Normal – Mental Wellbeing

Category: Uncategorized

  • Facing the Demon

    Anorexia has been a rollercoaster of emotional torture, but it has forced the growth of my self-awareness to such a point where I am grateful for it. When I was first diagnosed, anorexia was nothing but a feeling; a concoction of depression, anxiety, fear, anger and chaos. It was the feeling of overwhelm when I…

  • Older, Wiser & Happier

    I have often been told that I am old before my time. My teenage years of working behind counters and bars gifted me with the abaility to make small talk with just about anyone, ironically leaving me feeling more equipped to talk to someone in their 70s than to someone of my own age. When…

  • Beauty in Iteration

    In a recent talk I gave in a school in Leitrim, I joked about how 18 year old me had truly screwed up in his choice of third level study. Theoretical physics proved not to be the fruitful endeavour I thought it would be, falling somewhere in the intersection between financial maths, engineering and computer…

  • Just a thought

    Read a fantastic African proverb earlier: “A cat who wishes to become a lion must lose its appetite for rats” – meaning we must drop old habits to become a new version of ourselves, but it sounds much better this way. I’ve found this to be true when dealing with anxiety. We have so many…

  • Perspective is Everything

    I spoke about this in my book in quite some honest detail. It’s so easy in this modern day of social metrics and comparison, to view someone’s life through a biased lens. We tend to look at milestones like new cars, promotions, graduations and engagements as sure-fire signs of concrete bliss. But that’s a narrow-minded…

  • Only Human

    Perfectionism is a disease, I’m pretty sure of it, and being ambitious can become toxic at times. I think it has become natural to constantly live for the next milestone, yearning for the next hurdle. I often find myself possessed by the feeling of “I’ll be happy when”, believing in my heart that the next…

  • Taking the Wheel

    It often goes unspoken that anxiety rattles the body physically. In January 2024, I found myself sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, paralysed by fear, with a number of physcial ailments that a young man simply shouldn’t have, some of which were indicative of prostate cancer. I explained to the doctor that I had already…

  • Be The Difference

    This is something I mention in every single talk, a bitter but valuable lesson I learned at 14, thanks to my anorexia. The mental battle with anorexia is a life long affair, but thankfuly my physical battle with the illness was brief. Relatives of mine who didn’t see me between Spring 2011 and Summer 2012…

  • The Index Fund of You

    If I have learned anything between the ages of 20 and 25, it is that the best investments in life are the ones we make in ourselves. The other day I relaised that since leaving college, I have invested 10k euros in my health: 2000 euros on some procedures following a health scare when I…

  • It’s Not That Simple

    This is the biggest fucking lie that I, and I imagine many others, have been fed in our lifetimes. Maybe it’s the human condition, or maybe it’s a habit that originates from deep-rooted limiting beliefs, but we often tend to envision a gap between ourselves and the life we want. We tend to look at…