This is a personal account of a bad period and what I changed afterwards. It is not medical advice, and it is not a treatment plan. Some of what I describe — months of not sleeping, not being able to talk to my family, a spiral of self-blame — is the kind of thing a doctor should be looking at, not a blog. If you recognize yourself in it, please talk to a medical professional. Rearranging your mornings is not a substitute for that.
Ten years into working for myself as a freelance web engineer, after a stretch of reasonably contented drifting, I hit the worst year I have had.
Originally published in Japanese on January 6, 2025. This English version was written in September 2026.
I would eat lunch in the living room and then find I could not move. My head said get up. Neither my body nor my mind would go along with it.
I stopped being able to laugh or hold a conversation. Nothing outside work was enjoyable. I was low continuously, and my family absorbed a lot of that.
About six months on from that, things feel different in a way I did not expect. Time with my family is genuinely funny again, life outside work is full, and I go into work in a good state.
What changed was my daily life. Not my circumstances — the actual shape of my days.
Expecting too much of other people
Looking back, those two months at the bottom were genuinely bad.
I could not talk to my family. I could be out with friends and not laugh. Small things irritated me and trivial events knocked me sideways.
What made it worse was the rumination — lying in bed at night while unpleasant scenes cycled through my head, and not sleeping. Then working the next day short on sleep and unable to concentrate, getting little done, and folding that back into the self-loathing.
Traced back, the cause was mostly what I expected of other people.
It started with trouble at work. Not something I caused, but I was in the middle of it.
We have worked together for years, surely you understand this.
We are all adults here, surely you take responsibility for your part.
I never said these things out loud. I held people to them privately and then felt let down when they failed a standard nobody had told them about. I could not keep the disappointment off my face, which I then blamed myself for, and down it went.
Then one day it landed that there is no point thinking about what I cannot change — and that I could put that attention on what I can.
It rang a bell. I went back to The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, a book I had read years earlier, which lays out Adlerian psychology as a dialogue and leans hard on the idea of separating your tasks from other people’s. I read it in gaps between work, noted down whatever seemed important to me at the time, and read the notes each morning before starting.
That was the turning point. Slowly, I started facing forward again.
Redesigning the day
It was not a clean recovery. The dark voice would find a gap and start up again.
The negative loop in my head had no visible end, and the chatter was exhausting.
In that state, sleep was not happening. There were days I slept two hours, and I could not even nap properly.
I am in my forties. This is not sustainable.
So I decided to change how I lived.
My surroundings were not the problem. The pandemic had prompted a move out to the countryside, and I was working surrounded by it. I just was not using any of that.
Getting the morning on my side
The first move was waking up early.
Until then, not sleeping until dawn and getting up near midday was normal. I shifted it gradually rather than all at once.
I started at 8am. Once that was comfortable, 7:30, then 7:00, and two months later a wake-up somewhere in the five o’clock hour had stuck.
To make the time count, I put a morning routine around it:
- A cup of hot water. Warming up first, letting the engine turn over slowly. Plain hot water — sayu — is a common morning habit in Japan.
- Bamboo foot stepping (5 min). Standing on a split length of bamboo to press the arches of the feet. It is an old Japanese household habit; for me it wakes my head up.
- Strength work (5 min). Short, but moving at all generates something to work with.
- Journaling (5 min). Getting what is in my head onto paper and sorting it out.
- Meditation (3 min). Attention on the breath, settling down.
- Reading (10 min). Taking something in.
- Study (30 min). Protected time to get better at something.
The routine gave the day a solid opening, my concentration at work improved, and the satisfaction of getting through work efficiently came back.
Small habits, compounding
Beyond the early start, I went through the rest of it.
Eating within an 8-hour window. I kept a 16:8 pattern for six months and felt better on it. I should be straight about the evidence here: I do not weigh myself, so I have no numbers. People around me commented that I looked like I had lost weight, and my wife said the puffiness had gone. That is the entirety of my data.
Drinking less. The nightly drink stopped appealing and dropped off by itself. I did not go teetotal — I drink when I see friends — but the next day it simply does not resume.
Moving caffeine to the morning. One coffee before midday, so it is not still working on me at night.
Between them, I came back to something like health in body and mind. Whether any single item did the work, I genuinely cannot tell you — I changed several things at once, which is terrible methodology and quite normal when you are just trying to feel better.
Mostly I want to say: it passes
From here it looks like something you could dismiss in a sentence. Why were you expecting anything of them in the first place?
But remembering going from there into blaming myself and falling the rest of the way — it was awful. That is what people mean by not being able to see anything ahead. I could not picture a good future at all.
What weighs on people differs. From outside, someone else’s version can look like nothing.
In my case, looking back at the times I have gone down, my daily life had come apart first. So the thing I want to pass on is narrow and hedged: sometimes reviewing how you live gets some of it back. Not always, and not instead of help.
And to the version of me who was down there: it works out. The version of you further along is enjoying himself.