The Anxious Achiever

“I didn’t want to accept myself as someone who had mental health struggles. And having kids made me be like, oh no, this is a health issue that you absolutely need to keep under control because your kids come first,” says New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose.  Like many things, the pandemic brought to light just how fragile the mental health of parents - and especially mothers - really was in this country...

Representative Becca Balint is a new member of Congress, joining this January after several years in the Vermont Senate. She didn’t start her career in politics, but is now working to use her power to fight for those who need better mental health care...

Anthony Hunter is someone just setting out in what most of us consider to be adulthood: just graduating from college and joining the workforce full-time. But he’s been doing a few things a lot of us didn’t do in our teens and early 20s: working for the family business and as an entrepreneur even while in undergrad, and more importantly, working on his own mental health and increasing mental health awareness for his peers...

Does your career path feel uncertain, or at the very least, unsteady? In a world where jobs aren’t guaranteed, we increasingly need to advocate for ourselves and create a brand around our work. In the process of promoting ourselves, we can also lose sight of our values and the longer term goals. Marketing expert and author Dorie Clark speaks with host Morra Aarons-Mele about the ups and downs of career and life.

Michael Freeman is a psychiatrist and professor looking to better understand and better support the mental health of entrepreneurs. A fourth generation entrepreneur himself, he’s done research that looks at the higher rates of things like ADHD, depression, and substance abuse in this group of people. He looks at the idea of whether these kinds of thinkers are “touched by fire,” and the unique relationship between how our dopamine receptor genes may influence our desire to be entrepreneurs...

Many high achievers have a complicated relationship with their own health, and their own ambition. Things like anxiety can fuel us but also wreak havoc in our lives in ways we don’t always recognize or examine.  Rainesford Stauffer is a writer and author of the new book All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive, and she speaks about her own experience with high achievement, anxiety, and OCD...

Have you ever daydreamed about quitting your stressful job and hitting the open road? It isn’t something everyone can afford to do with their time and money. But it is something people sometimes do when they face incredible burnout, loss of self, depression, and more.  Daryll Henrich has spent the better part of the year on the road on his motorcycle after leaving his job as a VP at Google last September...

With all of the issues in corporate America, in startup culture, and in workplaces biases and inequalities, it can be easy to forget the ways in which work can be a positive part of our life. Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work: A Guide to Using Career Conflicts to Overcome Your Past and Build the Future You Deserve, argues that the workplace is actually a better place than we think...

Natasha Bowman always thought of herself as a goal conqueror: someone who could seemingly take on any project, multitask any number of things, and come out on top. It wasn’t until the global pandemic temporarily slammed on the brakes of her career that some of the underlying reasons for this came to the surface. At age 42, the HR executive was diagnosed with bipolar disorder...

Multi-level marketing businesses, or MLMs, offer people - often women who don’t work outside the home - the chance to be entrepreneurs, face new challenges, and grow their social circles. The reality is a situation that can prey on mental health issues, the emotional strain and isolation of motherhood, and even trigger substance abuse concerns...