This sounds a lot like my situation, though I haven't since reading your comment managed to determine whether or not your hypothesis as to what's causing the crash periods for you matches my situation all that well. It's worth testing, at least, if we can find a means of doing so. Most of the work I try to do is creative, or involves me convincing others to help with something creative. Enthusiastic and detailed feedback tends to help; putting most of my effort into notes and not getting any feedback as I struggle to move into the writing/programming/etc phase tends to end in a crash. I haven't put much emphasis on the feedback part before now, but I do have a decent archive of timestamped notes/comments/forum discussions/IM conversations that I can probably search for evidence in favor of or against the hypothesis. I don't know what specifically you do, so I don't know if any of my writing/programming-related observations would be much use, but something that's struck me as worth investigating while writing this comment is how I and the only other person who seems to be following what I'm working on deliberately keep spoilers at a minimum when trying to talk about our projects, which I could see fitting the "insufficient reward for broad areas of effort" hypothesis ("I took some notes, but you'll have to wait until a date that may or may not ever come when the product is ready for beta review!" Is not as much fun as "So I decided that an evil mushroom is behind everything... can you figure out how this makes sense in context? ... Or offer some more details on the Dark Lord Dragomutton in return, at least?"). I feel like I might have missed the point entirely and gone off in an annoying direction. I do this often (I can think of 5 examples on LW rather quickly). So it'd help to know if I botched this up or not (Judging by the karma for those 5 examples, karma isn't a very good indicator of whether or not I communication fail.).