How education and conversation changed the way I view anxiety

Mystic7 YouTube star, Brandon Martyn, gets real about mental health

A couple of years ago, I had a moment that essentially changed the way I look at everything. I had a really bad experience in an airport and had developed clinical anxiety from it. While struggling with depression for the first time ever, things got really bad. I had to take time off of work for the first time since I began my YouTube career in 2013. But I discovered as I was going through this stressful time, I really wanted to reach out to others.

I made a community discord server where people could join in and chat about things to support each other. Then I wondered if there was a better, more optimized way to do it.

That’s where Willow came from—a communication and resource hub promoting personal well-being and mental health awareness. I’m a solutions-oriented person. I like to wholly understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind something so I can offer the best possible solution.

For me, understanding and chatting with others about shared struggles has been the most helpful. Educating myself on anxiety and depression and having conversations with people about how they’ve been able to mitigate their depression symptoms or anxiety episodes has been key. Education and conversation are essential.

For quite some time, I have been obsessed with what makes a successful person successful, and not just financially because that’s just one aspect of it, but long-term success. I’m talking about success in life, happiness and overall life satisfaction.

Something that I’ve realized is our mental health and well-being is so imperatively important to our success in the business world, long-term, and to our lives. It’s the single most important thing anyone could do for themselves. And while the term ‘pandemic’ started getting heavily used this year, it’s no secret that we’ve had a pandemic of mental health and anxiety and suicide rising over the past decade that we don’t quite comprehend.

Having a better understanding of why this is happening is not only important to me, but important to the overall development of our society.

I think there’s a stigma around men’s mental health. I’m a guy so I’m pushing the message that it’s OK not to be OK and everybody goes through stuff. It’s OK to have emotions and feel them and it’s better to process them rather than bottle them up. An initiative like Movember is super important and a really cool thing to get behind because it really truly gets the conversation going.

For those out there who might be struggling with mental health, open up and find people you can confide in. A big part of the stigma is this looming assumption people might think you’re crazy or nobody really cares about you or what you’re going through. But the truth is, there are always people around you and if they aren’t in your personal life, you can find really good supportive community people online that you can reach out to.

It’s very easy to misdiagnose something. Each person is very different. The more you know about your situation and what you’re going through, the more likely you are to find the solution that fits you. There’s no one size fits all solution for anxiety and depression.

There’s a lot of value in having the ability to soul search enough to understand what you’re going through. I had really bad anxiety when I first developed it and I thought it was a heart problem because I would have chest pains and soreness, but in reality, nothing was really happening to my heart. And that would make my anxiety worse. I was in situations where I’d be in a full blown panic attack and it would just spiral out of control because of what I was feeling and thinking. I got tested for heart problems and they determined it was anxiety. 

Self-care is another great way to keep mental health in check. I try to work out every day if I can and eat as healthy as possible because what you put in your body fuels you for the day. While I often preach self-care to others, it’s sometimes difficult for me when I’m working 12 to 18 hour days. But I do try sleep at least six to eight hours a night and wake up around the same time every morning. You’ve got to keep your Circadian Rhythm in check. 

Every Friday I take a full or half-day off and go out and spend it with my girlfriend for minimal work and maximum enjoyment. And since this has been an extra stressful year, I made an intensive effort to focus solely on the things that bring me joy and spark my interest rather than dwelling on things that trigger me or make me mad. I think it’s all too easy to fall into the cycle of focusing your time and energy on things that stress you out, make you anxious, resentful or annoyed. We have this thing called loss aversion, which means negative things are weighed as heavier or more significant in our minds than positive things. Be aware of it and make the conscious effort to focus on all the good. You’ll be glad you did.