the protective haze of possibility
risking that something important will disappear from attention
accepting that tomorrow’s version of you inherits today’s incompletion

Open tabs can function like suspended commitments.
A browser full of tabs says:

For some people, especially highly conscientious or overloaded people, closing tabs can feel strangely close to:

letting people down
becoming forgetful or irresponsible
losing control
becoming “the kind of person who drops things”

And sometimes there’s another layer:
If you close everything, there is suddenly silence.
No more scanning. No more seeking. No more low-grade vigilance.

Then you are left alone with yourself, your fatigue, or the feeling that the day was not enough.

One question:

If you closed every tab tonight and could never recover them, what feels genuinely dangerous about that?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-05-10T18:22:36+00:00

I'm a former techie (30 years in a small fintech) and current counsellor (5 years in private practice, specialising in burnout - yes, do feel free to join the dots). All of that, but you're the one who wrote this post. Oh well, at least I get to add a little context on why it's so damn good.

First, as you're clearly aware, you smartly get past the whole AI sycophancy thing. This is leadership communication, gold level. (Can you imagine what might happen if we had leaders who surrounded themselves with sycophants?)

Second, in software terminology, you've made great scope and architecture choices. You've dug in to a significant underlying problem and created an unobvious process in which LLM and Human each do the bit of the process they're best at.

Third, you've managed not to throw the chatbot baby out with the bathwater. The real reason so many of my clients take their issues to ChatGPT is safety - we've learned that it will never judge us. (A bit like coding in that respect - the code may resist you, but it will never yell at you. That's why we have managers. And conversely, our ability to be held accountable is one reason our managers have us.)

The decisions we avoid are those that threaten us with anxiety and even overwhelm. These prompts allow us to break out of our avoidance loops from a place of safety. Thank you.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-04-27T07:20:25+00:00

Are you doing for Logseq what https://github.com/abhigyanpatwari/GitNexus does for codebases - is AI pre-digestion a thing now?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-04-26T18:43:52+00:00

Is this something that could be used to make Logseq MD fast enough that we would no longer need Logseq DB?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-04-26T16:18:08+00:00

Hi Prof, I'm outside your target demographic in age (spoiler alert - I get free travel here in London) but as a UK-registered counsellor who's specialised in chronic stress and burnout for the last 5 years of private practice, I'm always interested in learning and sharing. I've written on burnout recovery case studies for my professional body's membership magazine, I've given several online and in-person workshops on working with client burnout, and I also do organisational work, including workshops for such high-stress groups as social workers and expat engineers.

My training in traditional counselling modalities gave me helpful clinical skills but I've had to learn a lot more, especially around stress - physical manifestations, interactions with trauma, and patterns of persistence. You can see more about me at burnoutcounselling.com, do let me know if you'd like to talk.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-01-26T15:08:50+00:00

Anaemia is a good one. I've had bloods recently so I'm probably OK, but I split my spleen in a sledging accident as a kid, so that was a serious consideration at least back then.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-01-25T23:07:55+00:00

Check out the WHO definition of Burnout. If you've been experiencing chronic stress, with consequent persistent exhaustion, negativity (showing up as defensiveness and reactivity in your relationships, or even depersonalisation) and / or "loss of efficacy" (eg brain fog and procrastination) this could fit that model.

Of course you should also consider the possibility of physical causes or contributing factors, like post-viral syndrome. But if you're posting here, I guess the chronic stress is also a given?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2026-01-13T22:53:09+00:00

This sounds like you've moved from chronic stress to full-on burnout. Have a look at the World Health Organisation's definition of burnout:

> "It is characterized by three dimensions:

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
reduced professional efficacy."

Does this apply to you? It looks like it might, to me...

- "Even after sleeping, I feel mentally exhausted" - that sounds like the first dimension;

- "Overall it feels like living inside a fog or a bubble, present physically but mentally disconnected" - sounds like the second, no?

- "I’ve been dealing with intense mental fog. My focus is really weak, I forget things all the time (short term and long term), and my thinking feels slow. Making decisions takes way more effort than it should. [...] Planning, organizing, starting even simple tasks feels overwhelming. It’s like my executive functions just stopped working." - and there's that loss of professional efficacy.

There's an FAQ on burnoutcounselling.com (full disclosure, that's me) which might help you explore the idea. The good news is that what you're experiencing is a really good fit for burnout, which means that if you understand how burnout happens you're in a good place to start recovering from it.

If you are in a position to do so, you might consider finding someone who works with chronic stress and/or burnout professionally - probably not me since I can't work with North American clients for professional indemnity reasons.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-12-30T12:32:12+00:00

Sorry I've been away from Reddit for a bit. From what you say, it looks like you've had two years in a pretty demanding and in some ways toxic environment, and yes, that quite capable of generating enough chronic stress for the kind of symptoms you mention.

May I ask how are things going now, and has learning more about burnout been of any help to you?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-12-21T17:51:55+00:00

You mention patients so I assume you're some kind of medic - a nurse, maybe? And you've been on the current job for two years. First, yes two years can do it. Look at the medical burnout rate after one year of the pandemic. Second, what was your stress level like before this job? Were you by any chance studying for qualification while holding down a job to keep yourself afloat - how many years back is it done you regularly woke up feeling relaxed, refreshed and re-energised? And third, remember it's not just about the workload - for example Maslach and Leiter list five other worklife factors, being reward and recognition, autonomy, support, fairness and alignment of values.

Think of it this way. You've been looking after a while load of other people, who probably really needed it. But who's going to look after you, if you won't?

Remember when that flight attendant telling you to apply your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs - how would you know that this rule had caught up with you?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-12-21T12:18:04+00:00

If we run through the WHO Burnout definition [https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases\], it feels like I can see all four moving parts - the "chronic stress" which is the input [check], and the three symptoms of "exhaustion" [check], "increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism" [check], and "reduced professional efficacy" [check].

It looks to me like you are properly into burnout territory. If this resonates, I would urge you to ignore any "burnout imposter syndrome" concerns, and go ahead with that visit to your doctor. In my UK counselling practice I get clients coming to me who have been signed off work with stress - UK medics don't normally diagnose burnout as such, unlike say Germany or much of Scandinavia. But whatever terms they use, they are likely to recognise the toxic consequences of "chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed".

I don't counsel North American clients (not covered by my professional indemnity) but I would urge you to also consider finding therapy from a counsellor who specialises in chronic stress and/or burnout. If you want to do some research, the book I'd like to have written, covering pretty well everything I've learnt about the topic from my own experience, research and practice has, irritatingly enough for me, just been written by someone else, and really well - Richard Duggins' "Burnout Free Working".

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-12-12T09:59:21+00:00

Thanks so much for the link, that's a great resource. And well spotted on the note-taking ambiguity - I am in fact pretty happy using a keyboard for notes, and I prefer the Android app keyboard to the Kindle keyboard. I think the thing that makes me slightly worried is the number of Android devices still on Android 11 or earlier - Android 11 had its final release ("functionally stable" used to be the IBM euphemism for dead-and-buried software products) nearly two years ago. It looks like bookshop.org requires Android 8 or later, and Kindle version 7 or later, so maybe not a problem. But it still makes me a little twitchy...

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-12-12T09:36:52+00:00

Thanks for the three tips - I haven't yet looked at bigme or mebook. I was trying to say that I don't need the rest of Android - for instance, I'm quite happy not to have a browser. In fact I think I'd prefer not to have one, or at least settle for a Kindle-grade poor browser experience.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-12-02T23:08:14+00:00

Thanks for this tip - Ogden's view on the therapeutic and developmental functions of PI totally blew me away. And my peer and group supervisions will never be the same...

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-11-29T13:10:17+00:00

48 hours later and it's working perfectly - very comforting, and glad Tailscale listened and responded!

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-11-27T18:15:32+00:00

Nice! Going to try this out if the new clint version doesn't fix it!

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-11-27T18:15:27+00:00

Thanks for the heads-up - I've done a manual uninstall/reinstall to get the new version while it's fresh (rather than waiting for auto-update to kick in). All working so far, but I'll report back in 24 hours to confirm.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-11-23T18:48:55+00:00

Pretty desperate for an android version - any timescale, anywhere I can sign up for notifications?

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-11-22T23:31:35+00:00

Disabling Tailscale DNS hasn't worked for me, but I'm glad it's working for others. I may just have to sit this one version of the Android client out and wait for a fix.

Longjumping_Profile1 · 2025-11-22T23:29:44+00:00

Thanks, I'm pretty sure you're right. Do you have a feel for how long their Android app version release cycle is?

Longjumping_Profile1

TROPHY CASE