What I Learned About Burnout and Anxiety at 30
Source: Neil Kakkar | Published February 16, 2026
Neil Kakkar is an engineer at PostHog. He wrote a post about turning 30 and the years leading up to it. It is the most honest thing I have read about burnout in a long time.
He frames life as a four-legged stool. The legs are emotional connections, physical activity, hobbies, and work. With four legs it is sturdy. With three it still works. With two it gets hard. With one you are falling. With zero you are a pancake.
He became a pancake.
The Slow Slide
He was deep into work. Became a manager. Took on high-profile client-facing features. Cared a lot about what he was building. He was switched on all the time and escaped into fantasy novels afterwards to decompress. That was his only recovery mechanism, and it was not enough.
The panic attack came in mid-2024. He did not know what was happening. It felt like a serious illness. His body and mind had finally given up and said, “Neil, fuck this shit.”
The signs were there long before. A year and a half earlier, he started having reflux problems. He ran meticulous experiments to figure out which foods triggered it, broken down by time of day. He was treating the symptoms while missing the cause entirely. The reflux mostly went away after he quit.
His weight was climbing. He was recording the data daily, looking at the graph weekly, and telling himself it was fine. “I’ll start working out again when I have more time.” The alarm bells were ringing and he silenced them.
There was an undiagnosed iron deficiency that caused fatigue and made everything worse. An NHS doctor finally caught it after several others missed it. He ran his blood work through ChatGPT afterward and it connected the dots faster than the first doctors did.
The Rebuilding
He quit his job in January 2025 after six months of trying to make it work. He could not bring himself to work anymore and decided it was better to stop than to drag it out.
What followed was slow. He discovered board games, made new friends, played tennis and pickleball. Every time he pushed too hard, the anxiety crept back. Going to a movie with friends felt miserable. He felt trapped in his seat, spiraling — “Why am I feeling like this? These are all things I used to enjoy?”
He learned to treat himself like an AI model he was evaluating. He did not have a good intrinsic understanding of his limited self’s capabilities, so he ran his own evals. The difference is that the act of testing his capabilities changed them. Sometimes it extended them. Sometimes it shrunk them. He learned to test the edges without shattering.
What Stuck
He writes that environment beats willpower every time. An 8 AM alarm makes it hard to stay up late. No junk food at home is more effective than resisting temptation. A living room full of sunshine sparks joy. He can ask more of the world than the default.
He learned that stress reveals itself through control. When he grips tighter, tries to fix every problem, cannot shut off — that is the sign that something needs to change. Sometimes the fix is walking away from the environment that incubates the stress.
He noticed the same patterns repeating. His first work review was cerebral — frameworks and code design. His second was emotional — soft skills, fear of failure, how it feels to take on a big challenge. Now he sees the same loop in his life reviews. The first was all intellectual frameworks. The years after were implementing them and watching them fail. This post is the culmination: learning to listen to his body, sit with the discomfort, and let it pass.
He still likes the tradeoff. He sacrifices stability for growth and would do it again. He might flounder in different ways, but he learns from it, which sets up a better third loop.
Four legs on the ground again. It took years and a panic attack to get there, but the recovery is real and he writes about it with the same clarity he brings to his code. That is harder than most people realize.
Crepi il lupo! 🐺