Overcoming Depression, Burnout, Anxiety and Insomnia with Dan Murray-Serter | E54

It's very rare that you get to meet entrepreneurs that are following and have followed in the steps that y- you've followed in, in your life. And, like, so whenever I meet people like you and Ben Francis, who is similar age to me, who has, like, similar life ambitions, um, I see it as, like, this really amazing, rare opportunity to learn for myself and to ask honestly, like, selfish questions. And w- I saw on your Twitter, I think it was over the Mental Health Week period, you did a tweet where you talked about your experiences with depression, burnout, and anxiety. And from what I know about your story, you experienced those things in that order.

Yep.

So I think that's a good place to start, which is, let's talk about depression and the, the, the role that depression played in your life and where it came from and how you've overcome or are overcoming or handling depression.

Yeah. So interesting actually, because, um, I, I realized when I started to talk about mental health stuff, even more interestingly than what you've just said, I kind of realized that I'd been burying another mental health problem. So actually the, the tweet was more depression, burnout, anxiety, um, and insomnia.

Mm-hmm.

But actually, it's really interesting, I did a, a podcast interview with a nutritionist called Rhianon Lambert, and when I was preparing for that, I was going over my, the fact that I'd grown up fat and the fact that, um, you know, I probably did have an, an unusual, uh, relationship mentally with food.

(laughs)

And, um, suddenly, like, I was unpacking what had happened in my 20s, and I actually had bulimia.

Mm-hmm.

Um, I used to throw up for, like, four to five years, not intentionally though, this was, I, like, quite unusual, but that's how deeply rooted this mental health problem was. I would eat something and I would throw a lot of it up. Um, my friends would, like, know about this, but it wasn't, like, labeled, and I went to, you know, specialists in Harley Street to see what was up, and they were like, "Medically, you're fine. So psychologically there's something there." Anyway, I haven't done it since I was about 26 or whatever, but it suddenly occurred to me a few weeks ago, really interestingly, that, you know, being able to label, like, the time I got depression, the time I got anxiety, the time I got insomnia, the time I was burnt out, I remembered those moments. This one, I'd actually buried as a story-

Mm-hmm.

... right in my head and never, I'd never expressed it in my whole life to anyone publicly at all, full stop. Um, and it was a couple of months ago, and I wrote a newsletter on mental health and, uh, and nutrition, um, and I admitted for the first time then that I'd had bulimia, and what the symptoms were, and how long it had gone on, and the fact that I was basically, like, losing lots of weight, getting really skinny, and all I saw was someone fat.