My Mental Health Routine

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am talking about my journey with anxiety, how it's impacted me at work, and how I manage my mental health. It's something that I'm really passionate about. I'm constantly trying to learn more about it. And I'm even on the advisory board for a mental health nonprofit called Project Healthy Minds, which is doing incredible work.

Whether you experience a diagnosed mental health disorder or not, you will inevitably experience anxiety or depression at some point in your life and the tools I'm going to share with you, I hope you'll find helpful for those moments. Let's hop into it. 

Getting along with “treadmill mind”

I have had anxiety and OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder, for as long as I can remember. My dad had OCD, which for him manifested in the form of being a complete germaphobe and he likely passed it on to my sister and I, since OCD can be hereditary. As I reflected on my experience for this episode, I vividly remembered my first anxious thought. I was in third grade. I was in the library at the Pingree School, and I started concentrating on my breath and anxiously monitoring if I was breathing correctly. I did this for a few minutes. Obviously I was breathing correctly, given that breathing is an instinctual behavior that we all do, but that was just what my brain happened to latch on to. 

It may sound strange to you if you haven't experienced anxiety or OCD yourself, but these are the sorts of things my treadmill mind has decided to obsess about throughout the course of my life. As I've gotten older, my OCD, which generally refers to having persistent, unwanted thoughts, it has evolved and at times gotten more intense than in my childhood. And I like to think of my OCD as following a 90 10 rule. 90 percent of my anxious thoughts or feelings are driven by 10 percent of my concerns in life. Said differently, there are a few things in life that drive the vast majority of my anxiety, and it generally falls into three buckets: my work, my romantic relationship, and my health. What ties these three themes together are two key traits that the anxious brain loves to feed on: one, things that are really important to me, and two, things that are unanswerable or filled with ambiguity, whether it's wondering, am I doing a good enough job at work and pulling my weight as a co-founder or am I pushing myself to be uncomfortable in my career? Or am I getting complacent? Or am I fully healthy, or am I going to drop dead one day? 

These are actually questions that I ask myself constantly and I simply can't answer. And because I can't answer them, my brain chooses to ruminate on them in an effort to answer them. Dealing with these thoughts over the course of my whole life—it's both exhausting and painful, but that's the reason it's so important for you to understand this topic on this very podcast today, because anxiety and mental health disorders are ever present in all aspects of life. And it's something that one in four adults must face.

 I and so many others don't have a choice to turn off our anxiety when we step into work. There have been points in Morning Brew history where I've had to walk out of a room because I thought I was going to have a panic attack and it felt like the room was closing in on me. There have been points in the Brew where we hit really exciting milestones, like certain subscriber numbers or revenue goals, and my experience of enjoying them was dulled because I was ruminating on one of my many obsessions. There were also times where I felt like I was operating at 50% of capacity in my role as CEO, because my mind was so focused on my obsessions, which was creating overwhelming anxiety.

#1: Live with anxiety in a loving and productive way

I'd often say to myself, why can't I just have a calm mind so that I can realize my full potential and not have this hold me back? But that's not the right question to ask. What the right question to ask is: I know I have anxiety. I know I have OCD. What do I do now? The first thing I do is think about my anxiety in a way that allows me to have a relationship with it that is loving and productive. My first thought around it is I am biologically wired to be more anxious than the average person. I can't fight this, I shouldn't fight this, and I can't try to get rid of it, but I can learn to harness it.

#2: Create a mental stack

The second thought: Anxiety is a blessing and a curse. I need to respect the positives of my treadmill brain. It makes me creative, productive, proactive, and allows me to be a great storyteller, but it's that same mind that latches onto unproductive contexts. I need to accept that there are always unintended consequences of positive things. And my third thought: Managing anxiety is not easy. It's anything but. It's a part-time job that takes self-awareness, focus, and a lot of hard work to move the needle. I can't feel bad for spending time on it, just like I wouldn't feel bad about going to the gym to maintain my physical health. These assumptions give me the permission and the space to spend time understanding my obsessions and quieting my mind versus resisting it as a nuisance.

It's not my choice that my brain runs on a treadmill at 10 miles an hour, 24 hours a day, but it is my choice, how I conceptualize my experience and how I live with it in a productive and healthy way personally and professionally. That's why over the last several years, I have taken it upon myself to understand how my brain works and create something I like to call my “mental stack” that helps strengthen my brain. If a gym routine is for your body, my mental stack is my routine for my brain. And my mental stack goes as follows: I have my daily habits, which includes exercise, diet, sleep, and medication. And then I have my non-daily habits, which are therapy, mindfulness, and executive coaching. How I think about my wellness stack is that all of these things work together as kind of a potpourri  in order to both lower my average feeling of anxiety from say a five out of 10 to a three out of 10, but it also lowers the peaks of anxiety when there's something that's particularly nagging at me. I find that the combination of exercise, sleep, and diet, the trifecta, are the most important drivers of my anxiety in the present. And so if I go a few days, not working out or a few days drinking alcohol or a few days not eating healthy, I feel that spike in my base anxiety from a three out of 10 to a five out of 10, and then I find things like therapy, mindfulness, and executive coaching to be super important tools that helped me navigate anxiety once it's happening, and they are also long-term investments in my mind that pay dividends long into the future.

 I've actually really gravitated towards mindfulness recently because the practice is all about shifting my attention to the present rather than getting anxious about traumas in the past, or worrying about if I'm making the right decision for the foreseeable future. Things like focusing on my breath, shifting my awareness to five things I can see, four things that I can touch, three things that I can hear, and scanning my body to see how it feels. They all work together as part of my mindfulness practice to bring my attention to the right here and now versus the past or the future.

And as I reflect on my experience with anxiety, it also makes me think about what I can do moving forward to make me more effective in managing my mind. The first thing: I tend to be reactive, not proactive in my mental health practice, whether it be mindfulness or therapy, my instinct has always been to partake in the practice when my anxiety is heightened, but that in my opinion is not the approach. That's like if I chose to work out only when I was out of shape. Maintenance is such an important part of my mental health and practicing mindfulness and therapy when I feel like I don't need to is super important.

If I want to be a great entrepreneur or a great partner, or just have the tools to live a fulfilled and happy life, working on my mind is the best possible investment of time I can make. And I can't feel guilty about it. Number two, I need to practice having greater self-awareness around the things that truly drive my anxiety. I walked you through my mental stack, and I know that the combination of all of these things, it lowers my base level of anxiety, but I'm often not self aware enough of my actions and my body to pinpoint what's creating my anxiety and what tools in this stack I can use to exercise my mental health. 

#3: Sit with anxiety

Third and final, I need to learn to sit with my anxiety versus resist it. One of the worst things an anxious mind can do is ruminate about why they feel anxious and if only they didn't feel anxious, how much happier they'd be. I need to trust my process for quieting my anxiety while learning to love life, even in the face of being anxious. The analogy that I've used with my therapist in the past is like, if I'm looking in a mirror, if I have no anxiety, what I see is a clear picture of myself. But when I feel heightened anxiety or OCD, almost picture a film of dust over the mirror. I have two options: I can either live with the dust and be okay with the dust, knowing that the dust is there, or I can try to fight the dust because I believe it's dulling my experience because I can't see myself.

The first is a far more productive way to navigate life. And that's my experience with anxiety, whether you experience anxiety or not. I hope that you've learned from this episode about the power of the mind, what managing anxiety looks like for so many people, and the work it takes to maintain a constructive relationship with it. Also hope it brings awareness to the struggles that likely several of your coworkers experience on a daily basis and provides perspective to exercise greater empathy in your work with others. As you can tell, I am super open about my journey with mental health. So if you ever want someone to talk to, or you're curious about it, don't hesitate to email me at alex@morningbrew.com. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal. And one final ask of you. The number one way to grow this show is by having listeners pound the subscribe button. So whether you listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast player of your choice, hit the subscribe button if you liked what you heard today, and you want to hear more of it. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.