People Ask Me How I Obliterated Mental Illness. Here’s Exactly How.
You don’t need a new brain. You can alter the brain you have.
I lived in a torture chamber for most of my life.
The four walls of the chamber were my head. All I wanted was an escape. Every day felt like going to war. I didn’t trust myself to do the basics in life. A sudden meltdown during a meeting or social interaction was common.
Things got really dark in my 20s. After leaving behind a startup I loved, my world caved in. Crash! Bang!
I managed to overcome mental illness. It led me to write inspirational content online and reach millions of people. I posted a story recently on LinkedIn that referenced my battle with mental illness and it went viral.
My LinkedIn inbox lit up with people who also suffer from mental illness. They were begging me to know what worked. Mental illness is entirely curable. People like you win the war every day.
This article is a summary of the tools I used that you can use to escape, not if, but when mental illness affects you.
Write a list the same as this
I suffered from many varieties of mental illness, the main one being anxiety. The first thing I did is list down all the things that made me anxious. They included: elevators, meetings, flying overseas, dinners, romantic dates/women, and family confrontations.
After I had my list, I purposely put myself in each situation — once is not enough. I started to learn that getting in an elevator didn’t always make me anxious. If I took deep breaths, prepared myself mentally, and disconnected from the outcome, there were times where everything was fine.
Revelation: My illness told me I’d always have an anxiety attack near an elevator. The evidence from my experiments showed otherwise and produced the self-talk, “but I got through it this time!” What if mental illness is lying? What if mental illness is simply conditioned thinking? These two questions changed my reality.
Put yourself in the situations that make your mental illness real. Repeat until you get a tiny win that gives you hope. Then, work on what you can do to improve the situation.
What helped me the most was disconnecting from the outcome of each experiment. “If this elevator brings on an attack then who cares. They’re all strangers and don’t care about me one bit. You’ve got nothing to lose, pal, as things are already a disaster.”
Mental illness is invisible. Let it become visible.
That’s what kills me. Good people suffer the torture of mental illness in silence and we have no idea. What allows mental illness to win is that we let it remain invisible. If you want to crush mental illness then let it become visible. In my case, I started telling people I trusted about it.
The first person I ever told is my boss.
“Look I’ll come to the work dinner and do my best, but understand that the mental illness I’m fighting could mean that I need to leave early.”
After saying that I felt dirty. It felt like admitting I liked some kinky sexual fantasy. I immediately regretted telling him … that is, until he understood.
“You do the best you can mate. You’ll get through this because we’ve got your back. Even five minutes at the dinner is a huge win for you.”
When mental illness is invisible you feel alone. The lies you tell yourself slowly ruin your life and there’s no external party to evaluate those lies and go “hang on a second, pal.”
Make overcoming mental illness a team sport. Interrogate your mental illness. Take mental illness to trial and present the evidence in front of a judge. The lies mental illness tells are criminal.
Go to a live event that creeps you out
After the admission to my boss at work, I had a sudden sense of empowerment. Like, “I can freaking beat this thing.”
I don’t remember how but videos from Tony Robbins ended up in my Youtube feed. I downloaded his audiobooks and consumed a tonne of his stuff. He felt like an older father figure telling me, everything’s going to be okay son.
I became so obsessed I signed up for his live event. The first hurdle was flying from Melbourne to Sydney, alone, with my anxiety screaming at me in my head. Somehow, I arrived safely without the plane crashing and killing everybody on board in a fireball.
I took a double-decker train to a rundown motel full of cockroaches (all I could afford). I needed a full day in advance to process what was about to happen. I did long walks around the motel and tried to calm the anxiety. The next day I got up bright and early and walked to the stadium. The lines were huge. My anxiety started whispering at me.
Then the worst thing that could happen, did. The most popular kid from my high school walked up to me. “What are you doing here? Do you like this weird stuff, do you? I’m only here to support my mother. I’d never come to a lame event like this.”
I made up an excuse for being there. I panicked. He asked me to sit next to him. I purposely got lost in the stadium and we didn’t meet again.
Once inside the ice-cold room for Tony’s event, I got nervous. The instructions were explained. You had to dance. You had to constantly change seats. You had to jump up and down on call. It sounded weird and creepy. I felt stupid for wasting thousands of dollars. I decided to commit because I was already at rock bottom. “What if it works?”
For the next four days I jumped, screamed, danced and partied as if my life was about to be terminated by cancer. I was in such a state of euphoria that when I walked on fire as part of the event, and had visible burns, I couldn’t feel a thing. I didn’t even feel hungry.
Tony introduced me to a long list of new ideas. They were so far away from anything I’d been exposed to that mental illness’ winning streak was broken. Getting out of my comfort zone allowed new information to break through the barrier of mental illness that resisted all change to protect itself.
Takeaway: Go to an event like Tony Robbins’ “Unleash The Power Within.”
Learn about neuroplasticity
Mental illness occurs in the mind. I became obsessed with studying the mind after hearing Tony speak.
Originally I thought we are born with our mental programming. I thought once you had mental illness you were stuck with it and had to take pills to cure it. I quickly learned that we can completely rewire our brains. We can change our thoughts, which changes our reality.
If you think you can you’re right — that became my mantra.
The concept of neuroplasticity explains the science behind how neural pathways in the brain are made, and how parts of the brain can grow and change. You don’t need a new brain. You need to change the brain you have.
Takeaway: google neuroplasticity and learn everything about it.
See a scary psychologist
Psychologists were scary to me. The stigma I had is that seeing them meant I was broken. It goes on your medical records. If everybody finds out they’ll think you’re damaged goods and never talk to you again. If a potential employer finds out it could ruin your career.
That way of thinking is why we avoid getting professional help for mental illness. It’s, again, a lie. Getting professional help is necessary.
While self-learning can help somewhat, it’s not the same as seeing a professional who has spent a large part of their life understanding the brain and helping people in your situation. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent.
The feedback I got from the psychologist was that writing down what triggered my mental illness and seeking evidence to the contrary was perhaps the most powerful thing I did. By the end, he asked me to continue this practice and assured me we wouldn’t need to see each other again. I haven’t had to go back since. That’s how powerful crushing fear is.
Takeaway: seek professional help, always.
Analyze your childhood for clues
One psychologist I tried in the beginning (before finding the right one), introduced me to the inner child concept.
Essentially, every adult has an inner child living inside of us. The inner child is a representation of your childhood. The inner child doesn’t know the difference between adult events and childhood events. The inner child reacts to every event based on a childhood scenario.
I analyzed my childhood for answers. A few experiences popped up. In grade four I fainted in front of the entire school while singing in the choir. After I woke up there was blood everywhere and I had to have deep stitches across my entire chin. This is where the mistrust between me and my mind began.
Every day before school my dad would rush me to eat breakfast and get in the car. I never could eat calmly. This caused my relationship with food to be associated with anxiety. Food meant stress. As an adult, food turned into an eating disorder that made the effects of my anxiety worse.
Because of the fainting episode, all things medical-related became a huge fear. Blood tests, immunizations, studying the human body at school, talking about a disease over dinner — all triggered anxiety.
When you look back at the events of childhood, you will find some of the answers to mental illness there.
Go to the poorest part of your country
Mental illness is selfish.
We become obsessed with ourselves and our problem. One way to escape mental illness is to get perspective. I began going to the poorest parts of my hometown and volunteering at a homeless shelter.
Quickly, my silly little illness seemed stupid. There were people who had been raped or seen people die the night before or experienced horrific drug problems. All I wanted to do was help. Mental illness took a back seat. I had to focus on somebody other than myself. The homeless people would ask me for advice. I would offer solutions. Oddly, these solutions were ones I could use myself to recover from mental illness.
To be a hero to even one person can seriously shift your perspective on a selfish mental illness.
The war against mental illness can be won. I am proof. This is what worked for me: Experiences that prove the negative thoughts in your head are lies. Helping those worse of than you to see how selfish mental illness can be. Understand the basics of how the brain works. And definitely seek professional help. Mental illness is nothing to be embarrassed about. Mental illness is at an all-time high according to recent statistics, so it’s normal.
Make mental illness visible to obliterate it. Use every bit of courage you have to tell one person about it. Heal. Share your defeat. Then help others so we can break the cycle of mental illness together.
