Growing up, one of my favorite sitcoms was Growing Pains, with Alan Thicke’s character Dr Jason Seaver as psychologist, serving as patriarch, provider, trying to be the best parent he could. As such, from an early age, I was drawn into the field, and by my collegial studies, I immersed myself in psychology and sociology as well.

Transparency

I’vep discussed anxiety, depression, addiction & such themes in my journey as an entrepreneur – both in my 3rd book The 10-year Overnight Success & on in my writings here and on TechCrunch before “mental health” was in vogue. I take pride that a manifestation of “servant leadership” and managing via “stakeholder mindset” means giving a damn about my employees, colleagues, teammates, etc. It’s like DEI: as a hashtag & trend, it’s pointless, but if your communications style & culture it engenders creates a positive workplace, then yes: magic can happen through diversity, inclusion, equity.

If we have had success developing a great culture and retaining so much talent, it’s because of a legitimate desire to listen, talk and help. My colleagues can talk to me about anything, but I realize most bosses are not like this and since many people’s issues stem at least partly from work, then you may not be able to talk to just anyone. While the human resources department is in theory there to assist their human capital, reality is HR works for the firm and does not really have an employee’s best interests at heart. These are facts.

These dynamics have helped WatchMojo get to where it is (despite its weaknesses & shortcomings, which all organizations have). But the same way that social workers, nurses and professionals in mental health can attest, it takes a toll on you when you’re there for others. As an employer, you’re ultimately responsible for the financial and mental well-being of your team members. Not complaining, again, just stating facts.

A Day in Infamy

After tearing my ACL playing soccer at a futbol tournament in Dubai on October 21 2021 – recorded and aired on YouTube, natch – I effectively lost what was my main outlet for stress (and let’s face it, anger management). Locked down during Covid and pushing myself harder than ever, I experienced quite the roller coaster ride for a period of time in 2022/23. To some, I was fine and the same; but others amongst my family, friends and close colleagues could sense something was off. My “salvation” throughout was actually work, as I used it as an outlet to stay focused… not that differently from a musical artist who may crank out their best works while struggling with inner demons & uncertainty.

In any case, what I believed to be physical ailments were in fact rooted in psychological struggles, and when you combine the two, I ultimately was undergoing severe physiological challenges. People who know me professionally or saw me compete in sports viewed me as a warrior and machine who could undergo and withstand tremendous amounts of stress and somehow come out stronger… but we are all humans and if a car needs fine-tuning and an oil change, then I assure you no human is immune from this reality. I was not. And frankly, I am happy that I underwent this change in my mid 40s.

Walking the fine line between Anxiety and Depression

Entrepreneurs –  like creatives, entertainers, athletes, professionals from all walks of life really for that matter – straddle the fine line between anxiety or depression, even if many never recognize that they may suffer from one, the other, or both. Depression generally refers to a single illness with many symptoms (even if it affects victims differently); anxiety includes a group of conditions.

“Only the paranoid survive” is a popular quote from Intel’s co-founder Andy Grove. Ironic, given Intel’s recent challenges. In any case, paranoia and anxiety around the unknown and worrying about possible scenarios is as much part of the entrepreneurial spirit & journey as anything else. 
– Paranoia is more specific & involves feelings of distrust and suspicion of others without enough evidence to support your concerns.
– Anxiety is generalized worrying and a diagnosable mental health condition. The following is a summary of my experiences with health anxiety disorder, or hypochondria and includes my “education” (which refers to research, findings, and as a perennial student extensive discussions with therapists who specialize in different fields of psychology and psychiatry). Please consult a professional if you need assistance and conduct your own research, without “falling victim to Dr Google.”

Most Things at Opposite Ends of the Spectrum Are Also Connected

In my research and writings on 20th century history, I noted that while nazism and communism were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, they were also tangentially connected as they share some traits: authoritative, extremism, violence, lack of freedom and rights, etc.

Similarly, anxiety and depression are both polar conditions, but they not only share some traits, they can feed off one another to create a heightened sense of fear, dread and despair.  

Throughout my life, I channeled my anxiety well, and it manifested itself as excitement, energy and drive. Anxiety and paranoia built WatchMojo. Depression can be channeled to fuel creativity and perhaps drive philanthropy and charity, but IMHO, it is generally a more challenging sentiment to overcome and channel positively (i.e. John Keats and the Romantic era of English literature created artistic gems, but did little to help the creators). 

Growing up and until now, I often hear that I am “energetic, excited,” etc. but I never recall anyone suggesting I was anxious (let alone depressed). Ironically, I certainly expressed feelings of depression and doubt, especially earlier on in my career and especially in WatchMojo’s early days when every light at the end of the tunnel was in fact an oncoming train!

I concede that I may not be clinically depressed (i.e. my serotonin levels are fine, I am sure!) but with the benefit of hindsight and my experiences, I understand if a psychologist would suggest that my energy and excitement are in fact rooted in anxiety. To me, with the right mix of creative influences (music), manifestations of my interests (travel, cooking) & stirred up by exercise (3 times per week for 20+ years), “anxiety” served as an angel of sorts, a guiding light. But once I left futbol with my ligament in Dubai, I was a ticking time bomb, with feelings of depression serving as a demonic weight that pulled me into a dark abyss.

Anxiety vs Panic Attacks

After tearing my ACL, I stopped exercising but took physiotherapy seriously. I took up swimming and found myself in the best physical shape of my life, but I didn’t… “see it.” Psychologically, I was bummed about losing soccer. Being 44 and not a professional athlete, undergoing reconstructive knee surgery didn’t seem enticing. I just wanted to regain my activities of daily life (ADL). I recognized that the level of futbol I was putting myself through was not sustainable and a recipe for further injury. I was intense in soccer as I was in business (if not more).

The second Covid wave shut down pools, and despite having a decent gym setup, I just sulked and focused on work: WatchMojo mainly, but after having sold 25% of WatchMojo, I decided to pay it forward and support entrepreneurs. I do not for one second regret that, and power law suggests that the winners will reward that risk handsomely. But financial gain wasn’t the goal, helping entrepreneurs succeed was. Put simply, I did not properly insulate myself from the entrepreneurs’ own journey and challenges. I took/take everything personally. Exacerbating this were letting frivolous regulatory non-threats take over my common sense:
– Quebec’s increasingly backwards language laws & its effects on my team,
– the government changing Canadian Content (Cancon) requirements, etc.
were some examples, neither which were pertinent, let alone material to our operations.

When the era of ZIRP (zero interest rate phenomenon) ended, it created a market pullback that led to our first ever down year in 2022, in our 17th year, mind you). But having just brought investors on our cap table, I felt a sense responsibility, even if I had zero control over the causes of the pullback. Ultimately, there’s no sense in lying: what really tired me out was people doing things that I didn’t condone – and letting these things affect you when they should not – it gets to you. My main source of frustration was the betrayal and callousness of people. Eventually, I realized that I didn’t need to ley anyone and everyone in my sphere – especially if I’d subsequently feel let down.

When said and done, my nervous sympathetic system was shaken, leading to an anxiety attack. 

History Rhymes

My father experienced a panic attack in his 40s. He was fine, but took medication to calm his nerves. I never liked the idea of taking medication. Ironic, since as someone who’s had zero issues relying on wine, beer, vodka, scotch – you get the idea – to take off the edge, this was where I drew the line. But more on that later, as addiction plays a “supporting role” in anxiety and depression.

Anxiety attacks tend to have clear triggers and last longer, panic attacks occur suddenly and unexpectedly and typically only last for a few minutes). 

In life, bad things happen. I used to say “if you wake up to good news, don’t let it get to your head, because something bad is going to happen… and if you get bad news, don’t overthink it, because things could be worse.” The 2006-12 period was hard, and the subsequent “successful” 2013-onwards years came with their share of headaches, heartbreaks and hassles. Navigating fair use gave me PTSD. Trying to accommodate and appease every single team member gave me heartburn.

Fight or Flight

Throughout it all, I had music to warm my soul, wine to numb my senses & futbol to strengthen my bones and muscles. After my knee injury put a kibosh on my athletic outlet, I was cooped up inside during Covid and immersed myself into work. When you’re stressed, your body reacts in a fight or flight response. With exercise, your pores literally serve as a filter to wash away the anxiety. In that sense, humans can channel their anxieties in a positive, constructive manner. I went from channeling anxiety into energy & excitement to letting my anxiety rise in heat by feeling down and increasingly depressed. With no outlet and stress factors piling up, your body – and mind – can turn into pressure cooking that is bound to burst.

Top 10 Hyperchondriacs

It’s abundantly clear to me now that I from my early 20s to mid 40s, I suffered from hyperchondria, or as the psychologists & psychiatrists refer to it, health anxiety disorder (hum, FWIW, I much rather hyperchondria than “health anxiety disorder” unless the goal is to amplify it; it helps that hypochondria sounds like the name of a Def Leppard classical music symphony I’d love to produce!)

Extremely driven and creative people tend to be fueled by ambition, and to many, ambition is softened and heightened by addiction: throughout the 2010s as WatchMojo grew (and with it came more challenges, risks, threats, etc) I would turn to cooking, music, futbol, and wine.  

Lessons and Takeaways

The foundation of living a good & healthy life is simple in theory:

In fact, 50% of your near-term issues can be solved at least temporarily through proper hydration, sleep, and breathing. Nutrition and exercise provide short-term relief no doubt, but those are more long term commitments and priorities. But to quote GI Joe, “knowing is half the battle.” For a laymen to have “figured out” fair use & copyright laws, it was humbling to so misdiagnose myself physically and psychologically. I didn’t need to read Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment” – I lived it.

The human body is actually incredibly resilient, but if you let your mind run amok, you think you are on the verge of breaking down, or dying. It’s certainly true that you only start living when your ego dies.

In my case, as stress & anxiety levels rose with each triggering event: my body was receiving body blow after body blow, and my mind would overthink the possible repercussions, driving me down in a spiral with no end. There were no knock-out blows like one experiences following the trauma of abuse, an accident, or a life-altering crime committed – but like an onion being peeled in reverse, the layers upon layers would feel like bricks, eventually wearing you down.

I had to go through hell to find my own xanadu. I just took the scenic route.

For me, some of the fear I had with speaking to a psychologist was the concern to slide into a reliance on medication, which is the field of psychiatry. Growing up, I didn’t even like to take Tylenol or Aspirin. With a super addictive personally, I recall developing a reliance on pain killers after removing my wisdom teeth in 2004, to the extent that I knew I had to stop cold turkey before opening that second bottle of pills. Knowing my pattern with alcohol, I knew that prescription drugs – legal in theory – were the last thing I needed to become addicted to and use as a crutch.

Once you’re in a spiral, even insignificant items can snowball into an anxiety attack. Symptoms of an accelerated heart rate & elevated blood pressure were psychosomatic but ultimately triggered my Achilles heel – hypochondria (aka anxiety disorder). From there, even though medical tests and conversations with doctors assured me that physically I was fine, my boundaryless imagination – which helped me tremendously but now I believed were going to kill me – led me down dark path where I needlessly worried about:
– an elevated heart rate (my resting heart beat was fine), 
– to white coat hypertension (I was always 120/80),
– to worries about cancer (with symptoms really just caused by dehydration), and 
– ultimately concerns that my organs were failing me. 

It’s almost comical, were it not a bit tragic. But, perspective is key. Most people would love it if “this” was their “life changing event.”

What I believed to be physical ailments were in fact rooted in psychological complexes (in Farsi, “oghdeh”) and insecurities. When you combine the two, I was undergoing severe physiological issues amplified by a drastic reduction in stress management outlet: from playing soccer thrice to sitting there and upset about these external forces – headwinds, so to speak.

So why open up?

For one, “writing helps me release the crazy within.” If you don’t channel your inner thoughts and demons, they consume me.

Second, privilege: we think we’re alone when we’re not. The VP who is gunning for a promotion can’t exactly upon up like this. So part of my own journey was in recognizing my privilege.

Third, there’s empathy and compassion: people who know me professionally or saw me compete in sports viewed me as a warrior machine who could undergo and withstand tremendous amounts of stress and somehow come out stronger… but we’re all humans. If a car needs fine-tuning and an oil change, then I assure you no human is immune from this reality. 

The Glass is Always Half Full – if you choose to see it as such

I like to think that at least, my wife and daughter would at the time laugh it off and humour me… but the guilt I feel for worrying them then took its toll. That’s really what drove me to properly speak to professionals: psychologists, psychiatrists, hypnotists – you name it. I was consumed with guilt (even more than shame). While there are a dozen plus areas of psychology one can pursue, to really summarize it, in my “education” I concluded that ultimately such fields can be broken down into two (2) distinct approaches, 

  • one focuses on experiences (usually childhood and adolescence but technically at any time) that cause trauma and shock, which if left unattended and unresolved could snowball into much bigger problems over time when amplified through professional experiences, expectations we set for ourselves etc. I’m not sure if this is “psychotherapy” and I welcome any professionals to correct my terminology… and in fact, I would not mind someone reading my subsequent deeper dive if I proceed with it as I would not want to misname or mischaracterize anything etc. This was NOT my problem area as I had a fairly benign, mundane and uneventful childhood in this regard… but imagine extreme experiences of rape, physical/verbal abuse etc.
  • the other, cognitive behavior therapy, are more behavioral things that our “Nature” pre-programs in us, and our “Nurture” (using philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s framework) amplify. This, 100%, was my issue.

It may be counter-productive and even dangerous if one needs the latter but seeks the former, and vice versa. This is why sometimes well-intentioned mental health professionals with otherwise near perfect reviews get the occasional bad review, etc. So I also learned when and how to know if someone was (not so much leading me down a dangerous path) not getting me where I needed to be.

Either way, the key is at least reflecting on 
1) what ails you, 
2) what you want help with, and 
3) then asking others to be referred to people who can play a role in helping you get through whatever it is that you are experiencing. 

Those are two VERY different approaches since for me, if I need a CBT specialist, spending hours discussing if I was assaulted as a child (for example) is just going to prove frustrating; when I need to open up about other things and adopt a different approach. Conversely, someone who was raped by a family member may not have CBT issues, but just needs to discuss that and get the appropriate help and counsel.

Turning the Page

The silver lining is even though I was always a present and active parent, I learned to really prioritize
– being a good husband,
– a supportive father,
– a good son,
– decent sibling… and yes,
– then being a great boss and entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship is a mindset, it’s not a 9-to-5 gig. But, my work life is just business – or as my dad would say, busy-ness. I was always operating at 200 miles per hour, working some 80 hours per week (still do, but I now just view work differently, as a series of hobbies to develop my skills and pursue interests I have). I live in Montreal, a pretty chill place where people “work to live,” and “don’t live to work” as they would in NY, the Bay Area, or London.

Born That Way, Yoda Was Not

At our old office, my colleagues placed a sticker of Yoda on my office door. But Yoda or Buddha weren’t born zen. You have to work at life, you have to endure hardships and overcome setbacks. When Mel Gibson said that he had “nothing to lose because humans fear humiliation” and he had suffered it in droves, I understood fully what he meant.

Stop the Self-Flagellation Mate 

The first – and really only – step was to stop beating myself over this, or anything really. This isn’t limited to entrepreneurs, you can be a ballerina or accountant reading this and be nodding along, getting teary-eyed wondering why you keep beating yourself up. 

If it wasn’t this then, it was something before. Many things. Everything. All the things. Today, I don’t want to say I don’t care about anything as that’s not true, but I really do not let anything get to me.

The only GAP you need to know

Gratitude and Appreciation start with Perspective. But sound bites alone don’t get you through tough times. The key with any help you seek is sticking to a system that keeps you in check. 

When I returned to Greece in 2024 after being (& coming across as) anxious in 2022, one of wife’s family members said “last time, you were like a Cessna, now you are a jet again…” – most people would take the Cessna in a heartbeat. For me, 

  • Relativism Works. I really have nothing to complain about, and don’t. But I also think of relativism in time: right now, what do I have to complain about? Some other guy may have spent jail time for a crime; I may have been in purgatory in my head, but I can live with it and channel my experience to better enjoy myself right now.
  • Value Yourself: False modesty, humility etc. are good, but you have to know your own value and respect yourself. What you say is not just humility, your inner soul is listening and if your subconscious is guided down a dark path, then that is when depression kicks in and can take normal levels of anxiety into overdrive.

Perhaps only the paranoid survive, but if you want to keep your sanity, then as my older brother says: “deneige quand il neige” (clear the snow when it snows) and enjoy the journey.

We really are insignificant creatures on this tiny speck of a planet in the universe, we may as well as enjoy ourselves while here.