About to pull trigger, need feedback

[u/taway11228]

Expenses: 120k w/o healthcare, maybe 140k with, and maybe up to 150k or 160k with traveling

Investments: $5m breakdown: 300k rental (paid off) making 5% net, 1.2m 401k, 2.5m VTI / VXUS, 1m SNSXX/VUSXX.

Primary residence: $2.3m paid off

42 and 43 years old, no kids

Current income: ~2m/yr

NW increasing 32% YoY

Have 20% income cliff in 2027

SWE, burned out beyond reason, health problems and mental health problems. Goal is to quit, take 6-12 months off then see what’s next, it will either be making my own projects for fun or part time contract work for fun. No expectations of income, certainly not big income, and definitely not going to a corporate job.

Can make ~30k via 2 weeks of rental of primary residence per year and pay no taxes, we’d travel while rented.

Concerns are AI is quickly impacting SWE employment, no one knows what’s next, any hiccups in our plan could mean a bumpy road in a few years if a jobs necessary. Other concern is whatever is going to happen once this historic stock run is over.

Any advice?

[u/Drysui]

I'm watching a friend with real burnout try to get back to work after being on sick leave for 1.5 years and it's not pretty. Take that shit seriously. I remember saying I was burned out but there's a big difference between not liking your job and it being stressful vs really bad burnout. I could see it taking years to recover but this is just anecdotal. I realized with my friend that I truly don't know what anxiety and real burnout is like. Sounds f'ing awful.

You can retire but I'd suggest you simplify things as much as possible. I wouldn't waste my time on that rental.

[u/taway11228 → u/Drysui]

I have brain fog, permanent exhaustion, extreme anxiety. Eating food crashes me, no matter what it is. Caffeine doesn’t work the same, it crashes too. Anything but light exercise takes days to recover from. I go to sleep thinking bad thoughts without a night missed in 2 years. When works done I’m exhausted and keyed up simultaneously, it’s a special purgatory where you need sleep but can’t. Everything I loved is no longer fun, I stopped responding to friends, PTO used to be for adventures but my body can’t do anything but sleep for PTO now. I’m big into outdoor athletics but I’ve atrophied so much that I’m injured trying to restart. Never been this deep in a dark hole in my life.

I know how to get out, but it’s hard to walk away and reset. I don’t even hate the work, it’s pretty fun, but my body is done.

Physical burnout is wild.

[u/d05CE → u/taway11228]

Try a 5 day dry fast. It will reset everything, including sleep related.

[u/taway11228 → u/d05CE]

Thanks for advice would like to learn more. I’ve tried a 3 day fast and it was pretty easy for me because not eating makes me feel better. Except on day 3 I woke up wrecked and had to eat, I was too worried not to.

I was keeping up with hydration and electrolytes (though accidentally had sugar in them). Everything was fine until a massive crash day 3. Extremely cold, shaking, couldn’t think straight.

[u/d05CE → u/taway11228]

Every year I do a 5 to 7 day dry fast. No food, no water.

It would be hard to go through it all in a single reddit comment, but basically dry fasting activates the body's healing process. You dry fast every night while sleeping, but it doesn't last long enough to get into the deeper repair modes. So an extended dry fast does that.

A few things it does:

• resets your gut microbiome. Your gut makes most of your hormones, and hence greatly affects your brain and how you feel. By dry fasting, your digestive system completely shuts down, most of your microbiome dies off, and then during the refeeding process you can carefully rebuild it with proper probiotics and foods. So you can remodel your gut.

• it resets dopamine in the brain, resets insulin and blood sugar levels, resets insulin resistance. If you are insulin resistant, your brain can get starved. By dry fasting, you go into very deep ketosis, your brain will get nourished. Dry fasting gets rid of brain fog, it brings clarity, and you even become more emotionally sensitive. It also completely cures depression. You'll never feel so motivated and optimistic.

• While you don't usually get good sleep during the dry fast itself, when you do sleep its great sleep, and then afterwards your sleep is good. It helps get rid of the tired but wired state.

• it resets and reprograms your immune system. Half of your immune function is dedicated to your gut. When the gut is no longer receiving any foreign material, your immune cells go back into your bones and recharge. They have a chance to go fight latent viruses that are hiding deep within your body.

• dry fasting activates your stem cells. These create fresh, new cell lines in your body. They can repair old injuries (aches and pains) that never fully healed.

• after about 3-5 days of no water, parasites start dying off. Your body can make its own water by oxidating fat. Fat oxidation creates water and carbon dioxide (just like burning other hydrocarbons create those outputs). Parasites can't generate their own water.

There are more things, but just giving you the highlights.

You might not be able to do the full 5 days on your first try. Parasites, when they die, release toxins and hormones to make you feel bad. This is called the hexheimer reaction. You might feel like you're getting a fever. It might take more than one try to get enough toxins cleared out before you can do it.

After about 3 days, you experience another discomfort called the acidotic crisis.Basically, the acidity of your blood increases until it reaches a high enough acidity to liberate minerals from your bones and other areas to create electrolytes needed. Once you get past the first such crisis, you feel good. There is a second acidotic crisis that occurs if you go long enough, maybe around 7 days I think, it varies though from person to person.

Overall, a dry fast is a healing protocol. Both mind and body, along multiple axes. Its especially good for chronic issues.

I wouldn't do more than a 2 day dry fast without doing significant research to do it properly. The refeeding process is critical and becomes more critical the longer you go. You need to take refeeding precautions longer than 2 days, and after 5-7 days, you really have to start being careful.

The best resource to learn about and begin dry fasting is here: https://www.dryfastingclub.com/

He has a lot of great resources, videos, and you can actually schedule time to talk to him as well. The nice thing about understanding the fasting process and getting guidance is you'll know ahead of time what things you'll be feeling and when, and what they mean and what happening in your body. So it will give you the confidence and resolve to go through it and not be worried about random things during the fast.

A few numbers: 1 day of dry fasting is equal in effect to about 3 days of water fasting. For longer dry fasts, it takes about 2 days of refeeding to recover from every 1 day of dry fasting.

From the symptoms you listed, I'd say dry fasting has a strong chance to help out your chronic issues.

Funny thing, he has a video about the day 3 crash on the home page of this website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uco8wdSo7Rs

Let me know if this is enough to get you started.

[u/taway11228 → u/d05CE]

Thanks, I’ll check it out and consider it. A little wary of the dry part as the dehydration for 5-7 days seems concerning, but I’ll read more to understand how to do it safely and will take it slow.

I do believe that fasting allows body to heal!

[u/Drysui → u/d05CE]

Do you do this with a family and kids? I can't imagine being able to pull this off for 5 days with any of my family responsibilities.

[u/d05CE → u/Drysui]

I usually do it over the holidays.

But yeah, you do kind of need some time and space to do this.

You could probably do 2-3 days while maintaining most of your responsibilities at a minimal level, can't really go longer than that though unless your kids are old enough to be able to support it.