Debugging Myself
PURPOSE
Five years ago, I wrote about surviving anxiety during the pandemic. That was the survival guide, written from inside the storm. This is different. This is written from the other side.
I’ve won the battle for my mind. I’ve beaten my greatest foe: myself.
It took five years of learning, failing, and trying again. There’s no shortcut. But there is hope. And I want to tell you how I got there.
It started with a single sentence from my therapist during our first visit. She looked at me and said, “You’re intelligent.” Then came the part that rewired everything: much of my inability to escape the cycle wasn’t a character flaw. It was a knowledge gap. My logical brain was triggering on something illogical. I didn’t understand what was actually happening to me, and that’s why I couldn’t stop it.
Understanding reality became the key to escaping.
WALKTHROUGH
The Circle
The thing about the anxiety circle is you never really know when you’re in it.
It’s almost subconscious. Almost. It’s painfully apparent to those closest to you, but never to you until it’s too late and you’ve been pulled into the vortex. By then, you’re spinning. Thoughts feed feelings, feelings change behavior, behavior creates space for more thoughts. Round and round.
For me, it was a feeling of defeat and hopelessness unlike anything else I’d experienced.
In the beginning, before I even knew what was going on, I never realized how the circle was impacting my family. The entire topic is “self” focused. It’s your thoughts, your feelings, your behavior. But part of the circle realization is seeing the collateral damage. Your family, the ones closest to you, even close co-workers are in the war with you whether they want to be or not.
My life partner, my wife, was in it with me. And it was just as difficult for her as it was for me. She didn’t have any power over what was happening inside my head. I can’t imagine how that felt. Watching someone you love spiral and having no ability to stop it.
But what she did have was the ammunition. The strength I lacked many times. The light I needed in the darkness. I don’t know if I could’ve made it out without her.
She was the key.
And underneath all of it, the despair, the impact on my family, was a question that wouldn’t leave me alone: why?
What is doing this to me?
You see, I’m a problem solver. Everything is a puzzle for me to put together or solve. I’ve spent twenty years in technology breaking down complex systems, finding the failure points, building solutions. And here was my own mind, malfunctioning, and I couldn’t see the architecture.
This would become the biggest problem I would ever solve. The most personal one. The one that mattered most.
The Glasses of Perception
My therapist gave me the first clue: I was intelligent, and that was both the trap and the exit.
My logical brain wanted to debug the anxiety like any other system. But anxiety doesn’t respond to logic. You can’t argue your way out of a physical response. The more I tried to think through the panic, the more evidence my primitive brain gathered that something must be wrong. Why else would I be thinking so hard about it?
The way out wasn’t stopping the thoughts. It was changing how I saw them.
Perception isn’t passive. It’s a choice. Your surroundings are real. The catastrophic interpretation your brain constructs is a story. Learning to distinguish between the two is the first skill that matters.
What does this look like practically? Naming what’s actually happening versus what your brain says is happening. “My heart is racing” is real. “I’m dying” is a story. “This deadline is tomorrow” is real. “My career is over if I miss it” is a story.
The glasses of perception let you see which is which. And at the very least, they allow you to look at it from a different angle, gain a different perspective. This is a powerful weapon.
The Invisible Trigger
My particular anxiety is a physical manifestation of a psychological trigger. My body reacts before my conscious mind knows why. The trigger is invisible because it’s rarely the obvious thing. It’s not the deadline. It’s not the difficult conversation. It’s the meaning my brain assigns to them, the imagined consequences, the weight of expectations I’ve constructed.
Learning to identify what’s actually setting me off versus what I think is setting me off was the breakthrough. The presenting problem is almost never the real problem.
Outside influence and pressure became the inputs I learned to manage. Not the stressors themselves, but my interpretation of them. Once I understood that, I had something to work with. A system I could actually debug.
The Formula
My band camp notes from 1994 had a line I dismissed for decades:
I control my thoughts. My thoughts control how I feel. I control how I feel.
This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s not “think happy thoughts and everything will be fine.” It’s an engineering statement. A recognition of the causal chain.
You can’t always control the trigger. But you can control what you do with it. You can intervene. Not by suppressing the thought, but by choosing what lens you view it through. By grounding in what’s real instead of what your brain is projecting.
This is a skill, not a trait. It requires practice. Thousands of repetitions. And that takes time.
The framework is only half of it. You also need weapons. The tactical tools that keep you functional while you’re learning to see clearly. For me, that was diet, exercise, sleep, human contact, music, and professional help. I wrote about all of them in my Pandemic Recovery post when I was still in the thick of it. Those weren’t the cure. But they were the ammunition that kept me in the fight long enough to find one.
CONCLUSION
The Victory
Freedom. It feels like freedom.
When you realize that you have the power and control, not the anxiety, it’s pure freedom. It’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t lived in the circle. The weight that lifts. The space that opens up. The quiet where there used to be noise.
I don’t suffer anymore. The circle doesn’t own me. I own it. When something tries to start the spin, I see it. I name it. I ground in what’s actually real. And if I miss it, my family catches me, grounds me, re-centers my “self.” That’s the system now. That’s the redundancy I built.
Everything around me is bright now. Hopeful. Not because life got easier, but because I’m not fighting my own mind while trying to live it.
The Truth About Time
Five years. That’s the gap between my pandemic survival post and this one.
It wasn’t linear. It wasn’t clean. It was learning, failing, trying again, succeeding, slipping, catching myself, building the muscle over and over until it held.
The first year was survival. The tactics from my pandemic post kept me functional. The middle years were understanding. Therapy, reading, pattern recognition, learning to see the circle before it spun. The final stretch was integration. The knowledge became automatic. The awareness became reflex.
This isn’t a hack. This isn’t a weekend workshop. This is rewiring how your brain responds to threat. Anyone selling you a faster path is lying or lucky.
But here’s what I need you to hear: there is hope.
Not management. Not coping. Victory.
For those in the circle right now, I know five years sounds impossible. And in reality, this is probably something you’ve been experiencing your whole life. You just didn’t know it. So for many, myself included, the reality is much longer than five years. Five years was just the conscious battle. The war started long before I knew I was in one. It sounded impossible to me too. But you don’t have to see the whole staircase. You just have to take the next step. Get help. Learn the system. Do the work. Fail. Get up. Repeat.
One thing I want to be clear about: this was my battle. My anxiety. My triggers. My path out.
Yours will be different. The circle might look the same, but the weaknesses in your particular anxiety are yours to discover. The perception shifts that worked for me might not be the ones that unlock your exit. The invisible triggers hiding underneath your surface stressors are unique to you.
That’s not a discouragement. That’s an invitation. Find the strength to explore where your anxiety is weak. Study it. Map it. And when you find the cracks, attack them relentlessly. Fight as if your life depends on it.
Because it does.
Everything worth doing is hard. This is worth doing. Fighting for your own mind is worth it.
Why This Matters for Leadership
You cannot lead others if you cannot lead yourself.
This isn’t a motivational poster. It’s physics.
When you’re in the circle, you’re not present. You’re reacting, not responding. You’re making decisions from fear, not clarity. Your team feels it even if they can’t name it. They see the short temper, the distraction, the inconsistency. They don’t know you’re at war with your own mind. They just know something is off.
A leader in the circle creates chaos without realizing it. The anxiety leaks into every interaction, every decision, every moment where someone needed you to be steady and you weren’t. You can’t steer others when you can’t steer yourself.
That’s why this matters. Not because winning makes you feel better, though it does. Not because you’ll have more empathy, though you will. It matters because leadership requires presence. It requires clarity. It requires the ability to hold space for other people’s struggles while managing your own.
You cannot give what you do not have.
Once you’ve won this fight, you bring something rare to leadership. You understand what it means to be trapped by your own mind. You understand what it takes to get free. You’ve done the hardest work there is. That’s credibility you can’t manufacture. That’s depth you can’t fake.
Here’s something else I learned in therapy that reframed everything: individuals like myself, with this type of anxiety, are typically outstanding in crisis situations. Crisis doesn’t impact us like it does someone else. Adrenaline is constant for us. We’re already “in the crisis,” so when one actually happens, there is no panic. Only focus.
Looking back on my career, I never understood why I was good in stressful situations. What made me have that intense focus when everything was falling apart. It was only after I learned about my anxiety that it all made sense.
On one hand, I’ve learned, through my defeat of the anxiety, to harness that focus and steadiness during crisis. It’s a genuine asset. On the other hand, I’ve learned that power needs to be wielded with restraint. Leaning into the adrenaline too often, seeking out crisis because you’re good at it, is a path back into the circle.
The anxiety was always technical. A system with inputs, triggers, outputs. I treated it like any other architecture problem. I documented it. I understood the failure modes. I built redundancy.
I won. You can too.
Photo by Jason Hogan on Unsplash
This post is the second in a series. The first, Pandemic Recovery, was written in 2020 from inside the storm. This one is written from victory.
If you’re struggling, please reach out to a professional. This is my story, not medical advice. But know that understanding is possible, and so is winning.
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