i don’t mean that in a braggy way. i mean it like my brain actually stopped cooperating. the first 8 hour shift was fine. great actually. i was in that zone tabs everywhere, caffeine on tap, little dopamine hits every time something worked. half way through the 2nd 8 hour shift, i was starting to trip over myself. rethinking the same thing twice. forgetting variable names. by hour 8, the text on my screen was moving even when it wasn’t. i’d drink more coffee and tell myself i had to push through it. that was not it. around the end of my 3rd 8 hour shift i tried to write a commit message and couldn’t form a sentence. that’s when it clicked im not tired i have fried my own brain. for a while i thought burnout was about long hours. but it’s not. it’s what happens when your brain stops trusting you. when you push through every warning signal until it just literally shuts down to survive. anyways. i took a few days off, thinking rest would fix it. it didn’t. i still felt foggy, slow, off. unsure and unconfident. so i started tinkering, not with code, with sound. Goal: never hit burnout without taking days off. i wanted to know if i could design something that pulled my brain back online faster. not meditate, not vibe, not “breathe deeper.” just reset. i started mapping what overload looked like: heart rate up, breath shallow, focus gone. then i started building sound around that. layering frequencies, silence gaps, pacing like rhythm for the nervous system. testing it on myself in real time, mid spiral, mid fatigue. it was weird at first. then one night, after a long sprint, i ran one of the sound loops. ninety seconds later, i felt clarity snap back in. my chest felt light almost like my lungs was breathing for the first time. not calm but like clear. like the noise in my head just dropped out for a second and i could think again. that moment changed how i build everything. now when people ask what i’m working on, i tell them: i’m building reliefware, tools that get builders back online fast. not wellness, not meditation. just systems that help you recover focus before burnout eats your progress. because the internet loves to talk about output. but the real advantage isn’t speed. it’s recovery. the founders who last aren’t the ones who grind hardest. they’re the ones who know how to come back quicker than they fall off. if your brain’s been foggy lately, take it from me don’t wait for it to crash to learn how to reset. that’s the real lesson behind 24 hours of building in a 72 hour period.