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From panic attacks at work to life at the beach and soaking in onsen.

How living a location-independent digital nomad lifestyle helped me cope with my burnout.

There was a time when everything besides work was meaningless to me.

During work, I was constantly on fire.

I worked long, 14-16 hour days, seven days a week.

I felt useless when I didn't work, and my thoughts spun.

I'm used to crunching for a few weeks as a software engineer.

Sometimes, you must go the extra mile to release something great, right?

When a few weeks turned into months and then a year, it wasn't fun anymore.

With the constant stress at work, over time, I burned out.

I started to have panic attacks at work from simple tasks like opening my inbox.

I felt exhausted after just a few hours of work.

Where was the energy I had in the beginning?

The worst, though, was my lousy sleep, thrashing in the sheets the whole night.

I couldn't go on like this.

At some point, I had to admit that I needed to change something.

I had to stop feeding my founder burnout.

I had to slow down.

When I slowed down at first, it got worse.

Intense anxiety hit me when I didn't work more than eight hours a day.

Depressions made me sad and numb when I dared to turn the computer off during the weekends.

It was a long journey getting back to myself and living an emotionally stable life again.

As an entrepreneur, I strongly felt that I was my business.

Without me, business wouldn't be able to continue existing.

And I wasn't able to exist outside of it.

But if I thought hard, I could recognize that being an entrepreneur wasn't my whole identity.

I was also a gamer, acrobat, climber, surfer, diver, craftsman, artist, cook, and digital nomad.

Without my digital nomad lifestyle, all these identities would have died with me long ago.

Today, I want to share three ways that being a digital nomad saved my life.

If this story sounds familiar to you, let's talk.

If you want to get to the next level but don't know where to start, I can help you.

Ready for your business to run itself?

>>> Get on a call with me.

Three Benefits of Living Location-Independent

As a Digital Nomad, I Can Choose the Best Environment For Me.

Spending a lot of time on flights and the road can sometimes be a pain.

This pain is very small compared to the right location's positive impact on me.

Living location-independent, I can change my environment when it no longer serves me.

I can choose a location that supports the needs that I have right now.

I started following the fun in all aspects of my life.

I feel best when I have mountains and the ocean close to me.

So, I started living most of my life:

Being only 2min by foot away from a beautiful beach to watch the sunset.
Going for a walk in the jungle when things got overwhelming.
Soaking in Japanese onsen for an hour before starting my day.
Taking a day off to surf spontaneously when my thoughts were spinning.

For this, I had to shift from an employee to an investor mindset, which is another story.

Besides having nature close, the time zone also profoundly impacts me.

I started to align my time zone with my best work hours.

I'm an early bird, so getting up early while living in Mexico to have meetings with Europe worked great for me.

I could then spend the afternoons (from 1 pm) at the beach.

This way I spent my most creative hours on work, which halved the time I needed for most tasks.

As a Digital Nomad, I Can Manage My Work-Life Balance More Freely.

This clicks into my belief that AI taking my job is a good thing.

The advances in automation free up time that I can fill with meaningful experiences.

Automation and asynchronous work are necessary when running a 100% location-independent business.

Having these in place, I could spend more time with my partners, friends, and myself.

Oh yes, I can again spend days alone with my thoughts, doing nothing without feeling guilty for it.

Luxury has an entirely different meaning for me now.

The digital nomad community is more open-minded and understanding.

During my travels, I met countless beautiful people.

A lot of them are more open-minded and forward-thinking than most sedentary people I met in my life.

Living outside of the norm makes you rethink some of our worldviews.

I found many new friends, teachers, mentors, and companions among them.

With some of them, I developed deeper bonds within a month than with the people I went to school with for 13 years.

I learned that living sedentary limits your social support network.

Having such a robust social safety net changed everything for me:

I have more people to talk to and get advice from when I need it.
I always have a place to crash all around the world if shit hits the fan.
I don't feel lonely despite finding myself in places where I don't know anyone.

Why is This Relevant For You?

With this article, I wanted to give you a look behind the curtains.

Not everything is going great all the time.

My journey with depression, anxiety and burnout is not over yet, even though I have come a long way.

Don't believe the lives people show on Instagram.

It is only a limited lens on what is going on in their lives.

Second, I wanted to show you how impactful freedom can be.

You're the only person who can create and grasp this freedom for yourself.

And I am sure you have the freedom to live location-independent and manage your time best for you.

There is just something blocking you from actually using that freedom.

Send me a message with your excuse why you're not free yet.

Or if you're already free, how do you use that freedom?

Simply shoot the message on Linkedin.

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3 Ways the Digital Nomad Lifestyle Healed My Burnout