From OCD to Launching my Fitness Startup and Getting Married (thanks Headspace)
With my 26 years of age, I’m quite the ordinary guy. A violin-student-turned-startup founder, I’ve worked successfully as a self-taught internet marketer, selling affiliate products for a living.
Making a two-person team together with my friend, we’ve been doing this for 4+ years. It paid the bills, allowed me to afford many things, took me, together with my wife, on a nomadic adventure (fiancée at the time).
But if you poke my story deeper though, it doesn’t really read like a postcard.
I’m low on focus, can hardly contain my enthusiasm, get freaked out often and get depressed easily. My emotions run wild, I react reflexively, everything gets perpetually fueled by my racing thoughts.
Add to this chronic and casually resurfacing OCD I’ve almost grew up with, and you can understand how anxiety episodes are not particularly outlandish for me, but rather something I’ve known all too intimately over the years.
But there is something that Andy from Headspace helped me understand. I have since restructured the relationship with my mind, changing, effectively, how I react to thoughts and feelings. In lack of better words, it properly transformed my life.
I started Headspace in order to cope with relationship difficulties
Sharing this openly seems rather surreal. But then again, once things stop bothering you on a more personal level, you approach them with ease. Talking about everything, all of the sudden, feels eventful enough for you to appreciate it, but otherwise distant enough and not able to bother you.
When I met my lovely wife for the first time, we kind of clicked instantly. The initial 5 or 6 months of our relationship were unicorns galloping across rainbows. And that’s putting it vanilla-free, trust me.
But then, all of a sudden, the mind starts to walk familiar patterns. Unpleasant thoughts, fear of uncertainty, a garden variety of jealousy, possessiveness and obsessive thinking.
Still madly in love, this affected our relationship nonetheless.
And that’s how I came across Headspace. Cannot remember my initial Google queries that led me to discovering it, but they were probably connected with obsessive thinking. Or how to “get rid of it” (as I used to believe)
The beginning was uneventful, but then things started to change
I remember falling in love with the Headspace interface, and moreover with the light approach to solving my problem.
Getting rid of thoughts, as I quickly realized, was not the goal. Instead, I went on to learn healthy habits, bringing myself more frequently in the here-and-now and re-framing the way in which I was to approach both thoughts and feelings.
Headspace — to use my vocabulary from the past — was working.
Soon enough, I started to cross-learn the patterns of though. By focusing on the breath, or by noting thoughts and feelings, I came to understand how to deal with unpleasant ones, and how to differentiate in the first place so I don’t get caught up in all too familiar patterns.
This wasn’t about crossing things off my list, but rather approaching each moment as a chance to do things differently. To be aware, to allow feelings to come and go, to allow thoughts to come and go.
I learned to sit in peace with anxiety, to rest comfortably with possessiveness and jealousy. And by doing so their grip became ever more loose, and the frequency with which they appeared ever more sporadic.
I learned to recognize resistance, and acceptance naturally surfaced. But putting such processes in words doesn’t do them justice.
The intellectual part is one thing, but the experiential completely another. So much so that a new world of possibilities opens up. The frequency and potency of unpleasant thoughts and feelings shrinks and dissipates till you can hardly remember how miserable you once felt.
Headspace is about cherishing the moment, and continually doing the things that took you to the top of the mountain
For otherwise, you start rolling back. And this wisdom is probably the biggest gift that Headspace has ever gave me. To learn that each moment is a change to train your mind and be at peace with yourself, or return to old habits and decide to be overwhelmed.
And this is how I managed to overcome the obstacles in my relationship, proposed to the love of my life, and started our happily ever after 5 months ago. It’s how I said farewell to OCD, and nearly forgot how unpleasant anxiety can sometimes feel.
It’s how I managed to create the fitness start-up with my friend, while financial worries and the clock of grown-up life were tik-taking behind my shoulder. The same circumstances that would have led to some really unpleasant moments otherwise.
That’s how I managed to stay focused and stick with the things that work. Instead of chasing every opportunity (like most startup owners do), I’ve kept with my SEO practice for growing the brand with conten, no matter how trivial it seems when compared to other established competitors.
So let’s end this post with a revelation I frequently swear by- It’s not about creating manufactured emergency that you must change this or that. No. It’s about embracing each moment as a chance to approach things differently. With ease, at peace with yourself, recognizing how habits take time to learn, and being comfortable with the way things currently are. The here-and-now is all that we have.
