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- Hey everyone, Benny Lewis here,
and I'm gonna be doing something different
in this upcoming series of videos.
I want to address mental health
and recovery from hard times.
(gentle music)
You may have seen in my video nine months ago,
where I opened up about what I've been
personally thinking of as my four big Ds,
debilitating burnout, depression, divorce on debt.
One of them alone would have been more than enough
to suck away my motivation.
But having them all at once was an incredibly overwhelming
and draining experience.
The extent of which I can't even begin to describe.
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But, I've crawled out from the depths of the hole
that is clinical depression.
I've been conquering my financial woes,
I have a vastly improved work-life balance,
and my outlook on life in general
is getting back to optimistic.
I'm in much greater spirits these days,
and while I'm still working on myself
and hope to continue making progress,
I've learned a lot of lessons
in this challenging recovery process,
and I'd like to share them with you.
(gentle music)
This will be a series of videos you'll be seeing
for a while on this channel.
So, you know, smash the subscribe button,
turn on notification bell so you don't miss them
and twinstasnaptokstigram, share this video, I don't know.
I haven't been a YouTuber in ages.
I'm not sure what the current lingo is.
In this video, I wanna talk about pace.
This was a hard one for me to wrap my head around
because as you'll gather from my website and book title,
the theme for a lot of my life has been
intensive bursts of progress as quickly as possible.
I still find a lot of value in that approach.
And I plan to have many intensive future projects
that I look forward to sharing with you all again.
But there was a reason I was able to take on
those epic missions one after the other, year after year.
My energy levels were high and my motivation batteries
were fully charged.
I had challenges as you do, when you're on the road a lot
and starting your own business, but they were manageable.
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Dealing with my four big Ds though
had completely tapped me out.
My batteries were run empty and it took all my motivation
to simply get myself from one day to the next.
Initially my thought process was to try to treat
mental health recovery, like an intensive learning project.
There's certainly a sense of urgency there,
when you feel like your entire life force
is being drained from you and you really want it to stop.
When I needed the energy to get to a better place
more than I ever have in my entire life,
it just wasn't there.
So for anyone watching this who feels bad,
that they'd been in their own slump for a really long time,
I just want you to know direct from
the fluent in three months guy,
that this is going to take a lot of time, and that's okay.
For context, I first sought out professional help
for my depression three and a half years ago.
That's essentially the point from which
I was attempting to recover in some form.
Then, I separated from my ex two and a half years ago.
That was the point where I had more control
over everything in my life,
to be able to work on my recovery as a priority.
But to be honest, I needed that entire second year,
just to decompress from everything that happened to me
and to truly begin my recovery.
Then a little less than another year later
or nine months ago, I was finally ready to talk about
what I'd been through openly with the world.
With that video you may have seen.
Now at that point, I was tempted to merge that openness
with a burst of content creation.
Because this would really help me feel like my old self.
I wanted to make this series of videos that I'm making now
immediately after that first one.
But I knew I wasn't in a place to commit
to anything like that.
And just taking the step of being open was already something
that I should have been proud of all by itself.
I still needed more time.
Now, despite knowing this, I thought about pushing myself,
even though my motivation battery
wasn't charged back up enough yet.
You guys actually helped me a lot with this.
Multiple comments on that video reminded me
to prioritise my recovery, over jumping back
into doing something I wasn't ready for yet.
And now, three and a half years after I really started
to try to recover,
it's not like I've solved all my problems,
I still have work to do.
Mental health recovery isn't a black and white situation,
but a spectrum where you gradually find yourself
getting stronger while finding some way
to be at peace with the fact that you still have bad days.
So the lesson from all of this
is that mental health recovery takes a lot of time.
The first step is to accept that and release yourself
from any guilt you may feel for how long
you've been feeling down.
It's impossible to have a timeline in mind ahead of time.
I'm three and a half years into this process,
and I still don't know if I'd ever reach a point
where I can say I'm all done.
But I can say that allowing myself to have had this time
has been one of the most important things to help me
truly get to a better place.
I hope you'll allow yourself that time too.
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So I hope this video has helped you,
and I hope that my upcoming ones have some useful takeaways
for anyone struggling.
Remember I'm not a mental health professional,
but just sharing my own experiences.
If you're really struggling with your mental health,
please reach out to a professional or at least confide
in someone empathetic in your life that you can trust.
Making that decision was the catalyst
that began my road to recovery.
Everything after that was being kind to myself
and taking my time.
(gentle music)
I'll see you guys next time.
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