[jborden13]

This is beautiful advice - take it. I am experiencing a situation semi-analogous to the OP's. I've killed myself and my health over the last 7 years to get a startup "going". While our traction is decent, scale and growth aren't easy. And since we are a difficult to scale business, we find ourselves not easily raising good, inexpensive money. So we've been bootstrapping it for a long time and my health and my relationship with my family have taken a hit. I thought having strong revenues would alleviate alot of the pressure, but as they say, "more money - more problems". Meaning, more clients = more needs, more support, etc. And we have an anemic team to do this. I had become very moody, grumpy, unwilling to listen - a bit of a nightmare. It wasn't coming from a bad place, but I just wanted to get shit done and didn't have time for any extraneous chatter or "unimportant" details.

After fighting intermittantly with my cofounder and my wife, I decided I didn't want to be that way. I've burnt the candle on both ends long enough and I was out of wax. While I can't take the full month off like FD3SA is recommending, I significantly scaled back (for me) to only working 5.5 days a week and putting a big effort into working out at least 4 days a week. Also, spending quality time with my family, not just being in the same room while I stared at a laptop. Keeping a high priority on work, but also a similar priority on fun and on life in general. I've only been doing this for a couple of months and have seen a significant improvement on my productivity, a more harmonious working and family life, and just a better overall outlook on life.

There are a million great opportunities out there, especially in the tech space - but if you are burnt to a crisp and you are physically/mentally not in a good place, it's easy to not see them or to feel too defeated to want to tackle them. Take care of yourself - you'll appreciate it.