Welcome to Untethered Mind - a guided written course to help you reduce the stress and anxiety that comes from unhelpful thinking habits, so you feel more at peace, more creative, and more confident.

I’m no stranger to unhelpful thinking habits, stress and anxiety.

I found it very difficult to speak up and contribute in large classes in my teens because I felt overwhelmed and pressured to ‘say the right thing.’

I rarely spoke up because of the tension I created for myself in wanting so badly to do well, contribute, entertain and be understood.

I developed an identity around being the ‘quiet guy’, and so did the teachers and my classmates. For the first couple of years at school, I moped around like an expressionless robot because I was so scared to look bad. Of course, this made me even more vulnerable to criticism and bullying, which made me even more self-conscious.

This led to me putting on a lot of self-judgement around why this was bad, which made it worse.

The sense of shame I developed around being quiet (when I knew in my soul that I had so much to give, knowing I was an intelligent and often an amusing young chap) affected my confidence as I transitioned into my twenties.

I had many good memories from my youth, but I also suffered a lot of unnecessary stress and social anxiety brought on by my own self-criticism.

Many opportunities, like stronger relationships and social experiences in my twenties, were polluted and stunted owing to my anxiety, rooted in worry and self-consciousness.

Combine this with alcohol and weed-use at university, and my anxiety was often through the roof. I remember frequently feeling lost, depressed, disliked and out of place around groups of people.

Life was also made difficult through other variations of mental limitation, whether it was feeling stuck out of fear, frustrated and triggered by people, or endlessly procrastinating in the face of tasks I needed to do.

As a result of the suffering of these years, I put a lot of time and energy into finding solutions. I didn’t want to fear social situations for the rest of my life. I didn’t want a life filled with worry, endless frustration, and unrelenting stress.

I knew I had to find relief.

In this search, I learned and experimented with practically everything, from therapy, to diet changes, to ‘emotional freedom tapping,’ learning human psychology and neuroscience, ‘Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing,’ (EDMR), cognitive behavioural therapy, to learning about Zen and Eastern Philosophy.

I still found all of it helpful, even the stuff that did little to improve my ability to enjoy myself in more situations. It was all funneled into my understanding of how humans work.

This work informed my own approach, which drastically reduced the amount of stress I now experience.

I am now far better able to maintain a general sense of enjoyment and calm in all areas of my life.

I do have nervous moments, and I can still be a little awkward and overthink things. This is part of being human. But my experience of life is dramatically different now compared to what it once was. If I’m being honest, I rarely go a day without an enormous sense of gratitude.