Thomas Curran

I had trouble breathing.

My throat became really tight.

And so I tried to get some water, but that was no use.

I ran out into the open road and tried to kind of suck the...

fresh air but none of it was really working and it just started to take over and this panic was starting to feed the panic and then you worry what on earth is going on?

Am I dying?

Is this it?

And then after a few minutes of complete meltdown I would say my body just started to come back to me, I was able to regulate my breathing, my heart rate came down and I was almost I suppose back in the world again

And at the time, I didn't know what on earth that was.

And I'm sure many of your listeners can resonate, but that was a panic attack that comes from the bursting of the dam of this kind of suppressed anxiety that we're just holding back.

And that panic attack was really the first of many, but it was an eye-opener for me and showed me that the way that I was approaching life, trying to achieve, trying to prove to everybody that I was good enough was actually coming at a great expense for mental health.

What I see in young people and students that come through the door is a lot of tension that's bound up in an intense need to excel.

And all of my students at some level feel this, but there was definitely a vivid case in John who I think was a very extreme case of that intense desire and need to do things perfectly, excellently, to excel at all times.

He would constantly come to me in meetings telling me that he

his grades weren't good enough, even though they were really high, that they weren't good enough, that he didn't feel like he was succeeding in the measure that he expected of himself.

And no matter really how I tried to reconcile those things and tell him that what he's doing is exceptional, he always recasted those successes as abject failures and how he'd let himself and other people down.

And this was...

It was so sad because John really found it difficult to see his successes in any other way.

And his justification really, at all times, was very simple.

How could he be a success when he was trying so much harder than other people just to get the same outcomes?