Brian Sachetta knows what it's like to look completely functional on the outside while struggling deeply on the inside.

His experiences with anxiety began when he was young. By high school, ordinary moments—sports, relationships, the possibility of failure or rejection—began carrying a weight he didn't yet have words for. Eventually, a panic attack forced him to acknowledge that something was happening that he couldn't simply ignore.

For years, much of Brian's energy went toward figuring out how to manage those feelings and make them go away. And for a while, he thought he'd made it through.

Then, years later, the anxiety returned.

During an intensely stressful season, Brian was sitting across from his parents at a restaurant in Florida when suddenly the people and world around him didn't feel real. After extensive medical testing failed to explain what he was experiencing, Brian began looking at his struggle differently. Instead of only asking how to eliminate the symptoms, he started wondering whether there was something in his life he needed to hear.

That shift led him to look more closely at his work, relationships, habits, rest, and even the ways seemingly productive things—like constantly consuming books, podcasts, and information—could sometimes become a way of avoiding what was actually happening in his life.

In this conversation, Brian and Rivers talk about what we can learn from the struggles we'd rather get rid of, why listening can sometimes be more helpful than immediately offering advice, the profound difference it made when Brian's mom simply noticed something was wrong, and why he no longer assumes a difficult season means he's back where he started.

And Brian shares what he would tell his twelve-year-old self after everything he's lived through:

It's going to be hard. But you've been through hard seasons before—and that's evidence that you can make it through another one.

In this episode:

• When anxiety first began showing up in Brian's life
• The panic attack that made it impossible to keep ignoring
• What happens when a struggle you thought you'd overcome comes back
• The shift from managing symptoms to listening more closely
• When productivity and information can become forms of escape
• How to support someone who's struggling without immediately trying to fix them
• The role Brian's mom played during one of his hardest seasons
• The simple practices helping him now
• Why his question has changed from “How do I make this go away?” to “What do you need?”

About Brian Sachetta

Brian Sachetta is a software engineer and mental health author. He is the author of Get Out of Your Head: A Toolkit for Living with and Overcoming Anxiety and Get Out of Your Head Vol. 2: Navigating the Abyss of Depression. His writing draws from his own experiences with anxiety and depression and his interest in understanding how our minds work.

https://getoutofyourhead.com/

https://instagram.com/getoutofyourhead

https://www.facebook.com/getoutofyourheadbooks

Brian's first book (on managing anxiety): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L5Z6V75 Brian's second book (on managing depression): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09KQ4FLBW