How I beat Social Anxiety to create a Startup
My name is Emma and I’m the co-founder of a new mental health focused startup called Myndr.
Myndr is a peer-to-peer collaboration app for those looking to overcome problems which arise when facing a mental health issue, such as anxiety or depression. We’re in the very early stages, but enjoying every second of the process as we move through the weeks of the tech accelerator Ignite.
Collaboration is something which I love! Everything from discussing new business ideas with other Entrepreneurs, right through to teaming up to build a dream theme park in Planet Coaster (yep I’m that geeky!). I think the sharing of ideas, supporting new goals and exchanging of knowledge is a really powerful thing.
I wasn’t always a fan of collaboration however. Rewind back to the year 1999 when I had just left school and started a media degree at University. I had already suffered silently with depression and anxiety since the age of 13, but just months into my new course I suffered a complete mental breakdown. I remember talking to my mum, telling her how I couldn’t cope being around other people. Just someone looking in my direction would trigger a debilitating panic attack. Thankfully she was massively supportive and helped me withdraw from University and seek help from my GP.
This was my first experience of a psychiatric hospital and my first time really opening up to how bad my situation was. Just a year previously I had secretly tried to take my own life because I couldn’t cope with the average 15 panic attacks I was having every day. Now, I couldn’t even open the door of our house to someone, instead preferring to hide under the bed whilst the panic took hold. I was just not able to carry out any type of basic human functioning and now my mind had imploded with the weight of anxiety.
My first doctor quickly told me that I had a severe social phobia (or Social Anxiety Disorder as its now known). Unfortunately, there wasn’t much understanding of it as there is now.
“Take these pills for the depression” he said. “You’ll soon grow out of the social phobia”.
That was as much treatment I got at that time.
I would come to spend the next 5 years at home as a recluse, only ever really talking with my parents and sister. I didn’t go out and I didn’t engage with anyone who came to visit. I tried of course to get treatment, most of which was very generalised anxiety workshops and meditation classes. I remember one therapist made me listen to whale song for 60 minutes whilst laying on a couch.
“How do you feel now?” he would ask me.
“Very relaxed” I would reply, “just don’t make me go outside where the people are!”.
Eventually I would start to read up more and more about Social Anxiety on the internet. Recovery via CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) was much more developed in the US, so I had many ‘internet friends’ passing me over tips about how I could do it on my own. This would be my first experience of collaboration. Learning from those who had gone before, as well as sharing with those who were about to embark on the same experience.
I made so many mistakes early on. There was so much information, some of it contradicting the other. The worksheets I would download didn’t make sense and I also lost the diary I’d been keeping when my computer hard drive gave up. It was a bit of a mess and so very hard on my own. It took me three years to make any kind of significant progress through something called graded exposure. This is a hierarchy system which is actually quite tricky to get right, but so effective when it is.
Goal setting soon became vital to me winning my battle. It was too much to say I wanted to beat Social Anxiety. I had to order it in a way where I could make mini challenges and work on them on their own — the fundamentals of graded exposure. But I’d also give myself side goals of ‘happy tasks’; things I new I loved which would help me to keep motivated. So I would draw one day and then set another goal to get better at a particular feature of drawing. Then the next would be to go out of the house and buy those super posh pens I’d seen online.
One of the first goals I ever set myself was to just walk down the street and give a stranger eye contact. It took months to get right, with many set backs and moments where I would want to give up. I’d managed to stay in contact with one fellow SA sufferer on a web group who told me to just keep at it. I did of course and was slowly moving on to harder and harder goals.
I also quickly realised that not all goals are worth fighting for. I tried ever so hard to to achieve the goal of clubbing with some new friends I’d made. I would fail every time at that one, but really… I just hated clubbing and so what was the point of the stress of something I didn’t have use for.
I was about 28 years old when I felt more like the me without anxiety when I was now out and about. I could sit in a room with people without panic and was able to navigate conversations without feeling the need to question myself every two minutes. Within a couple more years I felt confident enough to try my hand at work and was supported by The Prince’s Trust into self-employment. I did pretty good at that and even tried a bit of public speaking at some of their fund raising events. I even won an award for it.
I now consider myself a ‘recovering social phobe’. There are still moments when my anxiety likes to try and get its nasty little claws into me again. In those cases I try to re-examine my learnings, apply graded exposure and think about the bigger goals I want to achieve. I have also accessed talking therapies on the NHS and had to wait, like most, in endless waiting lines. I’m currently on an 18 month waiting list for health psychology due to a chronic illness. Its these times when I really need to dig deep into my past experiences and hold on to the wins I’ve made and remember that the fails were never truly that.
Now I’m here in our startup, looking to build an app which completely re-imagines mental health care for the future. If you’d like to check it out and create your first goal then head on over to Myndr.
