20 ms·

So I finally sorted out what happened to my brain

• sombremesa 5y ago
  Seems more related to starvation than hacking.
  • juancn 5y ago
    Yeah, or some form of diabetes. The body is great at making glucose out of pretty much anything, specially muscle and fat tissue. I don’t buy the diagnosis, there has to be something else on the metabolic side that’s missing if that were the case. Occam’s razor points to a psychological disorder, he went straight to psychiatric medication with no attempt to deal with the compulsive component of his behavior.
    • jasfi 5y ago
      I have to agree with a psychological disorder, brought to a severe point by stress (note: I'm not a doctor or psychiatrist).
    • HeadHonchoSP 5y ago
      I don't see how at any point a person can be so deprived of nutrients brain convulsions occur. Something had to be wrong before hand, maybe he should get his wife's side of the story.
      • garganzol 5y ago
        Thiamine (B1) deficiency can cause exactly that. It leads to mitochondrial disfunction depriving high-energy cells (mostly neurons) from ability to consume glucose via oxidation. As the result, a person develops insulin resistance that causes a swarth of consequences like an induced type 2 diabetes. If the situation with thiamine deficiency is not getting fixed, lactic acidosis proceeds as a dangerous side-effect of the backup metabolism path (anaerobic glycolysis) and gradually leads to progressive peripheral neuropathy including panic attacks (false hypoglycemia), burning sensations and numbness in the limbs and so on with ongoing neuro-degeneration. Not sure if this is the author's situation but he should be very warned.
• DoreenMichele 5y ago
  We do a pretty lousy job most of the time of providing the support the body needs. This story kind of touches on or points to the need for us to get better at understanding that kind of thing.
• gherkinnn 5y ago
  > I don't know how I would have done it without my family. > My brain didn't work. > I couldn't have done it myself. Well that is scary.
  • ohazi 5y ago
    The first two lines of that tweet: > The healthcare system in the US is a failure. > You have to do it yourself. You have to research things yourself. You have to hunt for doctors & specialists yourself. It is pretty scary. It's not a matter of whether you're going to need the healthcare system to work for you, it's when. Everybody gets older, everybody starts to lose function in various ways, and everybody dies. The US healthcare system is an unmitigated disaster.
    • sebmellen 5y ago
      I think this is also, to a lesser extent, the case in other first world countries. A family member of mine in Germany who had a serious incapacitating health issue needed to be advocated for for almost a year to get a life-saving surgery.
    • cryptofistMonk 5y ago
      > You have to do it yourself. You have to research things yourself. You have to hunt for doctors & specialists yourself. That's true everywhere, though. Just because basic stuff is paid for in Canada doesn't mean we've got crack teams of doctors tracking down your diagnosis.
      • sneak 5y ago
        Standard principal-agent problem. It can be somewhat mitigated by hiring better agents (finding doctors that are more interested in patient outcomes than their OV/day stat). Unfortunately this usually means private physicians who don't usually take insurance; the costs are usually 2-10x higher. Quality customized personal service from highly trained professionals costs Real Money, something I've not yet found a good workaround for. Insurance for catastrophes can mitigate it for unexpected outcomes but in the long run insurance for something everyone needs (basic medical attention and care) is going to approximate 100% of the actual costs of hiring those vendors. Finding extremely good personal services vendors (attorney, accountant, doctor, dentist, trainer) is one of the most important investments in oneself that anyone can make. It can literally make or break you.
• aetherspawn 5y ago
  I have had something similar to this (heavy fog and inability to continue creative work) and I use coffee, bulk vitamins and regular walks with music to work through it. I also started eating more fresh food and less frozen food, even if it meant eating-out fresh, because it was much worse when I was reheating a lot of tasteless frozen food. But no matter how hard I try, I have focused my career into an area that requires a lot of creative effort, and I think that this has given me nearly permanent long term memory problems. Over the years, my relationships always get irritated that I don't remember anything. Actually, I thought my memory was normal, until I started to contrast it with people around me who worked in hospitality and such.
  • senectus1 5y ago
    This is all sounding very familiar to me :-/
    • axaxs 5y ago
      Same here. Mid 30s and my memory is completely shot. Here's hoping it's not permanent or an early sign of things to come :(.
      • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
        Sleep. Get enough sleep every single night, not just some nights. Sleep cements the memories of the day.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • redisman 5y ago
      Do you use any drugs?
      • senectus1 5y ago
        coffee, tea I used to drink a bit but not much compared to some and not anymore. Never smoked or did any other recreational drugs.
• sxp 5y ago
  > I "depleted my brain of dopamine and glucose" causing "Functional Neurological Disorder" (FND - DSM-5 code 300.11) Is this a real thing? I can't find any evidence of Google about this and the author didn't link any sources. "300.11" is pretty vague and seems to refer to a problem that doesn't match any other criteria. I can't find any reference to it being caused by glucose or dopamine levels. Edit: https://twitter.com/TinkerSec/status/1388269323295338501 https://twitter.com/TinkerSec/status/1388269323295338501 says "I went to a neurologist first to make sure it wasn't a stroke or epileptic seizures. They gave me MRI and EEG tests. Then I went to a neuropsychologist. It was the neuropsychologist that diagnosed me." which means it was diagnosed by a psychologist rather than a medical doctor with an MD. The parts about stress are probably valid but the "glucose and dopamine" depletion is probably bullshit.
  • DoreenMichele 5y ago
    Functional Hypoglycemia is a real thing. I did a high school paper on it back when I had a rotary phone and pet dinosaur. At the time -- nearly four decades ago -- there was no known cause and the only useful treatment was diet and taking high doses of vitamins. When glucose levels get depleted, the body starts drawing on stored stuff in the liver. The mechanism for releasing that is adrenaline. When the liver stores run out, you have no further backups. So then you start waking up out of nightmares that involve running because your heart is racing in your sleep as the body tries and fails to access your depleted emergency stores. I've never heard of it as a neurological diagnosis, but it is known to impact mental functioning and promote terrible anxiety.
    • Muromec 5y ago
      > So then you start waking up out of nightmares that involve running because your heart is racing in your sleep as the body tries and fails to access your depleted emergency stores. Wow, really thanks!
    • ford_o 5y ago
      Wait, that's exactly what has been happening to me for the past few weeks. Each night I woke up after 2 hours of sleep with heart racing. Then I woke up another 2 times, due to tingling in my arm. My heart was calmer at that point. I was wondering what could be the cause..
• tluyben2 5y ago
  Same exact symptoms (the bass guitar string he heard is a thing that gave me ptsd like symptoms/crippling anxiety for a long time after) I had from a TIA when I was overworked. He waited getting a scan so they could've missed it later; my office was next to the hospital: nothing showed on the CT one hour after but on the RMI a couple of hours after they found a tiny lesion in one of the regions involved in forming speech (which, like him, I had issues with for a bit). Sounds more likely than glucose to me but that is because this looks too familiar to me. Edit: with symptoms like this, treat it as an emergency, do not wait. I do not even understand how you go to sleep and not the hospital if you actually suspect a stroke? Within 3 hours they can do a lot even for far more serious strokes.
  • fho 5y ago
    Is that "bass guitar string" thing common? I had it twice, both times in a hot and cramped train and shrugged it up to "heat stroke".
    • sciurus 5y ago
      I'm curious about this too. I have also experienced this at times, although I wouldn't have found these words to describe it. I don't think it's been tied to any particular conditions like heat or stress. Usually it happens when I'm in bed and beginning to fall asleep. Googling turns up https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome which sounds like what I've experienced.
      • Out_of_Characte 5y ago
        Mentioning the falling asleep part reminds me of a few cases myself. I have trouble sleeping myself and when I fall asleep very slowly I've noticed similar 'illusions'. flashes of light, voices, fractal patterns, a conscious state while dreaming and the very rare loud noise that comes from nowhere. Usually the noise doesn't prevent me from finally falling asleep. I've always wondered how many people experience these effects. >Despite the name, the sufferer's head does not actually explode. Oh good, now I can sleep at night again
• deepsun 5y ago
  Well, the whole description is pretty much what people call "burnout".
  • chris_wot 5y ago
    Almost unrecoverable burnout? I'd say this is more severe on an order of magnitude.
    • llamataboot 5y ago
      It sounds intense for sure. Seizures aren't a usual symptom of burnout, nor that extent of cognitive impairment, but I certainly think that lots (maybe even the majority) of burnout in the tech industry and in other fields that require constant intellectual output is unrecoverable to some extent. Even many of the people that found a way to code for fun (or even money) again will often say it's not the same, and the moment they hit a certain level of stress everything just shuts down. I do think it is a form of post-trauma/post-stress in some ways. The brain associates the intellectual activity so strongly with the negatives that it just doesn't want to do that activity anymore. US Healthcare system definitely sucks, though in this case the entire social safety net is kinda implicated.
      • chris_wot 5y ago
        But is burnout the same as severe PTSD? I guess I've never thought of it this way, but I can see how that might actually be the case - certainly I've burned out and it affected me for a long time. I just never have heard it this severe. The U.S. healthcare system does indeed suck, at least from an outsiders perspective. I live in a country that doesn't have such an awful system. I feel very lucky!
        • sneak 5y ago
          > But is burnout the same as severe PTSD? Not in my experience. Sustained, sub-traumatic stress can cause burnout without any major traumatic event. Cortisol ain't a good friend.
• nickalaso 5y ago
  Low Dopamine and glucose in the brain leading to seizures. I wonder if taking adderall/stimulants as an external dopamine source + sugary drinks/food for the glucose could have helped with this.
  • ackbar03 5y ago
    I dunno about Adderall but Id experience similar cases (stuttering, brain fog, social anxiety) after working hard for extended time, albeit nothing as extreme, and figured out a long time ago it was probably low glucose (there's sort of a saying for it in Chinese) and I'd indulge myself a bit in sweet stuff like chocolate and sodas. Most of the time I try to eat healthy. I have no idea if it actually helps though lol
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • ogwh 5y ago
    No. Adderall forces the brain to release the dopamine it already has and causes increased brain activity, using more glucose. It's more likely to cause this condition or make it substantially worse than it is to treat it. The amphetamine molecule enters the neutron and does several things, two of which are: 1) Force dopamine that is in storage in the neuron to be released prematurely. 2) Reverse the direction of the dopamine transporter so that free dopamine within the neuron that hasn't been reclaimed yet is forced back out into the synaptic space. Usually the transporter moves dopamine from the synaptic space back into the neuron. To restore dopamine levels you'd need plenty of rest and a healthy diet. Forcing the brain to use the last dregs of dopamine it has left with drugs would be the worst thing you could possibly do. Edit: In short amphetamine doesn't replace or substitute for dopamine, it just forces the brain to use what it already has. If you're running low it's going to mess you up.
    • antihero 5y ago
      Yeah I distinctly remember on day three or so of bangface (a n extremely intense rave festival in the UK) just kinda sitting slumped against a mattress in our chalet with almost this feeling like air was whistling through my empty neurons because you go hard on uppers and whatnot again and again.
• chrisbolt 5y ago
  https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1388107620574171140.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1388107620574171140.html
• gre 5y ago
  Start a blog already.
  • barnaclejive 5y ago
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  • danwills 5y ago
    Totally agree, why do people keep using the 'tweet' format for long stories that obviously do not fit? The reading experience is not good at all. Not trying to be negative am genuinely interested in the reasons.
    • getlawgdon 5y ago
      because that's where their readership is and that's where they're likely to be discovered by more readers? I dont like the format but I don't think the 'why' is a mystery at all.
      • danwills 5y ago
        So why not just post a link elsewhere for things that don't fit? It just seems strange to me, that people put up with the limit making the reader's experience worse, just to have the words on a particular platform.
• jvanderbot 5y ago
  Saying it wasn't burnout in the usual sense, and instead was an actual physical issue ... Well, that's just medieval. Good story though.
  • rapsey 5y ago
    What led him to those physical issues is however psychological. People need a work-life balance. No matter how interesting or awesome your job is. He unfortunately is still not looking inward for the actual cause of his problems. He just switched jobs to one less prone to overwork.
    • 1_player 5y ago
      Sadly the story lacked the "why?" Why are you working so hard to give yourself seizures and ignore them? When is it a good time to just tell your boss fuck off I'm out? I don't know the guy, but I would understand if it was the case if he was trying to provide for his starving family in a third world country. One thing is reaching burnout, one thing is literally reaching the point of permanent physical damage and just carrying on. For what?
      • pas 5y ago
        Third world countriness might not only happen there. The status game is very strong in the US. The need to provide for one's family, house, car, tuition, the very best food, savings, etc. And when it's just one more stupid report, it seems easy. OP seems to have a very high tolerance for delayed gratification. (Which doesn't seem that surprising for a pentester.)
        • misterremote 5y ago
          It's a Game of Society, and it's not our friend. When you're sold the story of how your life should look like through ads, people around you, etc, of course you struggle to achieve that. I think OP said he was in debt, and needed money to come out of it while supporting his family. So here's the result of the game called "society".
• vbsteven 5y ago
  Some issues in his thread probably sound familiar to many here on HN. One thing that helped me tremendously is conversations with peers in similar situations to share experiences. With this I want to make myself available for chat or audio/video calls for anyone wanting to talk about burnout/autism/adhd. I am not a therapist, just a peer with similar experiences. I have limited time and might be slow to reply. Check bio for contact info.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• LaundroMat 5y ago
  Why didn't the psychiatry and GP want to fill in the Temporary Disability papers? Does the healthcare system disincentivize them from doing so?
  • freeone3000 5y ago
    There has to be a diagnosis. "Dunno " doesn't go on the form.
    • GeoAtreides 5y ago
      Sure it does, but it's spelled "idiosyncratic" on forms
      • barapa 5y ago
        Idiopathic
  • pas 5y ago
    They might be some kind of just-world fallacy power-hungry sadists?
• Exuma 5y ago
  Hmm this is somewhat scary... does anyone know how much actually is required for this to happen? I work 10-13 hour days quite often. I love every second of it, but it can be intense. Also... what foods are high in glucose or whatever brain food I need?
  • saila 5y ago
    You don't need any special "brain food." You just need to take breaks and eat regularly. Edit: And of course you should try to eat a balanced, "healthy" diet, but the issue being described in the Twitter thread is pushing through far beyond what's physically or psychologically healthy.
  • tjohns 5y ago
    Eating foods high in glucose seems like a good way to give yourself insulin resistance and diabetes. That does not seem like the answer.
• Jakobeha 5y ago
  I don't necessarily doubt the author, but how do you chronically deprive your brain of glucose? Afaik you would get glucose back whenever you ate anything. Unless you were doing keto, but then your body and brain run on ketones. And if you did somehow deprive your brain of fuel, you would get symptoms in a much shorter span. Maybe undereating, but he doesn't list weight loss, and if you're rapidly losing weight and start to notice these symptoms it would seem pretty obvious to try eating more.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • h0l0cube 5y ago
    It seems very much like confirmation bias. The state of the art of research on FND might be ahead of wikipedia, but it states under 'causes' only this: > A systematic review found that stressful life events and childhood neglect were significantly more common in patients with FND than the general population, although many patients (around 70%) report no stressors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_neurologic_disorder#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_neurologic_disorder... The OP doesn't state what diagnostic data or opinion led him to the glucose/dopamine depletion conclusion: https://twitter.com/TinkerSec/status/1388114584209350658 https://twitter.com/TinkerSec/status/1388114584209350658
    • jac241 5y ago
      With you on this. There is no diagnostic test for glucose/dopamine depletion, and it is unlikely theory in my opinion. Even when you haven't eaten the circulatory system keeps the brain flushed with glucose from the liver or muscle glycogen, and then ketone bodies from ketogenesis. Unless you have a constant flow of these nutrients supported by a normal blood pressure, you pass out quickly. I don't think it's a surprise that he started to improve when he started antidepressants, started seeing a therapist (the psychologist), started exercising more, and took a less stressful job. To me it sounds like anxiety that built up repeatedly after 30 minutes of working. He states that he felt a numb nothingness (anhedonia), had trouble concentrating, and had psychomotor slowing. Only needs one more to hit the criteria for major depressive disorder, and I'm guessing he was having trouble sleeping at this time. From what he wrote ("It was a physical issue.") it looks like he was going to search until he found a non-psychiatric diagnosis, seeking out a neuro-psychologist (someone with likely no biochem/physiology background), to propose a theory about something that is unlikely. Regarding the post up above about a TIA (thank you for sharing this story) or the one below about the Microsoft engineer who had neck pain and then a stroke (carotid or vertebral artery dissection, often caused in younger people by car crashes or neck manipulation by a chiropractor..), I think a TIA/stroke is much less likely in this guy's case because of the recurrence of the symptoms after being able to work for a period of time. Someone who's had a TIA hitting Broca's area (motor speech) won't be able to work for a little and then have to stop, they're just not going to be able to speak/type. And unless they're very unlucky they're not going to have them repeatedly only after working for a short period of time. Maybe it is an exact match with the TIA post above with anxiety/PTSD after the initial TIA with word finding difficulty, but it doesn't seem like this guy had word finding difficulty at first because he was able to work after sleeping off his stroke. If you want to run with glucose, he could have type I diabetes or an insulinoma if you want to go rare, but the symptoms are going to be resolved immediately after eating anything with carbs. But what do I know, just a student in the American medical system.
• iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
  it’s wild how far we’ll try to go to reassure people we’re not having emotional problems. even though emotions are physical, and he mentions developing ptsd. his body (brain being a part of that) must having been telling him for ages that shit was going wrong but he’s so disconnected from his physical emotional experience that he just ignored it.
• totorovirus 5y ago
  I think trying to reverse engineer something that was protected multiple techniques to prevent it from getting reverse engineered can potentially drive anyone to getting a neural disorder.
• barnaclejive 5y ago
  Why does it take 33 posts to tell a story on Twitter? I know why, but _WHY_?
  • exciteabletom 5y ago
    What's the point of being a micro blog platform if long-form text is written anyway? Twitter either needs to disallow long text in threads or just remove the character limit.
    • majewsky 5y ago
      Both of your proposals would make Twitter significantly worse. - Removing the character limit would just make the feed unwieldy and unpleasant, especially when reading it in chronological order (bottom-up) like it was meant to be read. Typically a follower's feed will contain a collapsed version of the thread showing only the first one or two tweets and a "Show whole thread" button, so they can read a short summary in order to decide whether or not to go into the entire thing. - Disallowing long text in threads would just push people into writing the first half of their post on Twitter and the second half on $THING (there were once specialized websites for this format, like Twitlonger), which makes the reading and commenting experience unnecessarily disjointed. Another advantage of tweet threads is that people can share/like/comment individual tweets, which serves to surface the one or two interesting highlights out of a 30-tweet-long story. It's sort of like line highlights or line comments in some blog platforms. (And if you disagree with my viewpoint, that's fine. I'm not intending to convince you to use Twitter, just explaining why things are the way they are to the best of my knowledge.)
      • exciteabletom 5y ago
        These are good points. I especially hadn't considered the commenting on individual tweets aspect. IMO it's a bit esoteric to click on an individual tweet to read the comments, because it breaks the flow of my reading. But I can totally understand the upsides of that. After hearing your thoughts, Twitter could improve by removing the character limit BUT: - Showing only the first 250 characters of a post on user's feeds. - Putting a like button next to each paragraph - Making it easy to inline quote sections of the text in comments by building it into a context menu when you highlight text This UX would only apply to >250 character tweets, so the micro blogging aspect is not totally lost. Perhaps a option could be added to filter out long tweets for users who prefer micro blogging. This way you wouldn't have to laboriously chain tweets together, and you would actually gain flexibility in quoting specific sections without breaking the flow of reading.
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  My takeaway is the organisational design (one week hacking / writing report / planning) is not working at a sustainable pace. The problem is finding ways to work at a sustainable pace, even ignoring medical emergencies.
• misterremote 5y ago
  I don't know about the glucose ... ... but burning out can really destroy your life. I know it destroyed mine. It took me years to recover, and I'm still not 100%. I started working for an early stage startup right after school when I was 19yo. I didn't sleep. I didn't eat properly. Our team was small. Responsibilities super high. And I burned out. Oh, I have so many stories from this time... like when I hadn't slept for 3 days and my body shut down when I was driving home from the office – I was so tired that my body went to sleep behind the wheel. I wrote about it here: https://remotehunt.com/blog/4-day-work-weeks-in-remote-companies https://remotehunt.com/blog/4-day-work-weeks-in-remote-compa... -- Edit 30m later: I went for a run after writing this comment (you know, to be outside and be less stressed out), and while running, I remembered that I once had a "pop" in my head too. My "pop" could have been different from the author's, of course, but I would describe it as a "pop." I went to the ER immediately, and they did some basic blood pressure tests, etc. Then concluded that I probably had an anxiety attack (they get this often). Docs gave me some pills that took my anxiety away, and I was fine afterward. It was another sign for me to slow down. But it's hard to slow down when you're already far down the burnout road. In debt, but a family to support, etc. If I hadn't had a family at the time, I would have probably just quit the whole society game. Moved to a small hut somewhere near the beach. Alone, without a phone to reach me.
  • popotamonga 5y ago
    Sometimes i wonder if i'm in the path for that. Because even though i do 13h days every day of extremelly stressing work (putting out fires all the time), i do always get 8h sleep and 1h exercise. And so so food.
    • misterremote 5y ago
      You know, I think it may not have to do with the long hours specifically. I mean, when you work 13h a day, and you enjoy it, this could be totally fine? But when you say "extremelly stressing work," I guess you're not enjoying it. :) And well, I felt physically OK for 3...4 years. Psychologically not OK, but physically OK. Until one day, I wasn't anymore.
    • 5y ago
• dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
  > It was a physical issue. > My physical brain ran out of physical fuel. A bit limiting of a view on the events in my opinion. Our mental state directly influences our health. Attributing these kind of symptoms solely to physical factors misses the point, that the mental space is as real as the physical one and ignoring it has real effects. In an effort to be more like machines I think programmers forget that we do not operate by the same rules.
  • caddemon 5y ago
    I think the bigger issue with that statement is it reinforces the idea that mental issues are somehow meaningfully different than physical ones, and it's vindicating to identify a physical issue when a mental one was expected. IMO mental issues are pretty much just physical issues that we don't have even the slightest understanding of yet. Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) are one of the more fascinating examples of this, because there is a direct parallel to epileptic seizures. Aside from the fact it's not uncommon for people with epilepsy to be initially misdiagnosed as PNES (and vice versa), it's interesting what a stigma there is against PNES. The seizure-like behavior those patients display is completely beyond their control, yet it's often treated in a dismissive fashion such as "it's all in your head". PNES is often overlooked in medical research, so most of the literature focuses on psychological explanations like childhood trauma. Trauma can certainly be a risk factor, but that is also how disorders like Schizophrenia were talked about way back in the day, and now we are at least starting to have some more physical explanations. I'm usually the last person to harp on women's issues, but I'll note PNES diagnosis is overwhelmingly female. Feels like we still have a long way to go from the days of "female hysteria". If anyone wants to read a good memoir about dealing with epilepsy check out "A Mind Unraveled" by Kurt Eichenwald. At one point a neurologist tries to override his original diagnosis of epilepsy as actually being psychological in nature, but there are a number of other infuriating moments in that book.
• jordanbeiber 5y ago
  I experienced something really similar a few years back. Lengthy post, but a topic close to me these days. I had, a couple of years previously, changed job and had the opportunity to do a complete retake on a traditional business from a tech perspective. Incredibly motivated and excited - spent my days talking to teams and management and nights coding and building things. This is not in the US, and I had no pressure at all from management mind you - I just really enjoyed it and we made amazing progress. Couldn’t wait til the family was asleep so I could start hacking away, often to 3 or 4 AM. This went on for about a year, and I thought I had the best job, team and most fun ever in my career. One day going home from work I could feel a spring in my brain let go, much as described in this tweet - the whole world stated to spin and I found myself leaning against a car in the lot not to collapse. Weird... wth... ok, let’s see if it was just an issue or if we have a problem. A couple of days later I’m in a conference room to do a demo. Someone throws me the keyboard and as I start to write everything seems to slow down and my fingers are moving in slow motion. I try many times to type my password - impossible. I try to speak - just slurring. From this point on whatever is going on start to manifest itself on a regular basis. I get a “zing” in my brain, like physical, and loses train of though, words and balance. Going to work one day my body just stopped, turned around and began walking home. On it’s own! Surreal. I was just taken for the ride back to the bus and home to bed. At this point I’m starting to feel like “I’m not there”. Like my mind is in the back of my brain and not in front, at my eyes, if you get what I mean. My mind had kind of an out of balance, far back, tunnel vision of everything. This became the new normal. Really disturbing. Obviously I started to investigate this. Went through the process with different doctors. Lengthy process. At some point I get this unbelievable pain in my shoulder, probably because I had started to work out again quite hard. Way inflamed somewhere. I go to a naprapath to try to sort it out and he investigates my neck - “woha you seem to have massive inflammation in your upper neck”. He does the naprapath business for 30 min. Boom! I’m back! I’m “in my eyes” again, almost two years later. No more tunnel vision! W. T. H. Couple of week later I’m scheduled for a neurologist who examines me. He specifically asks if I’m ok in the neck. I describe the above and he explains that issues in the upper neck can cause all kinds of weird neurological issues. The MR came back clean as the doctor had figured. Getting back completely have taken it’s time. A good couple of years, and I’m in general more weary and try to listen for signs. These days - no coding after hours, exercise regularly and in general a better understanding of my body and mind. Listen to your body, brain included! Stop clenching that jaw.
• 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
  I don't find his explanation convincing. He totally overworked for a long time, probably didn't exercise at all, didn't do anything at all - this by itself is likely already a symptom of an underlying issue. No sane person will spend all the time working if there is a choice. Maybe he was distracting himself from a depression or some trauma. To narrow the cause of his experience down to Glucose seems like quite a simplification.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    I might not be sane (how would I know fully?), but there are several times in my life when I beyond-willingly worked 75-90 hours per week for months on end. I did it to ship a game, and two other internal products at other companies. Those periods look a lot like working, sleeping, eating, and walking among the areas where those activities happen. I loved my life in those periods and had plenty of freedom to choose to do or not do it, probably more than I do now with obligations to provide for my family.
    • 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
      I'm the last person to judge you. I myself am most certainly not "sane". My coping strategies lead me away from work. I need to maintain balance to actually work. Not even sure if I even have a real coping strategy. I do breathing exercises, ride my bike and in the evening I treat myself with a little bit of weed. So, that's that. It just seems to me that it might be worth digging a bit deeper and broader if you want to narrow down the cause/s. Good luck for sure!
    • marcodave 5y ago
      how old were you at the time? if you were in your late teens-20s your body might have been strong enough to sustain the pace.
• someelephant 5y ago
  Amazing the lengths the mind will go to to convince itself that it's not a stress or emotional problem that is the underlying condition. This person even convinced themselves that things improved because of FND rather than the improvements in life situation -- changing jobs, time passing from the loss of a partner, time passing from start of pandemic.
  • polytely 5y ago
    The distinction is a bit misguided anyway because of course all stress and and emotional problems also happen inside the body and thus have a physiological basis.
    • nchi3 5y ago
      Yes, emotion is all chemicals and signals in your brain, but there's still a quite clear distinction to what the difference between physiological and psychological is.
      • iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
        it’s not so clear cut, instead it’s very interlinked. what you think effects your body, what you do effects your mind. e.g. worrying will cause your heart rate to increase ad your breathing to quicken, breathing slowly will reduce your heart rate, a lower heart rate will reduce your sense of anxiety. your body is a sensor, your mind is the computer. emotions are like the ships diagnostic warnings from star trek. edit: id add that this is why “mastering your emotions” using the control sense of mastering, doesn’t make sense. you don’t want to control your diagnostics, you want to be great at reading them and making decisions from them, aligning with them if you will.
        • nchi3 5y ago
          I agree that it's all very interlinked, but that doesn't mean there's no distinction. Changing your way of thinking is purely psychological, whereas changing what you eat is both. > id add that this is why “mastering your emotions” using the control sense of mastering, doesn’t make sense. I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, it seems to contradict what you said in the earlier sentence? For example, if you have migraines due to stress, and you learn to control your emotions, you could reduce migraines. Breathing slowly is one way to do so, but there's also a lot of more or less purely psychological ways of doing it (e.g. CBT).
• deleted 5y ago
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• Zenst 5y ago
  Reading this, many will relate and yet would of put it down to burn-out. We know if you push your body physically too long you increase risk of injury and whilst initially can get over an injury, aspects can play up and increase chances of the injury repeating - say ligaments as one example or cartilage. Heck even if you break a bone, you may find aches and pains in later life for an injury that seemed to of healed back to new. The brain we are still trying to understand and to get a diagnoses and explanation for somebody who was able to run 1000MPH mentally and now falls flat, the not knowing in itself, I would imagine of been impacting and getting an answer would be huge - just to put a curious mind at rest. I know that is how I would feel and burned out many times, and can relate to too much of this that it's a bit deja vu.
• lsiebert 5y ago
  The truth is all mental illnesses are real, we are finding more and more underlying evidence of the neurological underpinnings of mental disorders (including with FND) using functional neuro-imaging techniques. And yet these debilitating illnesses are too often stigmatized because their effects are often invisible to the outside observer. This person was let go because they talked about their mental illness with their employers, which is, I believe, not even legal. People should treat those with mental illness with compassion and consideration, just like how they'd want to be treated if something like this happened to them. And if you think it couldn't, remember you might crack your head on the pavement tomorrow when someone knocks you down and get brain damage. The truth is that just as we wouldn't want people to work in ways likely to injure their bodies or damage their health, and expect good employers to consider worker's physical well being, we must also have workplaces in which people's mental being is considered. I consider how this person's employers behaved to be problematic to say the least.
  • obsequiosity 5y ago
    One unfortunate problem is how easy it is for employees and employers alike to contrive a situation, with respect to mental illness, to force a desired outcome. For the employee, good luck proving that management was complicit or negligent in the formation and continuation of a hostile working environment. At-will employment means it's your word against theirs in a wrongful termination suit, assuming someone mentally ill even has the resources and conviction to pursue a legal remedy. And ADA-related laws and protections, even if they can apply to someone with an "invisible disability", are difficult to invoke without social fallout. It's a catch-22. For employers, how can you discern and remove a truly disgruntled, incompetent, malingering or indolent employee (from management's perspective) in an efficient manner, when perhaps the first-principle reason for those employee's shortcomings are related to mental illness? ADA ought not to be intertwined with employment, rather there needs to be a more sophisticated social safety net and support programs for people with mental illness, instead of burdening employers with some of the responsibility which they have no business-rational reason to respectfully abide by.
• layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
  Sometimes when I push myself too hard I find that I become incapable of resting. Even if I’m very tired I can’t sleep properly because I keep having these “loops”, such that the moment I would fall asleep my whole body jolts and I’m thrown back to this half-asleep state, and this keeps repeating seemingly for hours.
  • quonn 5y ago
    I know that and there is an easy fix: Don‘t work after 6pm.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  This sounds incredibly unscientific, and I can't wait for it to be cited as a primary source in breathless made-for-netflix pop-neuroscience documentaries.
• mirekrusin 5y ago
  I've got a feeling there could be some nootropic experimentation involved?
• vegardx 5y ago
  This reads out exactly how a manic or hypomanic person would experience things and rationalize past events and feelings. The idea that it has to be something complex and in a sense grandiose compared to "just being burned out" is often a very telling sign. Perhaps it's Twitter forcing the format a little, but I could see myself thinking like this during a hypomanic episode. I'm diagnosed with bipolar disorder (type 2, rapid cycling). I could see a lot of people with undiagnosed behavioral disorders being thrown into a complete mess of a situation with any resemblance of a functional system being thrown out of the door when Covid-19 hit.
  • derangedHorse 5y ago
    I think that would just be a misdiagnosis. Seizures don’t typically accompany manic episodes and not being able to come up with words that are used in everyday situations is also an oddity.
    • vegardx 5y ago
      Seizures during a manic or hypomanic episode is very common, it's often what lands undiagnosed people in hospital to begin with. Lamotrigine and Lithium was primarily used to treat epilepsy, now they're also used to treat mood disorders like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as well. The problem is often that there are compounding issues. There's nothing that stops you from having TIA at the same time. People often describe being overworked and stressed as burning the candle from both ends. Hypomania can more aptly be described as setting the entire thing on fire. My post wasn't meant as some form of medical diagnosis, more of an observation from someone that lives with this. The feeling of numbness and having some sort of brain fog is how a lot of people with mood disorders like ADHD and bipolar disorder would describe things.
      • wittyreference 5y ago
        Do you have any sort of citation for this? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’d really like to read more. My understanding of the med lit is that bipolar and epilepsy aren’t particularly associated, and pure BD in particular is a rarity - when epileptic patients were assessed for BD symptoms, they were mostly only found in the confusional states pre- and post-seizure, which isn’t BD at all. At least in my hospital, the most common way we get BD patients hospitalized is either during a severe depressive episode, or when their mania results in violence or law-breaking. We do sometimes have patients land on our floor whose first presentation was seizure, but that’s after they’re assessed by neuro and found that it was pseudoseizure (factitious seizure).
• DaniloDias 5y ago
  People who have experienced brain trauma present significant initial relief when they are told they have condition that has a label. They tend to relapse every two years and select a new diagnosis after they don’t get better. It’s heartbreaking to watch when you know to look for the pattern.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that if your brain ran completely out of glucose and dopamine, you would die immediately.
• dcolkitt 5y ago
  I’m dubious about the diagnosis. If sustained overthinking could regularly cause seizures, I think it’d be ubiquitous in competitive chess players. Based on the authors description it sounds much more due to lack of sleep and stress.
  • derangedHorse 5y ago
    I also believe it was a multitude of factors. Creative thinking being a catalyst just doesn’t add up. I can’t speak for the physiology of others so it may very well just be that for him, but it’s be nice to get more details on what the doctors diagnosed.
    • caddemon 5y ago
      I agree it's probably not creative thinking, but I also kind of doubt the doctors identified specific triggers unless he did an extended in-patient monitoring stay. One of my friends, who in daily life on meds would have 1 or 2 major seizures a month, stayed in an epilepsy unit for 6 weeks with not even a focal seizure detected. He had had epileptic seizures detected in the past but was undergoing monitoring to evaluate for other treatment options/possible surgery. They took him off of meds obviously, and as the stay extended they started sleep depriving him, giving him caffeine, giving him booze, etc. Trying to identify what might actually trigger them. They now think it was mainly work stress, since he was on medical leave from work during the stay.
• wittyreference 5y ago
  Does anyone remember that Reddit post where a guy thought his landlord was sneaking into his apartment and leaving him notes? He insisted the handwriting was completely different. Then a poster suggested he get tested for CO poisoning, which it was, and the “different handwriting” was actually a part of his delusion. “Burning out all of the glucose and dopamine in your brain” isn’t a thing. “Functional Neurological Disorder” is another name for Conversion Disorder - a condition of apparently neurological symptoms inconsistent with neurological anatomy or mechanisms, triggered (most often) by significant stressors, often suffering a longer duration in patients who strongly believe “this is definitely a physical disease!”
  • sneak 5y ago
    > “Burning out all of the glucose and dopamine in your brain” isn’t a thing. This sort of narrative-based grandstanding is something the author is previously known for. His "lol oops I hacked too much" doesn't hold up to scrutiny, otherwise this would be an extremely common thing in overworked knowledge workers. It's not.
    • Robotbeat 5y ago
      I’ve had similar things happen. It’s not uncommon. It is a physical thing. I’m not sure it’s caused by burning out all the glucose or whatever (as that is short term addressable). Dopamine, that’s possible. In my case, it was caused I think by not getting enough sleep combined with cognitive load, perhaps exasperated by high sodium, and poor nutrition. Stimulants (such as caffeine, but also Ritalin, adderall, etc) if not carefully moderated both cause you to continue to work beyond the point your brain physically needs rest while also causing a kind of dopamine resistance where you need more stimulant for the same effect. And you get migraines. In my case, optical migraines (expanding noise/patterns... in your visual cortex, not in your eyeball... that is me with somewhat foggy thinking and a bit of a head ache). A little like seizures but limited to certain parts of the brain. A little like micro-strokes as well as there’s evidence that migraines like that are somewhat vascular in nature in that similar damage is seen (in folks with lots of migraines) as in small strokes. And they seem to happen when combined with high sodium, low water intake, combined with lack of sleep and high cognitive load. But I wouldn’t be too certain about the causes. It’s hard to tell with these things. I suspect it has something to do with the glymphatic system (as drinking enough water seems to help as does getting enough sleep). I’m more careful with my sleep schedule and generally don’t push myself overly hard like in grad school and try not to have too much sodium (eating Ramen—with the packet—triggered one of my episodes) and I really have them only extremely rarely—less than once a year—instead of multiple times a week like in grad school. Recognizing limits on yourself is important. I think hard work is really wonderful and feels amazing, but you should be careful to sleep enough (7-8, maybe more if you’re recovering from something... I aggressively try to get at least 7 hours every single night), drink enough water, don’t over do it on stimulants, and make sure to eat enough.
• operator1 5y ago
  I burned out hard during quarantine and developed both sudden onset tinnitus and a migraine for the first time in my life. The migraine was with a visual aura and was terrifying and debilitating. I was so sure I was having a stroke. I saw a neurologist and a psychiatrist just like the author. Nothing. It was all a “stress-induced” episode. No fancy label, no satisfying diagnosis. And the symptoms have persisted here and there since. I have constant tinnitus and my brain feels different since then. I can’t think or focus as well. It sucks. And for the record, no, I didn’t get COVID (this is asked regularly when I describe my experience, especially after describing what sounds like brain fog). I’m still not doing well. Just like the author, I’m not “better”. I’m barely hanging in. I’ve heard numerous similar stories. Stress can do horrible things to the body. Almost everyone I’m close with has shared some kind of anxiety-induced medical something or another story with me. Last year was rough for society as a whole.
  • caddemon 5y ago
    Reducing stress is something a lot of us could benefit from, but there are also some underlying medical issues that can be exacerbated by stress. If you are still getting migraines you might want to see another doctor. They aren't super well understood yet, but there are pretty clear physiological signs and there are also some prophylactic treatment options. Chronic migraines are a very real neurological disorder, and for some people severe enough to be disabling. In general I think it's a very hard line to walk to avoid over-pathologizing things while also not missing actual medical issues. Nobody really understands the brain, and the entire discourse around phenomenon like "brain fog" kinda bums me out. It's both easy for doctors to unfairly dismiss and easy for internet forums to spin pseudoscience about. The two reinforce each other even. Keep hanging in there, and best of luck sorting out these issues.
• moron4hire 5y ago
  OP mentioned the anti-depressants only masking the physical symptoms and not treating the lack of ability to work, therefore OP did not think depression was the issue. Uuuuh, that's basically a text-book description of anti-depressants "working". You take them to become functional enough to deal with the underlying issue of--in this case--having a really shitty job.
• gatewaynode 5y ago
  Sounds like burnout, he had mentioned that being something in his history when he did some work with my team a few years back. Burnout is real, it's also probably not glucose depletion triggered seizures, but I think his internal diagnosis says enough. In general people need to be better aware that you do have real limits to what kind of stress levels you can handle effectively and you need to back off when you start feeling overwhelmed and not try to "push through".
• WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  I told my firm. They put me "on the bench" for a couple of weeks. After a couple of weeks, they told me they couldn't pay me anymore. I wasn't bringing in money at that point. Mind you, I brought in millions of dollars leading up to that point. But I wasn't producing... Seriously. Compulsive corporate apologists can byte me.
  • sneak 5y ago
    The employment agreement is one of work hours for money. It's not a revenue share; for that, you need equity or to start your own business. For-profit corporations not being charities for the benefit of their current staff members is fact, not an apology. This is what insurance is for. Per the author's own admission, he didn't qualify because he didn't have a diagnosis when he made a claim.
    • WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      Analytics seems like a fairly awful substitute for ethics. and I do like This is what insurance is for followed by sick guy operated outside of complex series of guidelines that help reduce the resources spent on actual care.
• posthiatal1 5y ago
  This is a weird edge case, for sure. Seems like it's still far from understood. It could be any combination of psychosomatic issues, trauma triggering, lifestyle factors, and undiagnosed organic issues, as not all diagnosticians are great when it comes to edge cases. Just a thought to those who assume the brain diagnostics would have shown any seizures: There is something called "cognitive kindling." If a particular type and duration of mental activity can induce partial seizures, to confirm this any functional diagnostics (such as an EEG or fMRI) may have to be run during that type (and duration) of cognitive activity. I've felt something similar to what the poster described -- subjectively or phenomenologically. It began to effect me in the 1990s at QCOM, where I did mostly troubleshooting of embedded real-time systems. I tried to get a leave of absence but (despite having won two performance awards, each with additional stock options) my last (new) manager accused me of being lazy, so, rather than keep getting paid to show up and produce nothing of value (despite racking my brain) I quit. I wanted to leave before I jeopardized my good reputation, and given that the scope of my project was months, it could have been many months before I'd have received my first performance review below 3 (of 5). Thankfully, the last 50% of my initial set of QCOM employee stock options, plus 20% and 40% of my second two sets, vested near QCOM's all-time peak in 1999-2000. Thanks to that windfall, I was able to self-fund a deep dive into the peer-reviewed medical literature (because my own MD-PhD internist challenged me to do so*), see doctors who are good enough not to need to deal with insurance companies, and pay out of pocket for their diagnostics and treatments. (*Even though medicine does generate so much research that reading the research and making sense of it might need to be partially crowdsourced to the set of people with sufficient means, motive (pain point) and opportunity -- which is what I had -- even so, society, please do not rely on the edge cases of partially-disabled, semi independently wealthy engineers to come up with our own solutions.) Unfortunately, I don't take fools lightly, and I quickly label as fools non-Bayesian thinkers who can't see zebras because horses are so much more prevalent -- and make false assumptions about my history, motivations, and inner life. So I steered clear of perfunctory "show up in a white coat and get paid well" types who perform "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" standard of insurer-covered care. I ended up hiring mostly "alternative" doctors, and while their treatments (and ones I found myself, including illegal ones) were the ones that ended up helping me, their diagnoses are not useful in proving anything to conventional doctors nor to the government. Thanks to QCOM stock options and then profits on precious metals after the 2008 crash, plus my wife's support and a few entry-level jobs, I did not apply for Disability benefits until many years later. I was not approved for benefits, despite my psychiatric practitioner and case manager recommending it (for chronic PTSD, finally diagnosed after I suggested it myself), and an acquaintance who works for SSDI (US government Disability insurance) saying I'm "as disabled as most who qualify." Based on my experience, despite being a former Libertarian I believe the US social safety net has huge holes. Eventually I found some relief with a keto-ish diet and then, since spring 2018, microdosing LSD or psilocybin in the morning. Cannabis or delta-8 THC I sometimes also use in a normal (non-micro) recreational dose at bedtime, which seems to prevent subsequent days of effort from accumulating toward a burnout. This allows me to work a normal entry-level job, as long as there's no drug screen. For the latter, microdosing LSD or psilocybin are more practical (though more-often fully-illegal) because they are less likely to be detected by standard drug screens ordered by current or prospective employers. By the way, though I have been substitute teaching since October 2016, recently held a full-time factory job with mandatory overtime (48 to 56 hours per week) for 13 months (with a promotion to Electrician at $20/hr), and recently landed a full-time WFH customer service job to start May 17, this requires me to stay within 2.5 hours drive of the office, and I am looking for fully-remote work that pays a bit better than this $15.50/hour. I can do customer service just fine, and given my history in software development (mostly embedded, mostly the 5 years at QCOM, with degree in electrical and computer engineering) I think I could earn a premium doing a similar role, or perhaps some kind of technical writing, in a more specialized technical or scientific niche. (Along the way I did 40% of a Master of Public Health and later did most of Coursera/JHU data science course.) If anyone has job or career ideas for me (who still has been unable to do software engineering beyond the hobby level without burnout) I welcome them at (see my profile for email adress).
• da39a3ee 5y ago
  > You have to do it yourself. You have to research things yourself. You have to hunt for doctors & specialists yourself. This is one of the key things that establishes that Americans who don't see the problem with their healthcare system are completely insane. You are not supposed to have to research your own healthcare and choose your own specialists. That is the job of ... wait for it ... medical professionals.
• abstractbarista 5y ago
  Sounds like they were binging stimulants to get their work done. The brain needs regular sleep or you burn out hard. Nothing inherently wrong with drug use, but it must be done with compassion for your body.
• gverrilla 5y ago
  I have a lot happen to me but at this point I know these people from medical industry just don't have proper answers and will parrott you what they have been thought or heard because they need to make paychecks otherwise they are screwed like everyone. Also they cannot identify this major social symptom, showing how little they really understand complex systems. Medical students are chosen through a very competitive process and game that doesn't ressemble real theory at all. It merits parroting, memory, and greed. Psychologist are perfect analogs to priests, and psychiatrists are at this point glorified drug dealers.
  • ta988 5y ago
    Like in many high-skills high-competition jobs, people are selected on how much they can endure, not just how good they are. I've seen many excellent people just quit because the pressure with useless tasks was wearing them down. I often heard them tell me "I don't want to become a zombie like all of them" or things such as "Look at them, they are all trying to reproduce what they have been through because they have been convinced thats how you select good people"
• lazyant 5y ago
  "Well if you're not in the hospital, why aren't you working?" wtf, hasn't this doctor ever seen people with disabilities or mental health issues outside a hospital? we all know or have family members in that situation.
• tucosan 5y ago
  The conclusion that a glucose deficiency was causative to this episode is rather naive and far-fetched. This was either a severe migraine, a manic episode that possibly turned into a psychosis or a stroke. Episodic Migraines and strokes can both lead to loss of words and memory as well as auditory hallucinations (guitar string sound in the center of his brain) and could explain the other symptoms he describes. It could also be a mix of the above.
• jopsen 5y ago
  Sounds unpleasant.. Next time I feel like an unintelligent imposter, I'll remember this story, and be happy that at-least I won't break my brain this way. (We can probably still stress our brains into dysfunction by other means, if we're not careful)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• SZJX 5y ago
  Easy to blame the US healthcare system, though in what country would one consider the healthcare system to not “be a failure”, regarding these aspects or when somebody faces the same issues that the OP has? Sounds like an inherently hard problem given how things are structured now.