Brad Stulberg

And it was like a switch in my brain got flipped in a devastatingly wrong direction.

I was fortunate to have such a stark experience between before and after that it didn't take me long to get help.

I was very quick to go to my partner, Caitlin, and say like, something is wrong with my brain.

This is scary.

I need help.

And I think that in my story, the pivotal moment was getting help and getting a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder, because I thought I had some kind of like unrelenting depression, but it actually is a fairly common theme in OCD to become obsessed with

the potential to hurt yourself or to hurt others and constantly have these intrusive thoughts and then try to make them go away and then the thoughts get worse and it's just this vicious cycle.

And I was fortunate enough to see a wonderful therapist and psychiatrist that fairly quickly diagnosed me with OCD, began treating me based on the evidence for OCD

And though at the time it felt like forever, each minute felt like a day, each day felt like a year, it was probably about six to eight months where I was really in it before I started to see out of the dark forest and get to the other side.

And during that time period, as you said, I began to just reevaluate, well, what does success even mean?

And what does it mean to be excellent?

And before I had this experience, I thought that I knew what depression or anxiety or OCD was.

And it's as if you look across a river and you see people on the other side of the river and you're like, oh, I can see what they're going through.

I get it.

But it wasn't until I myself was on the other side of the river that I actually had any idea what it meant to be depressed, what it meant to be anxious.

And it really did lead to like a reevaluating of kind of the basic principles that I think and that I write about.

And it's not to say that the first two books aren't defensible.

The way that I like to talk about it is those books are for when everything is clicking and everything is going well.

Groundedness is much more about what's the foundation that is going to hold you not only when things are going well, but also when things aren't.

And what's funny is because it recently came out, everyone thinks it's a pandemic book.