Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Brad Stulberg: Six Mental Health Principles Entrepreneurs Need to Beat Burnout | Mental Health | YAPClassic
06 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What inspired Brad Stulberg to redefine success?
going on young and profiters today's yap classic is all about redefining success from the inside out if you've ever found yourself grinding non-stop hitting milestone after milestone yet still feeling like it's just never enough this conversation is going to hit home i sat down with best-selling author researcher and human performance coach brad stuhlberg to unpack groundedness which is his research-backed antidote to burnout anxiety and the non-stop chase for more
Brad went from coaching elite performers and writing books on peak performance to privately battling severe OCD, intrusive thoughts, and a total mental collapse. That breaking point led him to redefine success around six principles of groundedness.
In this episode, Brad shows us how to loosen our grip on heroic individualism, relate to our emotions more skillfully, build deep community, and still pursue big goals without losing ourselves. It's an essential listen for all of us high achievers and young and profiters, especially in the new year. So without further ado, let's get into this interview with Brad Stuhlberg.
I'd love to get more color about your background.
Chapter 2: How did Brad's mental health crisis shape his perspective?
So would you kindly walk us through your career path and how you first got into performance coaching and writing and some of your proudest accomplishments?
Yeah, it's been a really circuitous path, to be honest. I've always just kind of vaguely followed my interests and somehow ended up here. I'll do my best to do it quickly, but it really started all the way back in high school when I fell in love with writing. And like most high school kids, I thought, OK, well, I'm going to be a writer.
And I applied to Northwestern University's journalism school, which is one of the best in the country, if not in the world, and I didn't get in. And again, like most 16, 17-year-old kids, I said, oh, all right, I guess I'm not going to be a writer. And I went on to a different school. I studied economics and psychology. And I then took a job at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Chapter 3: What is the science behind groundedness?
And throughout school, throughout that first early job experience, what I didn't realize is that I was actually always writing. So even at a place like McKinsey, I was never the person building the financial model. I was always the person doing the memo for the client or coming up with the PowerPoint slide deck, telling some sort of story.
And when I was at McKinsey and Company, I became really interested in health and healthcare. And I got a bird's eye view to all the ways that our healthcare system, at least here in America, is not the best. So that led me to public health school. And it was there that I kind of had this aha moment, at least for myself, that there's really two ways to go about health care.
One is the care part, which is often disease driven. And the other is the health part, which is, well, how do we stay healthy? How do we thrive? How do we keep ourselves out of the traditional health care system to begin with? And that set me on this path to exploring all things human performance, health and well-being.
And through a whole bunch of just grind and pitching and getting rejected and getting rejected some more, I eventually got lucky and got some of my writing placed, which led to getting more writing placed. And it's just been an upworld swirl since then, though I still get declined more often than not.
That's awesome. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What are the six principles of groundedness?
And you are the best-selling author of multiple books, which is awesome. And I love how you talked about using your writing skills even when you were in healthcare and how those skills still translated later on when you wanted to become a writer. Because a lot of people think that when they get into certain fields... that they're kind of locked in.
But the fact is, and especially writing, writing cuts across so many different things. And I always say this, especially recently, as I have a marketing agency, and the hardest thing to hire for is people who know how to write well. And I feel like there's this big gap in our society of people who actually know how to write compelling stories.
And this storytelling capability, I feel like is so needed right now, especially when everyone's so focused on tech skills.
Yeah.
Yeah, and what I didn't realize and what's so interesting in hindsight is that I was training to become a nonfiction writer at McKinsey & Company.
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Chapter 5: How does patience contribute to long-term success?
Because if you think about what a big consulting study is, a client comes to you and says, we've got this thorny problem and we want you to solve it. And then you do all kinds of research, you interview experts, and you craft a bunch of hypotheses as to how to solve that problem. And then you explore them.
And then if you're any good at your job, you come up with a decent solution and you also tell the client all the ways that you might be wrong. And that is the exact same framework that I use to do my nonfiction writing.
Chapter 6: In what ways does vulnerability foster confidence?
I define a problem. I do research. I interview experts to try to get to a solution. And then I also ask myself, well, how might I be wrong? What are some other solutions that could work, too?
Chapter 7: How does emotional flexibility enhance wellness?
So I never realized it at the time. I certainly wasn't thinking to myself, oh, this is good training to be a consultant, or excuse me, in consulting to be a writer. It's only something I saw in hindsight.
Chapter 8: Why is building a deep community important for mental health?
Totally. I love this story. I love skill stacking and hearing people stacking their skills and how they translated skills from one field to another. It's my favorite thing to talk about, but I want to move on. So let's take everybody to 2017. This was a dark time in your life. You were around 31 years old. To the external world, you had everything going on.
You were an expert on human performance, already training elite athletes and coaching entrepreneurs. You were a bestselling author on Peak Performance. But inside you were suffering and you developed OCD and you actually started getting suicidal thoughts and self-harm thoughts and anxiety. And it kind of came up out of nowhere from my understanding.
So talk to us about that time in your life, because I think that was really the trigger for you to start thinking about success differently.
Yeah, it definitely did, as you mentioned, blindside me from nowhere. I had no prior history with depression or anxiety, at least not that I knew of. 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.
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