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July 3, 2025 20 mins
In this week’s episode, I’m opening up about a recent mental health episode—one of those moments that forced me to stop and reevaluate how I’m really doing. It wasn’t easy to go through, and it’s not easy to talk about, but I believe in honest conversations that matter. I walk through what led to it, how I’m working through it, and what I’m putting in place so there are fewer days like that ahead. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, burned out, or just stretched too thin, this one’s for you. You’re not alone—none of us are.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:20):
Welcome to episode four of My Mental Health Breakdown. My
name is Frank and this is a podcast around my
mental health journey. And today I'm going to tell you
about a day that I had recently. It was not

(00:42):
a great day. I struggled with my mental health and
I want to share my story with hopes that you
take away what happened to me and know that if
you're having the same moments, you're not alone. And I'm

(01:04):
gonna share also what I've done to make sure that
there are much fewer days like that. So welcome in.
This is My Mental Health Breakdown, Episode four. So what

(01:53):
usually happens when I have a mental health day that
is not good? Per se today of struggling, And the
key to take away from this is that those days
do happen. Those days do happen. It's just part of

(02:15):
what happens when you're struggling with mental health. Those days happen.
Thinking of this way, everybody has bad days. Right if
we were able to have a life that was filled
with nothing but good days, that'd be awesome, But we can't.
There are going to be bad days that are going

(02:37):
to happen. And this day started out like normally how
a bad day takes place. So I suffer from of
course anxiety, depression, ocdre's irritability, there's ADHD autism all circle throughout.

(03:05):
And the one thing that I have noticed in my
past that is a trigger to spark a mental health
episode is being in decisive and toppled with feeling guilty.
So there's a situation recently just happened that I had

(03:29):
a very hard time making a decision on what I
wanted to do. Now, for some it may be as
simple as, hey, what do you want for dinner? Oh?
I don't know. I want Pisa, or I want tacos,
I don't know. But something as simple as that can

(03:50):
also trigger those episodes. So there's nothing too big or
too small. And over the years you learn what does
that now? The trick is, once you realize and recognize
that you should immediately put your steps into play. Things

(04:11):
that you might have learned along the way, things you
might have read about, things you might have learned in therapy.
And I know sometimes when I'm overwhelmed or I'm stressed
with other factors, that something as simple as being indecisive
can start a avalanche of issues. So I was unready

(04:41):
I was indecisive, and that caused a lot of overwhelmness.
I was already overwhelmed, I was already stressed out. I
was trying to finish a few things, trying to get
things in order, and my mind was going ten thousand
miles in in it because I was indecisive, And with that,

(05:04):
it just started to snowball, like the snowball effect, right,
being indecisive triggered overwhelmed, which then went into nothing's going right.
So even the simple things like I think on that day,
I was wearing a pair of shorts that were wrinkled

(05:27):
or something to that extent. I can't remember exactly, but
what happened was everything was snowballing. So every mental challenge
that I had was coming in. Right, you had being indecisive,
maybe that was you know from you know, ADHD and
then overwhelmed, which caused anxiety, and then nothing going right

(05:49):
caused irritability, you know, So it just it just triggered
and triggered and triggered and triggered. Now I love to eat,
and it's kind of like making a lasagna, right, the
mental health Zannia. There's one layer, and there's two layers,
and three layers, and four layers, and five layers and

(06:10):
six layers, and if you have a full slice of
all those six layers, you're gonna feel tired and you're
gonna be done. What happened was, after all that want on,
I immediately should have did what I was taught to do,
what I've learned for myself as well, and that is
take a stop, pause, breathe reaffirmed myself that everything is

(06:37):
going to be okay, it always works out, nothing to
worry about. It's not a big deal. Worry about you,
you know, those types of things. Gonna be a little
selfish in that situation too. Okay, at that point too,
there might have been and this is you know, whatever
choice you make. But I know that I'm prescribed Xanax

(06:58):
for these situations. So maybe it was take as annex,
maybe it was just you know, whoever, whatever happened, I
think i'd worked that day, maybe maybe call it a
half day. You know, you really got to take care
of yourself in that situation. But that all equaled to
me not following those steps, and the overwhelmed, which may

(07:22):
have been at a fifteen percent, is now at one
hundred percent. And I fell back into that bad rhetoric. Right,
nothing's going right, I can't get a win. Why is this?
You know, just very very moody. I might have pounded
the bed or something like. It was just not a good,

(07:45):
good day, per se. There's a lot of stuff going on,
and I just did not handle it as I was
as I learned across the years, you know, so you
have all those things, and it just got worse and worse.

(08:10):
I made some inexcusable threats about myself. I you know,
felt like I was headed towards you know, the worse
of the worse depression and irritability that I had a
few weeks back, and even even going to the extent
of heading back to twenty seventeen when it was really bad.

(08:34):
It was just very very bad. My wife has been
through my mental health struggles and she is by far
my number one support system, and I refused to listen
to her advice. Now there are some people, you know,
there are some people we have them that will go

(08:55):
to you, oh, well, well you're nervous, just get over it,
and you're like, no, it's not that easy just to
get over it. You can't just get over it. And
that's not how she gives support and advice. It was, hey,
do your steps? Did you want did you want to
take a X annex? You know, you know it's up

(09:15):
to you. What do you want to do? And I
kept saying no, no, no, no no, And I kept
saying to myself, and this thing is kind of still
burns in my brain. I kept saying, well, I don't
want to crutch. I don't want a medicine, or I
don't want to do this. It's not a crutch. It's
there to help you in the moment. Whether it's medicine,

(09:35):
whether it is your steps, whether it is affirmations, whatever
it is, you do those things. You do those things
to level set your brain so you can start thinking
more clearly. You can really position what you want to do.

(10:00):
You can have a clear mind. Because if you don't
have a clear mind and your mind is racing and
you're feeling overwhelmed and you're feeling stressed, it's just gonna
pile on. That snowball effect will continue forever and ever.
Now I'm gonna get to what I did, but I'm

(10:22):
going to preface this. Sometimes I can knock that out
of having a bad moment in an hour ten minutes
half hour, But this one that happened last week. Last week,
I started having the bad moments around eight thirty in

(10:48):
the morning, and I did not snap out of it
until about four thirty in the afternoon. Four four thirty. Now,
if I would have put the steps together, I'm pretty
confident that I would have knocked it out much earlier.

(11:09):
And then afterwards you start feeling these other effects. Right,
did you say something that you didn't mean? Was it
mean to somebody you know? Did you did you scream?
Did you pound something? Did you just not who you are,
not who your personality is? And I have those things happen,
and then I feel guilty afterwards. I feel guilty how

(11:31):
I acted. I feel guilty for not listening. I feel
guilty for not doing my next steps. And at that
point you really need to give yourself just breathe and
know it's okay, meaning to the extent of you're not alone.
Bad days happen. Bad days do not make bad people.

(11:53):
And I've always said, if you can go throughout a
year and say, out of three hundred and sixty five days,
I had fifty bad days and the rest were good.
While that's awesome and not even that number. And I've
also said two if you had three hundred and sixty
four bad days, but we'll try again next year as
long as you're making that progress, right, as long as
you're making that progress. And I'm gonna also say here

(12:18):
that there were multiple attempts to get through it after
I finally had some reasoning to myself. There were multiple attempts.
I would try and then I would fail and get
mad again. I would try and I would fail and
get mad again. And I would try and I would
fail and get mad again. So what I ended up
doing is something that I normally don't do because usually

(12:40):
when I get through the steps, or when I get
through the breathing, or if I get through, you know,
I have his x Annax that helped me, you know,
level things out. It's usually usually pretty good. And I
didn't do any of that, but I did something. I
just shut it off. I've had enough, because you know what,
those episodes are gonna make you tired, They're gonna wear

(13:00):
you down. You're gonna wear you down, especially if you're
you're you know, like me in that situation, feeling all
these emotions. You know, you're angry, you're upset, You're sad,
you're you're you're just tired. If you get all those emotions,
it's gonna wear you down. It really is, really is.
So at one point I was like that said enough enough.

(13:21):
I had a tough talking to me, and I think
it was at a moment that my brain finally relaxed.
I don't know why it relaxed, but there was a
pause in the the horrible bad rhetoric, the the the rumination,
the racing thoughts all stopped, and I said, enough, you
are a fucking forty two year old man. Ah, enough enough.

(13:46):
And I'm not saying that like I did that in
the beginning, right. I didn't do it like you know,
five minutes in and then I was fine. It took
me all day, all day, a full day. And then
what I did was I did pause, I did breathe.
I told myself right away, you are not going to

(14:06):
let this impact of all the great outcome that you've
had recently and all the successes that you've had. The
next thing I did, I apologized. I think that's very important,
and I think what gets lost in a lot of
situations are the people that you live with, because when

(14:28):
you're having your mental you know, health struggles and stuff.
I think those people get forgotten because they're just as
part of it as you are in that moment or
that time. So what I like to do is immediately apologize,
immediately apologize, and just you know, say, I'm going to

(14:49):
do my best to not let it happen again. I'm
going to do my best to make sure that I'm
stronger in those types of situations. I guess what there
may not em and I happen. You may there might
be situations. You know, it may take you a while
to get to get fully strong, and by that you
may have one or two in a week, and then
you know, like me, it's maybe once every month, right

(15:11):
every two months. You know, maybe we'll go three months
without anything. So you get stronger as time goes on.
And then I immediately had a plan, immediately put a
plan in. I'm a very big planner. But I merely
said to myself the next time that happens, in a

(15:32):
very un nice way, I said, I'm gonna tell my
brain to go fuck off, to go fuck yourself, because
I want to set the standard that I'm in charge,
and then if I get bad, I'm gonna I am
going to take Xanax. It's there to help and calm
me down and get me into a level set in mind.

(15:53):
But I'm gonna pause. I'm gonna pause, and the one
thing that I want to do is to immediately think
how my actions are going to reflect on the rest
of the people that live in this house. Right. Maybe
it's not directed towards them, but the direction is sort
of towards them. If you're angry, if you're moody, if

(16:14):
you're this, you're that. So I want to think about that.
I want to put that thought in my head, and
I just want to forgive myself, not just a that situation,
but when it happens again, to forgive myself and say, hey,

(16:34):
it is okay that you cannot make a decision right now,
and it's okay that you have fifty thousand things going on.
But I always fail to realize and this is the
one thing, but even though all those things happening, everything
turns out okay. If you go back to all your
worst situations that you've had to experience personally, think about

(16:58):
how it you know, your mind, of course, is going
to be all you know, positioned on the bad stuff.
But think, think to yourself, think to yourself. It ended
up okay, this happened. That happened, and ended up okay,
because it always ends up okay. It always ends up okay.
It really it really does, and it's not the end
of the world. In that situation, I felt like it

(17:19):
was the end of the world, and I know most
people feel the same, and it's not the end of
the world. It's not the end of the world. I
promise you it is not. Do your best, Do your best.
We're all human. I want to share this type of
story because I feel it's important that when we are

(17:41):
talking about mental health to be as transparent as we can.
I think that the way that some podcasts and some
shows and stuff are are shaped are to, you know,
tell you about a situation, but sometimes they may not

(18:01):
fill in that gap right. And when I started this
podcast in twenty twenty, for the first season, my goal
was to share very transparent stories, stories that you at
home can say I've experienced all those things, and also
provide some of the tips, some of the tricks that

(18:23):
I've gone through. That's always been my goal because I
am not one to hide away from things. I'm an
open book. I have a podcast about being a dad
and that's way open book. But I really think that
what kind of unites everyone is letting someone know they

(18:46):
are not alone in those thoughts, They are not alone
those feelings, They are not alone those struggles. Right, find
that relatableness next week it is episode five. Episode five
is the final podcast of the season. Thank you for

(19:09):
joining me. If you need anything, please do not hesitate
to reach out. The email is my mental Health Breakdown
at gmail dot com. I personally read the emails and
respond to them, so if you need anything, please my
Mental Health Breakdown at gmail dot com. I hope you

(19:33):
have a great rest of your week. It is fourth
of July week, so I hope you have a great
holiday and I will see you back here next week
for this season finale, episode five. Bye everybody,
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