This breathing could be done discreetly, without people noticing. Take a deep breath, hold for four seconds, exhale, hold for four seconds, and repeat. In this session he taught me a breathing technique to help whenever I felt triggered with an anxiety attack. Sometimes as a protective mechanism, your brain associates fight or flight triggers with seemingly minor things, like walking through the front door of your work building. In caveman times, this was a useful response to danger signals such as an approaching saber-tooth tiger, but in modern times that same signal could be triggered by a manager sending you an email, telling you that your customer proposal’s not good enough and to get it re-written for Monday. ![]() I had a tight chest because when I was getting stressed, the muscles in-between my ribs were filling with blood and puffing my chest out, physically preparing me to run. ![]() He told me about the science behind my shooting pains, and why my body reacted the way it did. Session one – why this was all happening.And in that moment, I knew deep down everything was going to be okay. “You don’t look like you’re about to die.” He sat opposite me, took a deep breath and gave me a quizzical look. 'Steve Salvin.’ Apprehensively, I followed the psychiatrist’s voice into the room. What if this psychiatrist started worming through my memories, fishing out the demons in my head? Would I have to lay on a couch recounting my childhood as a bearded Freud trots around me, glancing down through spectacles? My mum had run away when I was two years old and I didn’t see her again until I was sixteen. My mind started shooting in all directions, worrying about the skeletons in my closet I’d have to reveal. To my surprise, I noticed that none of them actually looked crazy – in fact, they looked like ordinary people, just like me. So there I found myself, sitting nervously in a white waiting room, peering at all the faces of these other crazy people. I'd run out of excuses, and things had to change. My anxiety and stress had got so out of control that it was causing people around me to be unhappy. It wasn’t until my girlfriend pleaded with me one evening to go see the psychiatrist that I truly realised how bad things had got. One night I drove myself to hospital and waited in the car park, just in case I had a heart attack, so I could save the ambulances a trip to come and get me. The thing about avoiding a problem is that it doesn’t magically go away. A what! Are you having a laugh? Offended, I walked right out. I picked it up, peered at it and read the word. ‘Don’t tell me the obvious things, tell me the things that are wrong with me!’ One visit, the doctor looked at me and slid over a business card. Every time he said there was nothing wrong with me, and every time I’d storm out muttering under my breath. ![]() I went to the doctor a dozen times for blood tests and ECGs. When I went to bed at night, I found myself jolting upwards with heart palpitations, pacing up and down like a caged tiger and taking cold showers. I began popping Paracetamol and proudly had a massive bottle of Gaviscon on my desk that I sipped directly from the bottle every few hours to take away my heart burn. I started getting these weird pains in my chest, my fingers and arms. I wasn’t exercising much and gradually put on weight. It was work hard, play hard – and I felt on top of the world.īut then the cracks started to appear. To wind down after hours, I’d join my colleagues down the pub for drinks most nights, eating late. I was in the office every weekday from 8am – 8pm, and almost every Saturday. It was a great role with huge amounts of responsibility and I loved it. I was one year into my first start-up, deploying next-generation document management and workflow technology to help HBOS launch a new direct insurance business. And honestly, I’d never felt happier in my life. That’s how I used to think when I was 30. ![]() If you open up like that, you’re admitting weakness. You must have something seriously wrong with you to go see a shrink. It’s all white coats and crazy people, right?
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