I spent last week working a 4000 person music event. I was the New Camp manager and was in charge of 850 people for a week. I worked on average 16 hours a day.
When I was there I would only eat and drink only because I knew it was a thing my body needed, I had no internal reminder or desire to. Sometimes things would get fuzzy and I would realize I had not eaten yet that day. At one point I noticed that I had a hairband on my wrist without noticing, a hate the feeling of hairbands and normally I would take it off after about two hours but I had not noticed it for two days. I showered in my rings, I did not notice when I got bruised, sunburnt, and blistered. My boyfriend took a cold shower and did not notice until someone else mentioned that we had run out of hot water.
Coming home has been a strange experience. Everything feels like it is in sharp relief, I thought maybe they had repainted because the walls seemed so much brighter white, the bed seems unreally soft, the feeling of a hot shower strange and unfamiliar.
I spent a week completely outside of my body, I was entirely focused on my camp, my 850 charges, and getting to the next day.
I don’t think this is a good behavior to have long term. I would not call it dissociative though I suppose that would be a correct term for it. I think it falls near some spiritual experiences in the sense of purposely detaching yourself from your body, then having a greater love and respect once you return to it.
It does lead to the question why would anyone do drugs when they could just choose to work 16 hour shifts while suffering mild sleep depravation for a week to get the same effect.