Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety (2 page)

More than 130 authors and entrepreneurs, from all over the world, paid $10,000 apiece for admission to Tim’s conference. And while I was confident we would successfully make it through this four-day event, I was also completely overwhelmed by the complexity of the task. There were so many moving parts.

I was terrified of screwing up. If something went wrong, I would need to fix it with superhuman speed. Somehow, I had to stay awake for the entire event...

And so, in my desperation, I visited an overseas pharmaceutical website, where I ordered the most powerful brain drug on the market.

The pills arrived just before the event. I took one every morning. Each day, I expected to pass out randomly from exhaustion. But it never happened; I stayed alert and wide-awake the whole time. The pills really, really worked. During the course of the four-day seminar, I slept a grand total of
six hours
. And just as I’d hoped, I was great at my job.

The event was a whirlwind, but we managed to pull it off. On the final day, everyone gave us a standing ovation. Attendees ran up to hug us and said it was the best conference they’d ever been to. Our inboxes were filled with dozens of glowing reviews and thank you notes.

W
ITH
T
IM
F
ERRISS

I was in shock. After months of working around the clock, we’d exceeded all expectations, including our own. Tim gave me a hearty congratulations, and said he was amazed how well we’d done.

I was proud, happy, and very tired when I arrived back home. But later that night, my body started sending out emergency signals, warning me that something horribly wrong was happening.

My heart was racing. My vision was blurred. I had a pounding headache that wouldn’t stop. Sounds drifted sluggishly into my ears, and I could barely stand upright.

For the first time in my life, I felt completely and utterly burned out.

***

A few days later, I went back to work. We were just getting started on our next big project:
The 4-Hour Chef
.

Two years prior, I helped Tim edit and launch his second book,
The 4-Hour Body
. I was immensely proud to have played a part in the book’s success; it was the pinnacle of my career. On the other hand,
The 4-Hour Body
had been the most stressful undertaking of my life. Tim and I half-joked that the book nearly killed us. I was very hesitant to jump in for round two.

Tim offered to double my salary if I helped him complete
The 4-Hour Chef
. It was a generous offer, and I was immediately interested in taking it. I’d be making more money than I’d know what to do with, and I’d have another cool achievement under my belt. What did I have to lose? After a moment’s pause, we shook on it.

I felt incredibly fortunate to be in that position, especially since so many people I knew were either unemployed or working in jobs they hated. My family and friends all congratulated me. From a distance, things looked great.

But on the inside, I was flailing. I’d completely lost balance, and I couldn’t even recognize that I was destroying myself.

You see, I liked to think of myself as busy and important, so I was tethered to the internet seven days a week. I communicated with people primarily through screens. I spent all day long sitting indoors. I drank coffee all week, and drank alcohol all weekend. I only stopped working when I was sleeping. And then I stopped sleeping.

I just couldn’t stop myself from working all the time. It didn’t matter what else was going on in my life; work was everything. No one seemed to mind, because practically everyone around me behaved the same way. All of my friends and colleagues were workaholics. Several buddies of mine were pulling 16-hour workdays. My friend in medical school was popping Adderall like it was candy. All of us were destroying ourselves during the week, and punishing our livers on the weekend. We didn’t take vacations. We didn’t take breaks. Work was life.

Here’s the thing: I was a workaholic long before I met Tim. I’d always stayed up late. I’d always spent hours at a time staring at screens. The difference now was that my state of mind had changed. I took my work very seriously. And because my entire life revolved around work, life stopped being fun. 

Each week, I felt increasingly sick, exhausted, and apathetic. My eyes sunk back and grew dark circles beneath them. My forehead developed thick stress lines. My hands started shaking. I felt like I was always on the verge of crying. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me, so I just tried to work my way through it.

Then the deadline for
The 4-Hour Chef
got pushed back three months.

Then a family member died.

Then my close friend attempted suicide.

When Tim and I met up for dinner the following week, I told him very meekly:

“I can’t do this anymore. I have to quit.”

***

Tim didn’t argue with me. He understood where I was coming from, and offered his support in whatever I was going to do next. It was a relief to part on amicable terms, but I felt weaker than ever. I was already feeling the pressure to get back to work, but what would I do? My identity was gone. I decided to take a couple weeks off. Then another week... And another...

I spent the next two months being unemployed and feeling awful. Every day, I’d go through the motions of my old work routine without actually doing anything. I compulsively checked email all day long, stayed up until 4:00
AM
, and slept a few hours each night. I received a handful of job offers and turned them all down, recoiling at the thought of having to go back to work.

The worst part was the guilt. I felt enormously guilty every second I wasn’t doing something that could advance my career or earn money. I would pace around like a neurotic rat, coming up with random chores to distract myself. When the chores were finished, I’d think, “Okay... Now what?” Any activity that didn’t feel productive – sleeping in, watching TV, taking a trip – filled me with regret. There was this gnawing sense that I was wasting time. I was losing money. And yet, I had no desire to work. 

I started wondering if I’d screwed up my life very badly.
Hadn’t I been living The Dream? Did I just throw away everything I’d worked for?
I started feeling very anxious. I wanted to do something big, to reinvent my career, to make a name for myself so I could be successful. What that something would be, I didn’t know.

Then one day, two of my friends, Chad Mureta (whom I’d met at the
Kimono
event) and Jason Adams, suggested that we start a mobile app company together. They were both sharp entrepreneurs and savvy marketers, and Chad was already making millions from the apps he’d developed.

Finally
, I thought,
here’s a job that makes sense
. I could be one of the founders of a cool tech startup, working on fun projects with my smart friends, in one of the most exciting industries on the planet. The Draw Something app had recently been acquired for $250 million, then Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. I thought,
This gig might make me a millionaire by the end of the year! This is it...

I
NTERVIEWING
C
HAD
M
URETA

I was so relieved to feel productive again. I strolled into the office each day to work on my laptop until late in the evening. I sat down, stared at my computer screen for several hours, and drank coffee. When I got home, I worked on my laptop until 4:00
AM
, slept for a few hours, then started all over again.

We spent the first month putting together an online course called
App Empire
, which walked people through the entire process of starting their own app business. It required many sleepless nights to get it finished on time, but we managed to pull it off.

The launch of the course was a success, raking in $2 million dollars in revenue over the course of 10 days.
³
We spent the next two months doing weekly webinars, walking customers through each lesson and answering their questions. In our spare time, we worked on our app ideas.

At some point in the third month, I realized:
I didn’t care about apps
. I knew how to make them, and I knew how to succeed in the app market, but I just didn’t care. I didn’t really use apps and I never got excited about them.  I asked myself,
Why am I really doing this work?
Well, the job gave me an excuse to hang out with my friends during the day, rather than being holed up alone in my apartment. But that was only a small part of it. The honest answer was:

Status. Money. Guilt.

I wanted to impress other people with my “success” of founding a company. I wanted to be rich. And I wanted to avoid feeling bad for not working.

The problem was... I didn’t really care about what I was doing. There was this weird disconnect, like apps should have been the natural progression in my career. But it just never felt right. It felt forced.

I quit my job that week.

Once again, I experienced “success” and walked away from it. Only this time, I was riddled with anxiety.

I started to think I was going to be punished for not being productive, for not making money, for not having my life figured out. I didn’t know how or when, but I was certain it was going to happen. Everything was coming to a head. It was only a matter of time before something really bad happened...

***

I was in a bad place for a long time after I quit those jobs. I didn’t have a life or identity outside of my career, so I had nothing to fall back on. I was too scared and proud to reach out to anyone for help, so I bottled my feelings up and stumbled around for the next year. It was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life.

It’d be very easy for me to manufacture a villain in this story. I could tell you that I was pushed too hard, or that no one cared about how I felt. But that’s not the truth. I was the one who chose to stay up until 4:00
AM
. I was the one pouring caffeine down my throat every hour. I was the one who secretly ordered brain pills. I was the one who isolated myself from friends and kept my feelings hidden. Everything I did that fueled my anxiety was my choice.

The truth is that all of my emotional issues would have unfolded for me at some point in my life, regardless of whom I was working with. I was the creator of my own anxiety, and I was the one who broke myself with my workaholic habits. I just didn’t recognize how destructive my behavior was because I thought it was normal.

I wish someone had held up a mirror to show me I was the problem, but that never happened. No one knew the full extent of my situation but me, and I was in denial. It’s worth taking a moment to ask yourself:

• Do I feel guilty or anxious when I’m not working?
  
• Have I stopped playing with my friends?
  
• Do all of my daily activities revolve around building a more successful career?
  
• Am I sleeping fewer than eight hours per night?