Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain

When I was 34, I was laying in bed one night and noticed that muscles all over my body were twitching. It didn't go away. A month later I went to a neurologist in my hometown in the midwest for a workup that culminated in a EMG-NCV study (the neurologist doing that study asked if I liked the NY Yankees.. "I do not.. and I've definitely never heard of Lou Gehrig.. so let's get on with it.."). Ultimately he congratulated me on having no signs of ALS or any other neurodegenerative disease and told me to "live your life." He hadn't seen the widespread persistent muscle twitching I was experiencing before. Six months later, I went to another neurologist, this time at Stanford. She did another workup and said the same things as the first guy, except she added, "yeah, we see this fairly often." The diagnosis was "Benign Fasciculation Syndrome" (BFS), aka "we don't know what caused everything to start twitching or how to stop it, but it won't progress and kill you."

What really struck me was that 1) the midwestern neurologist seemed to have never seen symptoms like mine, whereas the Stanford neurologist had seen them often, and 2) the Stanford neurologist linked it to poorly managed anxiety. At the time I was five years into a data scientist role at a big tech company in the bay area (now it's two year later - the symptoms improved somewhat but are still there). I definitely had burnout and mental health problems and was in denial about them ("I have all these great perks, how could my work be causing my mental health issues?").

The best thing you can say about BFS is it isn't physically painful; I am definitely not equating it with the chronic pain issues that others have described on this thread, which seem much tougher. It's another one of those things that has no known cure (diet / lifestyle / mental health improvements help somewhat), is only vaguely understood ("your nerves are oversensitive"), is linked to mental health issues, and seems overrepresented in the bay area (maybe in other tech/urban centers too, I don't know). Two years in, I don't have any answers, just wanted to share in case it's helpful to anyone.