It's a Sunday morning in May 2008, and I wake up to find I'm unable to move.
I'm in my late thirties, three years into building an e-learning business I started with friends. Twenty people work for us, and our clients include BP, other blue-chip brands and the UK government.
And my body has stopped.
Looking back, it shouldn't have been a surprise.
For years before that, from my consulting days onwards, I'd checked my messages constantly and made myself available in the evenings and at weekends. When the BlackBerry arrived, it felt like a godsend and a drug.
In my book I put it like this: 'I showed up as seemingly infallible, utterly reliable. To a fault.'
Underneath it sat a belief I couldn't see at the time. If I wasn't always on, I'd be found out. And if I was found out, the whole house of cards of my life would come tumbling down.
You may have played out your own version of this.
You're the one who picks up what others drop. When something goes wrong late on a Friday, you're the one who gets the call, and maybe part of you is glad it's you.
I call it being the last line of defence.
It feels like mattering. Being needed is a kind of proof that you count.
There's research on what that role costs.
Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant looked at how work gets done across more than 300 organisations. In most of them, 3 to 5% of people accounted for 20 to 35% of the collaboration that added real value.
So far, so flattering.
Then they looked more closely at the most sought-after people in 20 of those organisations. They had the lowest engagement and career satisfaction scores of anyone.
The researchers describe a cycle that starts out virtuous and turns vicious. The more reliable you are, the more you're asked. Eventually you become the bottleneck, and the work you're best at starts to drain you.
The study covered the people everyone leans on at every level, not only senior leaders. I imagine you recognise yourself in it anyway.
What I couldn't see in 2008 was this.
All that holding everything for everyone was doing something for me. As long as I was the one everyone needed, I didn't have to feel how scared I was that, if people really knew me, they wouldn't think much of me.
The reliability was armour.
I was stripped of it that Sunday when my body stopped. It was the clearest message my nervous system had managed to send, after years of smaller ones I'd brushed aside.
I'd rather yours didn't have to be that loud.
Even now, nearly 20 years later, the pull still comes. But I've become wiser to it.
I notice the early signs, like feeling fraught and irritable, or a tightness in my head. That's my cue to slow down.
The first thing I ask myself is, 'Is this really an emergency?' That helps me see what's actually happening, and gives me the option, and the break, to say no.
Here's something small to try this week.
Notice one thing you pick up that someone else could have held. Before you pick it up, ask yourself what would actually happen if you didn't.
Then leave one of them untouched, and see who steps in.
Most of the time, someone does. You get a little of yourself back.
So check in with yourself. Of everything you're carrying right now, which would you most like to put down?
I write More to Play For every Tuesday for successful men at midlife who've built the career and want the next decade to count. If you'd like the next one, you can subscribe below.
Matt
Sources: Cross, Rebele and Grant, 'Collaborative overload', Harvard Business Review (2016)