I wish I knew then what I know now.

How many of you know the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling?

I first came across it at university when I saw it, framed, on my housemate’s bedroom wall. He told me his father had given it to him on his 18th birthday. I thought that was the coolest gift for a young man.

Little did I know that about twenty years later, the first line from that poem would haunt me: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...you will be a man, my son."

It haunted me because, for that to be true, the reverse also had to be true—if you couldn’t keep your head, then you wouldn’t be a man, my son.

On the surface, I’d like to think that for most of my time as a leader, people felt I was ‘keeping my head’. Sure, I had tough days, but for most of the time, I reckon people had no idea what was going on inside. I was making decisions, supporting my teams, fighting for resources and budgets, helping clients and partners grow their businesses, and generally doing all the things I needed to do.

But the inside story was different. The toll of appearing to ‘keep my head’, both emotionally and physically, proved too great. I burnt out.

It wasn’t that one day I just broke down like you see in the cinema. There wasn’t a spectacular blowout in the middle of the office or anything.

It was just that one day, and I can be super specific—it was Tuesday, 11 October 2022—my day started like any other day of the previous five years: with a surge of cortisol that woke me up into a monumental panic attack. A very typical start to the day.

The difference this time was that none of my usual calming techniques worked, and I felt beyond overwhelmed. Enough was enough.

Some of the thoughts I had pushed away over the previous few years came back strong. They were thoughts that told me how easy it would be to end all the suffering.

LinkedIn isn’t the place to share the dark details of those thoughts. Suffice it to say, had my wife not stepped in at that moment, I would almost certainly not be writing this now.

She, too, had had enough of me trying to ‘man up’ through the last five years and was convinced that either the anxiety or my own hands would kill me.

So she emailed my boss and calmly explained that I had been suffering from panic attacks for a long time and needed some time away. At once, I felt that my career was over and the most relaxed I’d felt in years. It was a strange feeling. But she saved my life.

During my time away from work, I delved deeply into understanding why we experience anxiety and depression. My therapist told me that rather than being broken, I was, in fact, in perfect working order and that my nervous system was behaving perfectly in line with what it was designed to do.

I promise I heard more than ‘you are perfect’!

She told me that my nervous system was acting exactly as it should. She explained that it was a simple formula: when core beliefs developed as a young child clash with a reality that’s incompatible with those beliefs, the mind and body can react as if under attack, triggering Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn.

Ok—it’s a lot more complicated than that, but simple is good here.

She explained that if anyone had lived the life I had lived and experienced what I had experienced, they too would have suffered in the way I had. Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn. She helped me rewrite those core beliefs (that takes time and effort, people)!

We have evolved to function in this way.

We just haven’t evolved quickly enough to adapt to the new, technologically noisy, separate-from-nature, separate-from-each-other world in which we now live. But that is a whole other thing…

At the same time as working on my mind (core beliefs, etc.), she also explained how anxiety physically worked. She opened my eyes to the awesome world of biohacking the nervous system.

And it changed my life. I haven’t suffered a panic attack since.

I’ve bought an ice bath and built a sauna—check out the work of Professor Susanna S?berg.

I went back to work. I was different. I felt like that Japanese concept of Kintsugi!

When an opportunity arose to leave my job, continue my healing, and spend precious time with my little daughters and my awesome wife—I took it.

I love the concept of Kintsugi. I am the same me as before the panic attacks started, just a little different.

In my view, I’m now happier, more at peace, and more in tune with who I really am, what I want out of life, and how I need to deal with challenging situations that life will always throw at me.

I’m more connected to nature and my place in it. I’m more connected to the people who really matter and the things that really matter.

I still want to work hard and do things that matter, but I am much more comfortable with my ‘why’.

I now know how important it is to understand my mental health and how, if I invest in it like I would any other aspect of life, it can make me a stronger, better, more capable father, husband, and leader at work.

Thank you for reading this far. Please look after yourself. Please invest in yourself.?

And please don’t judge anyone who suffers from mental health issues—their bodies are responding perfectly to the challenges they face, even if our modern world wasn’t designed for it.