Calm. For the First Time.

A mental health update from someone who used to look like he'd wet himself on stage.

It's been a couple of months since I last checked in on the mental health front, so I figured it was time to pull up a chair, make a coffee, and have a proper chat.

Quick recap for anyone who missed the last instalment of Mick's Ongoing Psychological Adventures: a couple of months back I posted about what had been a genuinely brilliant run with my mental health.

No drama. No fires. No white-knuckling my way through the week. Just... good.

Which, if you know me or have followed any of my mental health content, you'll understand is not something I throw around lightly.

The thing I was most chuffed about at the time was that I'd gone to see my psychologist and, for the first time in longer than I care to admit, I didn't have a crisis to unpack. No urgent agenda. No emotional ambulance required. I walked in, sat down, and we actually got to work on improving things rather than just patching them back together with whatever was handy.

That felt like a genuinely new chapter. And I said as much.

So, how have the last couple of months been?

Honestly? Still pretty good.

Which I say with the cautious optimism of someone who has absolutely been burned by his own positivity before and knows full well that life has a habit of reading your diary and going "oh yeah? Hold my beer."

But genuinely, there have been some moments in the last few weeks that I am really proud of. And one in particular that I want to tell you about, because it involves a fear I've been carrying around since I was about eleven years old.

The Part Where I Confess I've Been Terrified of Public Speaking

Right. Here we go.

I am a physiotherapist who runs workshops. I travel to deliver talks. I present at symposiums, run lecture evenings, and have spent the last several years effectively making "getting up in front of rooms full of people and talking" a core part of what I do professionally.

And for most of my life, I have been genuinely, properly, physically terrified of public speaking.

Not in a cute, relatable "oh I get a few nerves" kind of way. I mean the full catastrophe. The kind of fear that doesn't wait for a logical reason, it just shows up in your body and absolutely goes for it.

The fear that manifests in me literally crying in presentations (not joking - that has actually happened twice in recent history).

I remember being primary school captain - which, by the way, feels like the universe's idea of a practical joke in hindsight - and standing on stage in front of the school assembly feeling like I was simultaneously going to cry, faint, and vomit. Not in sequence. All at once. My voice would quiver. My palms would sweat. My whole body would betray me in front of everyone I knew, and I had absolutely no idea why or what to do about it.

It followed me through high school, where, again, I somehow ended up as school captain, which I can only assume meant there was a God and he had a very particular sense of humour. The handshaking was noticeable. The voice quivering was noticeable. The sweat situation was... very noticeable. I'm talking wet shirt, damp back, and on particularly memorable occasions, a situation with my pants that I'll just describe as "not ideal for someone trying to project authority and composure."

And it wasn't just the big moments, either.

That's the thing about anxiety, it's not always waiting for a worthy occasion. It'll rock up to a university icebreaker just as happily as it'll show up to a formal presentation.

You know the ones. You're sitting in a circle. Everyone takes a turn. You say your name, where you're from, maybe a fun fact. The stakes are genuinely zero. Nobody is judging you. Nobody cares. And yet, as that circle crept around the room toward my turn - one person, then the next, then the next - I could feel my heart rate climbing. By the time it was my go, my voice had already decided it was going to do the quiver thing, and the person next to me had definitely noticed, and I could see it on their face, and that made it worse, and then it was over and everyone moved on and I sat there quietly furious at myself for the next twenty minutes.

I did that for years. A lot of years.

And the really frustrating part - the part that I think a lot of people with anxiety will recognise - is that I didn't really talk about it. I didn't name it properly. I didn't ask for help. I just kind of... carried it. Pushed through. Told myself it was fine. Told myself lots of people get nervous. Told myself I'd grow out of it.

Reader, I did not grow out of it.

The Part Where I Decided to Actually Do Something About It

A few years back, I got an invitation that forced my hand a bit.

I was asked to be involved in an ACL symposium run by La Trobe University and to deliver a case study and contribute to some panel discussions. And I thought, very clearly: this is going to go extremely badly unless I sort myself out.

So I did something that at the time felt almost as terrifying as the speaking itself. I decided to create my own exposure.

I ran a public lecture evening on ACL rehabilitation. I kept the numbers deliberately small (twenty-five people) and I told myself it was a one-off. Just one night. Get through it, tick it off, move on.

It sold out.

And the response was warm enough that I found myself committing to three more evenings, running the same lecture to new crowds. Which, looking back, was exactly what I needed; structured, repeated exposure to the thing I was most afraid of, in a format I had some control over, on a topic I knew inside out.

Did it fix the anxiety? No. But it moved the dial.

It gave me something to build on. And it planted the seed of an idea I hadn't really entertained before, that maybe this was something I could actually get better at, rather than just endure.

That was the beginning. What followed was a lot more work over a lot more years, including - and this is the bit I'll come back to - some pretty significant changes to the way I live my life, the way I think about my own head, and the help I've been willing to ask for.

The Part That Actually Made Me Stop and Go "Oh"

Last week I was in Melbourne running an ACL evening. Good room, good crowd, topic I love. All the ingredients for a good night.

And just before I was about to be introduced - in that slightly excruciating backstage window where your brain has historically decided to absolutely go to town on you - something different happened.

I felt calm.

Not "pretending to be calm." Not "doing a breathing exercise and hoping for the best." Not "white-knuckling it behind a smile." Just genuinely, quietly, unexpectedly calm. A stillness I hadn't really felt before in that context; or honestly, if I'm being completely honest, in many contexts.

No racing heart. No clammy hands. No voice in my head doing its usual routine of who do you think you are, why are you here, everyone's going to figure you out tonight.

Just... calm.

And then I walked on stage, and I had what I can only describe as the most present I have ever felt in front of a room. I held eye contact. I slowed down. I let things breathe. I put a few jokes in - some of which even landed, which is always a bonus. I was there, in the room, enjoying it, rather than somewhere slightly outside my own body just trying to survive the experience.

I stood there afterwards and thought: that's new.

Not in a smug way. In a genuinely moved, quietly disbelieving, took-me-three-and-a-half-decades-to-feel-this way. Because it has been a long road to get to a single calm Thursday evening in Melbourne. And I don't want to blow past that without acknowledging it properly.

What's Actually Changed (The Unsexy But Honest Version)

I want to be upfront here, because I think it matters: there is no single silver bullet.

No one thing I started doing that flicked a switch. What's changed is a stack of small decisions, made consistently, over a long time. And I think that's actually the more useful thing to share, even if it's less satisfying than a dramatic turning point story.

Acknowledging the anxiety properly. Not minimising it, not explaining it away, not telling myself to just push through. Actually naming it as a real thing that deserved real attention. That was harder than it sounds.

Seeing a psychologist. Regularly, not just in crisis. This has been one of the most important investments I've made; not just in the hard moments, but in the good ones, where you actually get to build skills and strategies rather than just triage whatever's on fire that week.

Medication. I know this is a loaded topic for some people, and I get that. But I'm not going to tiptoe around it. Medication has been a meaningful part of my picture, and I think being honest about that matters more than protecting anyone's comfort around the subject.

Exercise. Consistent, regular movement has done more for my confidence and self-belief than I fully appreciated until I actually experienced it. It's not just physical. It genuinely changes how you feel about yourself.

No alcohol. This one's been bigger than I expected. I'll leave it at that for now, but yeah, significant.

Journalling and gratitude practice. I know, I know. It sounds a bit soft. But the evidence stacks up, and more importantly, so does the effect. Small habits, repeated often, compound in ways you don't notice until one day you're standing calmly on a stage in Melbourne wondering why this feels so different.

Letting go of control. This one's been a quiet revolution. We had some fairly stressful website issues with Learn.Physio recently, and if you'd asked me four years ago how I'd have handled that - genuinely, honestly - I would have told you: up all night, stress through the roof, probably a drink or four in hand, trying to fix something I had absolutely no ability to fix. Instead, I trusted the people around me. Passed it on. Let them do what they're good at. And I slept fine.

That is a different person. One I actually quite like.

The Imposter Syndrome Is Real. But It's Getting Quieter.

I want to name this one specifically, because I think it affects more people in this space than we talk about.

I am not describing catastrophic mental health episodes here.

What I carry is anxiety, imposter syndrome, and a fairly reliable inner critic who has historically had a lot to say about my worthiness, my capability, and my right to be in whatever room I'm standing in.

You shouldn't be here. You're not good enough. Someone's going to figure that out tonight.

That voice has been pretty loud for a pretty long time. And what happened on that stage in Melbourne - that quiet moment of actually thinking yeah, I belong here, I've got something worth sharing - that was significant.

More significant than I can probably adequately explain to someone who hasn't spent years arguing with their own brain about whether they deserve to take up space.

I'm not going to pretend that voice is gone. But it was a lot quieter that night. And I'll take that.

Why I Keep Sharing This Stuff

I'm not sharing any of this because I've got it figured out. I genuinely haven't. I know this good stretch will have its rough patches. I know the cautious part of me - the part that's always quietly waiting for the good things to end - hasn't fully retired yet. That's probably just part of who I am.

But I share it because I know there are people reading this who are carrying something quietly. People who look like they've got their life together. People that others follow, admire, look up to, grab a coffee with - who are absolutely, one hundred percent winging it just like the rest of us.

And the thing is, you'd never know. Because we're all pretty good at looking fine.

Mental health doesn't pick and choose who it shows up for.

Whether you're dealing with a bit of anxiety, low mood, significant depression, PTSD, or anything else on that spectrum, you don't have to sit with it alone and in silence.

There is help.

It might take a while to find the right kind of help. It might feel uncomfortable to ask for it. But it exists, and you are worth the effort of finding it.

If one person reads this and feels a little less alone - or decides it might be time to finally reach out to someone - then that's more than enough reason to keep writing it.

As always, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment, send a DM, or just sit quietly with whatever this brought up for you and let it do its thing. All of it counts.

Thanks for being here. Genuinely.

Mick 🙏