Espresso: YOU are not your BUSINESS - Mike Davies on his Mental Break Down, Intervention, and Recovery

0:00I mean, it's a long process, man. and because it's like that's like asking a person you're you're asking it in a through the business prism but the reality is that you're asking me how I've changed personally over 10 years I mean yeah between 25 and 35 I think there's probably common experience in the sense that I've well I felt like my 20s were just concentrated entirely on work so because I started Franks when I was 20 right and then I started this when I was 25 that's really young and I was proper like nose to the grindstone like when I started Frank's I was working full-time at the anchor and hope and Frank's so I did like 45 48 hours a week at the anchor they kindly grouped all my doubles together so I could do like Monday to Thursday doubles and then I would do Friday Saturday Sunday at Frank's because we were only open Friday Saturday Sunday so I literally worked seven days a week right and I'm not advocating for that at all in fact quite the opposite but at that time I had no other strategy for getting through that start that part of my life that was the only way I could approach it because I was like if I'm gonna if I if I'm actually gonna like make anything happen here I have to put myself into this fully without any thought towards my well-being or anything like that it's crazy to think now but I was sufficiently young and pliable to like get away with it a little bit like you can just about get by doing like 100 hour weeks and not sleeping that much you know at that age not that you should but you can when you're 30 yeah yeah when you're 30 you can't right so like in terms of how it's changed i think um my attitude to work has become less self-sacrificial that's one thing i feel totally confident as a person in who i am where before i felt defined by my work that's another thing i mean i'm asking these all these things selfishly right so i've hit 30 right i same thing when i did this left comfort of peanut butter business when i was like moved home my parents i was like i'm going in like i'm just gonna fucking send it and make this make this thing a full-time thing now i hit 30 and uh not like yeah because i think you you talk somewhere about like um anxiety hallucinations at some point in your yeah like i've definitely had experiences of that where it's like and you know i'm still trying to sort of pinpoint what the fuck it is is it like is it just working too much i think when it's your passion it's it can become very muddled area because you're like you love it so much that but then you're like mate if you actually step back you're working so much yeah but the point is that you're more than your work exactly yeah right but i'm i don't i i'm struggling to kind of i think what you said there there's two prisms to look through the business and personally goes you were defining yourself your personal by your business prism yeah i 100 relate to that because it's actually not enough i think that's the point is that like a business is great and you can throw loads at it but it's not life it may a hundred percent and and that's a huge it's a massively important distinction because the fact is there's this classic like aphorism you know like we uh work work to live as opposed to living to work right and the fact is that's it can often the balance there skews because quite often it can feel like you are just working you're living to work if you get trapped in that cycle of ambition where you're like i need to give everything to this in order for it to go forward there may be some truth in that but i think it's not about the hours it's actually more to do with how much you concentrate on it and how much you're able to focus on it and i'm saying that from a position of someone who's like given everything to the point of burnout and now feels like it's not the only way to achieve the same end result in fact i would advocate for a different approach in order to create a better business the so talk to me about the anxiety and like yeah let's go here because i just think 100 i think i think uh yeah like one it's helping me but i know it'll help loads of people who listen to this but if you could describe almost like um maybe a song that would describe the way your brain was thinking or like hey um well this is the thing so we can we could maybe cut this bit out but only because i think the easiest comparison is actually if you take psychedelics right but like because the experience of being trapped in a thought loop that you can't escape from is like terrifying and maddening and that can happen if you if you have a bad experience with psychedelics yeah but i i will try to think of a song but yeah i think no no we can go with that and i think um so then so then you wake up like what are the first in this period of time let me just can i just give you some context first because i think i think it's important because i feel like otherwise we just drop into the like the apex of it and actually there was a build-up to it and that's that's significant yeah so i think that like so so what we're talking about here is something that i've been open talking about which is that i had a breakdown in 2020 right pre-covid and which is weird because i think a lot of people had a breakdown during or just at the beginning of covid and what happened separately to it really it was completely irrespective of that and then covid happened and it kind of compounded it in some ways but also made it easier because the business changed and i wasn't dealing with that but also if i'd been here i don't know how i would have dealt with it right yeah so but i in 2019 i i lost 80 % of my chefs at the beginning of the year.

5:39Coincidentally, like a group of people who had been here for a long time, all kind of handed in their notice with different lengths of time. And the only solution at that point was for me to come back into the fold. And I had been trying to step away from it unsuccessfully to give myself a little bit more breathing room. And what that actually looked like was just working every day doubles, you know um but like I said to you before it's not quite as easy to do that when you're 30 or over 30 like your body for one isn't the same and your mind certainly isn't the same and I started to kind of like degrade mentally at that point then I managed to hire an amazing head chef called Sam and a sous chef called Ben who are both lovely people and they kind of took it on and the way what it feels like in my head is that the relief of having these guys who are able to do the job that I had wanted to give up for quite a while was so palpable that my brain sort of imploded and what happened was very gradually towards the end of the year I started to get physically unwell um various other like for example I've got gout which is like a sort of comedic thing for a lot of people but like I had you know that's partly to do with family history and partly to do with like a life of excess right but also it's to do with the stress building up in my body like triggering something that shouldn't really have happened to me for another like 10 or 20 years right and then I had a long-standing like sickness like a sort of flu style thing that I literally couldn't shake for like eight or nine weeks um like regularly spiking with fever and I was working at this point like doing shifts in the kitchen trying to support the team so so it was all kind of building and this is after like I mean so 2019 what's that five years ago so yes we're talking about 12 years into the industry at this point um the pub is uh five and kind of doing okay but like not out of the woods yet um and it just all kind of built after that long of being an owner operator a head chef and a director it was just too much and my brain couldn't take it and what happened was that like over the christmas periods my anxiety started to build about opening franks the following year and i had like in my mind i had created a new system of operating for franks that i wanted to launch the following year because i was like oh this is going to revolutionize the way we do it blah blah blah and what happened was that i started well basically at the beginning of january i started um having stress dreams in the daytime which i've described as anxiety hallucinations if you like but the reason for that is that that's how it felt to me at the time I was awake it was during the day and I was trapped in a visual loop of doing mise en place out of that kitchen here with a chef from Frank's who I was going to hire and we were just looping over these processes and I was like but this is wrong like this isn't the way to do it like when you have a stressful dream that you can't get out of right but it was completely terrifying because i thought that i was going mad i literally thought that i wouldn't be able to communicate with a human again so i just in my mind i was like becoming yeah that's how i felt i thought that i was going insane and that is quite that is terrifying you can see it now you can feel it coming off me right there's a a very real um sense of fear at that point that I'm lost forever and uh yeah so it was it was very intense you know but remediable over time and it took and it did take time but like there was and then I kind of reached there was a point where I reached I did try to go into work after the break and Vicky who's our ops director um and a great support to me um over the years and friend also she just it's that classic thing of just like she just asked me if I was okay and I was like no and I started trying to explain it to her and she was like Mike you you have to go home like now and so I did do that I went home and then it got worse a little bit and my wife Benita was like there was a point where like i couldn't talk and or do i was just it's hard to describe i'm gonna tell you though what it looked like i guess was just me uh sort of like hysterically crying covering my face and like so this way that's what it that's what it physically looked like yeah physically yeah so and then so she was like fuck yes what am i gonna do about this yeah like he can't even fucking go outside like what the fuck are we doing yeah and so she called my parents is this too much are we all right yeah yeah yeah so my parents came around and they were like they the three of them worked to like stop me from going to work and so what we did was we managed a conversation at that point about like the main concerns that I was having which were to do with various things that just it seems so insanely ridiculous now that i was really fixated on um yeah but there's a so i've got obsessive obsessive like i've got a seriously addictive personality right okay i can get i can ruminate on something like this is not not a big thing at all but i'll ruminate on it for like to the point it is a bit sort of i've maybe not the same degree or same texture as what you had but i've definitely had those you know my my life is sadly like punctuated with occasionally these big blotches of fucking anxiety and i'm just like sorry to hear that yeah but it is it's just like it is what it is i think you've got a brain that's sharp like they're like not sharp but like always thinking it's just comes with the bro comes with the comes with the mo mate unfortunately but the um but yeah what you're describing there what one thing i wanted to ask you is when you've got that addictive or like not necessarily addictive but when you're like i have to be at work otherwise my ship's gonna sink so you've got that on one side Which, by the way, isn't true.

11:38I know, but it's important to say it. But in your head, absolutely. So with this, I can't take time off. No. I feel sick if I take time off, which I'm asking this, but I need to. And also, what I think you said there is that I may not be, I could be on a beach in Barbados, right? But my brain is still worrying about this. You could put me in like a, and that's one thing I'm trying to work through, is how you... So, but that's where I was. Yeah. But I've let go of that. So how? Also, one of the ways is having a breakdown. Yeah. Right? Which I wouldn't recommend. but like certainly is a way to rewire yourself because it forces you to make a change