A C-Suite Exec On Finding Growth After Battling Depression with Paul Greenberg

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2:13Morra Aarons-Mele: Learn more about how Notion can support your business at notion.com slash achiever. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash achiever and try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Hi, I'm Maura Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes. And honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before.

3:06Morra Aarons-Mele: If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

3:22Morra Aarons-Mele: If I told you you're about to hear from someone who first tried to take his own life at age 13, has spent a lifetime burdened by clinical depression and suicidal impulses, and who finally found solace after electroshock therapy, you might expect to hear from someone who sounds a little bit like his mouth is filled with cement, whose sadness and malaise and trauma just oozes through the airwaves. But on the contrary, you're about to hear Paul Greenberg, who sounds exactly like what he used to be, a charismatic radio sports announcer. Despite living through deep and chronic depression for decades, Paul built an incredibly successful career as a media executive and CEO.

4:09Morra Aarons-Mele: as CEO of College Humor, digital president of Time, Inc.'s lifestyle brands, EVP and GM of TV Guide Digital and VP of business operations at MTV.com. And today he runs his own fast-growing company, Butterworks. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation with Paul and I and learn a lot, be surprised by his positive attitude in the midst of severe mental illness. but we do talk about suicide and suicidal thinking. And if this is an issue that will trigger you or upset you, I wanted to let you know that we do talk about that. So Paul, you wrote, I worked nearly three decades of 10 hour days during which none of my colleagues knew that I was struggling.

5:02Morra Aarons-Mele: How is that possible?

5:05Paul Greenberg: I honestly wish I could tell you. It was brutal, but there was some ability I had to parcel out the work that needed to happen and kind of, you know, containerize, if you will, the issues of how I felt and what I needed to get done. Sometimes the work was a solace where I could focus on something else besides the depression. Often, however, it was a slog, really working hard to get through it. I talked to my doctors. Some of the treatments that I've had, which I know we'll discuss, have been quite aggressive. And I've had very few side effects. But they theorized that maybe the reason I had few side effects is that I exercise quite a bit.

5:52Paul Greenberg: And so maybe there's good blood flow to my brain, which they also theorized might have been one of the reasons why I was able to tolerate the depression in the first place.

6:00Morra Aarons-Mele: So talk us through what a day that was a slog felt like. I mean, you were in leadership positions. I assume you were dealing with other people's problems, right, as a manager, leading meetings. What did those slog days feel like?

6:17Paul Greenberg: Exhausting. Sisyphean. You know, I would get up in the morning. I was fortunate not to have the kind of depression that made me unable to get out of bed, but I would get up and I would think, OK, I just need to get through this day. Whatever I have to do, I'm just going to keep pushing the rock up the hill. And I, you know, every day or every minute, I would have almost constant suicidal thoughts of I want to kill myself. You need to kill yourself. And I wasn't visualizing actually killing myself. I just kept hearing those thoughts. And that was exhausting enough. But then there was this weight, this heaviness that depression gives you of this physical pit in your stomach, in addition to the other things that depression does to you, which is to catastrophize everything.

7:02Paul Greenberg: So nothing will ever work out. We'll never get through this. I'll you know, I'm going to lose my job and be homeless and everything will fall apart forever. So all of that on top of everything else. But I would go through my day and I would get to work and I would focus as hard as I could on the people around me and trying to feel needed and trying to understand and be as empathetic as possible to what I could do for them and how I could help them. And somehow that made it a little easier to get through the day to feel like I was part of something and I was part of something bigger. And I had a mission that connected me to other human beings and that, you know, I had a responsibility to these people that I had to lead them, not in a sort of power hungry, obnoxious way, but that was my job.

7:48Paul Greenberg: But as soon as I had any downtime, you know, I wasn't in a meeting or I was just eating my salad at my desk, the depression would rush back and I would feel hopeless and anxious and angry and frustrated. And then as soon as I had to go to my next meeting, I would kind of shake it off and push through. And it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But it almost felt like I didn't have an option. I really just felt as if I stopped and succumbed in any way, it would take me over and I would never be able to get out of it. So it almost just felt like I had to keep the inertia on my side.

8:24Morra Aarons-Mele: It seems it's interesting first that you express such empathy as a depressive. Normally, we don't think of people in clinical depression as having empathy for other people because that's one of the things that depression does, right? It makes you very, very focused on your own misery and catastrophe. What do you think that having the empathy did for you? Was it something that you cultivated or do you think it's just who you are, you know, relying on other people and getting drawn out of your head by other people?

8:57Paul Greenberg: I'm a very social person. I'm, I guess, definitionally an extrovert where I get energy from being around other people. But I also think, not to pathologize my depression too much, but my depression honestly could have gone one of two ways in terms of how it came to be based on events in my life. I could have turned it outwards in terms of getting angry at everybody else and feeling like it was everybody else's fault. Or I could have turned it inward and sort of beaten myself up and thought that I was a horrible person and I was useless, which is what happened. And I think that in a way made me more sensitive.

9:38Paul Greenberg: And I don't, again, I don't mean to self-aggrandize, but I do feel like somehow that made me more in tune with what I was feeling, the pain I was feeling, and then the pain that other people might be feeling. And so in a weird way, I felt almost more sensitive because I was depressed.

9:54Morra Aarons-Mele: I think that's true. I absolutely, I think that people who are in the state of depression or anxiety and know it so well that it is their life, if they can understand it at some level, are able to see in other people the things that a lot of others can't see.

10:12Paul Greenberg: It's a horrible gift in a way, but it's a gift nonetheless. Well, but I also think that, you know, I've been in therapy most of my life since I was 13, some more successful than others. But when you spend that much time looking at yourself, looking for causes and effects of human emotion and transference and unconscious feelings, you do begin to understand there's a lot more going on below the surface for all human beings. How does your depression manifest itself?

10:48Morra Aarons-Mele: Like you said that you take it inward. Yes. Right? Is it a script? Is it the suicidal thoughts? Is it always the same every episode?

11:02Paul Greenberg: It's a good question. Yes, I think it is. For a while, it was one long episode. I mean, literally, I tried to kill myself when I was 13. And literally from the time I was 13 until I was in my mid-40s when I had ECT, I was depressed basically consistently. I mean, it really wasn't sort of up and down. It was just there all the time. just living with me. And so that script was constant. Since the ECT, I've had a couple of down episodes. Recently, I had a very down episode, which was the first time since ECT six years ago that I've felt as bad as I felt before I had the ECT.

11:44Morra Aarons-Mele: It was less scary, but it was certainly,

11:49Paul Greenberg: it made me feel hopeless because it made me feel, again, which is what depression does to you, but was also a characteristic of my depression, which is this will never get better and everything will be terrible and no one will ever love me and I will never be able to succeed and my business is going to fail and I'm going to end up living on a box on the street and I'll fail my family and my kids will starve. I mean, just, and it went on and on and on. And, oh, by the way, on top of that, I'm a horrible person and there's nothing about me that's lovable. And so that is consistent throughout my life.

12:19Paul Greenberg: And then you add on top of that, and I should kill myself. I want to kill myself. And some of the suicidality is I want to end this suffering. But for me, it was more of it was it was slightly parallel to the depression where it just felt like an add on in the sense of it's important that I think about this. You know, I need to I'm such a bad person that I need to kill myself. It was almost, again, turning it inward on myself. I need to hurt myself or punish myself for being such a bad person to the point where I deserve the death penalty at my own hands. Oh, my God. Sorry. Other people, I think, you know, for them, suicidality is I just need to end this pain.

13:01Paul Greenberg: For me, it really was more, like I said, pathologized of I hate myself so much I deserve to murder myself.

13:08Morra Aarons-Mele: You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist, we were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month.

13:53Morra Aarons-Mele: And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say, to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me frankly take some of emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code achiever at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off just$50. That's $50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever.

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16:06That's correct. How did that relate to your keeping going?

16:13Morra Aarons-Mele: I mean, do you think if you hadn't had the family, this would be a different story?

16:19Paul Greenberg: no i don't think so i just think that's how i'm built um i want to succeed i'm i'm very ambitious i like to succeed um it didn't help the depression go away uh my success um but i do think that although i would i would say to some extent you're right in the sense that i really had no safety net if i can use the suicidality as a safety net you know it was almost like saying you're just, killing yourself isn't an option because you've got two kids that you have to support and you have a family you have to support.

16:56Morra Aarons-Mele: Even though you're a failure and you're going to go broke and it's all going to go.

16:58Paul Greenberg: Exactly, exactly. I never said I was logical. I know it well. Exactly, right? But I do think that there was something about, in a weird way, that kind of made me angry. It drove me, but it also felt like, well, these kids are making it so I can't, kill myself and end my pain. How dare they force me to stay alive, which obviously on its base is absurd. But I think in a good way, it did remove that option in reality. I would say that until I had the ECT, which removed the wall of depression, therapy was really useless. I couldn't get at the root of anything because I was so sick. You were so sick.

17:45Paul Greenberg: Just mentally ill that I, you know, I mean, And again, I see mental illness as the same as physical illness. You know, you have a broken leg, you can't walk until it heals. And if you have mental illness, I couldn't feel happy until I was able to make it heal.

18:01Morra Aarons-Mele: Well, let's talk about treatment. How many meds over your life do you think you've tried?

18:09Paul Greenberg: Probably 75.

18:10Morra Aarons-Mele: Wow.

18:11Paul Greenberg: And nothing worked.

18:14Morra Aarons-Mele: so you tried electroshock therapy in 2013 2014 2014 how did how did you all come to that you and your your medical treatment team i assume like was that the last straw were you scared to try it what

18:30Paul Greenberg: what happened to get you there it was the last straw i was really down i was i was worse than i had ever been. And my psychopharmacologist, Dr. David Kahn, who is just a genius, he is affiliated with Columbia University, but he'd been working with me on the meds and trying different things and nothing worked. And several times he had said, okay, I think it's time for ECT. And I thought, I've seen one flu over the coven's nest. No way are you getting me strapped into that thing. And finally, you know, they say, when you're in enough pain, you change. I was in enough pain. And I said, okay, I'll do anything you suggest.

19:08Paul Greenberg: So he got me into the ECT outpatient program at Columbia. And, you know, it's not anything like one flew over the cuckoo's nest anymore. They give you a general anesthetic. They give you a muscle relaxant. So literally, you know, you count backwards from 100. I got to 88. And then I woke up and they said, do you want some apple juice? And they had done the treatment. One thing I was super fortunate about, which I alluded to before, is I had almost no side effects. So ECT can cause short-term memory loss, nausea, headaches. I woke up and I went straight to work. So I got to the phone at 8 in the morning.

19:44Paul Greenberg: They took me right away. They did the treatment, which the treatment itself, I don't know if you want me to go into what it is. I'm happy. So ECT stands for electroconvulsive therapy. And they are literally convulsing you. They are inducing a grand mal epileptic seizure, which is actually what they think heals your brain, not the electricity per se. They just need the electricity to create the seizure. And what's weird is they kind of don't know why it works. They know that it does. It's 85 % effective with drug resistant unipolar and bipolar depression, which is amazing. I mean, just off the charts, amazing.

20:20Paul Greenberg: So I went in, I had three days a week for four weeks. And after the 12th treatment, it was Sunday morning, I was in the playground with my kids. And I suddenly felt happy for the first time in my adult life. And I really didn't know what was going on. I thought maybe I was having a heart attack, but it just, this albatross that had been around my neck for so long lifted. And I just felt physically lighter, emotionally lighter, and the sun looked different and the kids look different. And I just felt, wow, I am actually happy. Did you, did you know that, did you know that this feeling was happiness?

20:57Morra Aarons-Mele: Did it take you like, to take you?

20:59Paul Greenberg: I wasn't. No, I didn't know. I never felt it before. I just I knew it was better.

21:04Morra Aarons-Mele: Yeah,

21:04Paul Greenberg: I knew, you know, I knew the pain had diminished. So that was great. So then we started tapering. So I did it twice a week, once a week, once every two weeks, et cetera, et cetera, for another eight months and never had have not had to do it again. And it was it was a medical miracle. And it is one of them. And here's the thing is that I, you know, I would sit in the waiting room, the outpatient waiting room, and there were a number of people there every day. I mean, a fair number of people. This isn't like I'm the only person who gets ECT these days. So there is it's just something people don't talk about because it's got this terrible stigma.

21:43Morra Aarons-Mele: So take us through to the present day. You had the ECT in 2014. It's 2019. ECT. 19. Yep.

21:50Paul Greenberg: Yeah, so I was doing okay for a long time. A few, like I said, downs, but I actually went back to see Dr. Berman and said, do I need a touch-up of ECT, which they say you can go back for if your depression comes back. He said, I don't think so. It sounds like you're just not feeling great. And he was right. It passed after a couple weeks. this year I had a huge new I was actually because as I mentioned before the ECT allowed me to do real therapy I actually came to a lot of realizations in the last few years that I never was able to that I probably should have in my 20s if I had been able if the depression hadn't been this big wall in my way so I finally came to some of these realizations which were incredibly painful about my childhood and my life and what's going on and that kind of sent me back into more of a depression.

22:38Paul Greenberg: And it got better and it got worse and it got better and it got worse. And then actually about a month ago, it got really bad and it got as bad as it was before ECT, where I was depressed all the time, terribly suicidal, very upset. And Dr. Khan, God bless him, pulled another magic trick out of his pocket and said, OK, it's time to try ketamine. And I thought, OK, I've heard of ketamine. I know it was a club drug.

23:10Morra Aarons-Mele: It was a club drug in the early 2000s that I guess.

23:14Paul Greenberg: It's OK. Exactly. Actually, ketamine was invented in 1962 as an anesthetic to be used medically. So then in the late 90s, it started to thaw the academic climate and they started looking at ketamine for depression. And in 2000, a couple of people at Yale had great success with it. And in fact, this year, Johnson & Johnson has had a ketamine nasal spray approved for depression by the FDA. It's now being sold. And so it's in a way, it's been validated. It's actually, interestingly enough, it's a slightly different variant. What Johnson & Johnson got approved was a portion of what the full ketamine drug is.

23:57Paul Greenberg: but get the way I got ketamine is intravenously and it's actually ketamine. It's not the Johnson and Johnson variant. Um, you go for 40 minutes, you get ketamine intravenously. Um, you do, I felt, you know, sort of loopy and a little spacey for, you know, 25 minutes. Um, and then you come out of it and it works really, really fast. Um, within four to five hours, they say your suicidal thoughts go away. Your depression can go away. Those effects aren't lasting unless you do it several times.

24:28Morra Aarons-Mele: I was going to say six, you have to go every week. Is it, is it like a course of chemo? It sounds a little bit like a course of chemo.

24:34Paul Greenberg: So, so I went Monday and Friday, the last three weeks, um, yesterday was my sixth treatment and my, this depression that I was talking about is totally gone. My suicidal thoughts are totally gone. Um, and, uh, and so now I'm just going back to sort of taper and maintain and it's, it's new. So they don't know a lot about how to maintain. And but but ultimately, what you're getting is a relatively small dose. So it's not addictive. And it is somebody I just read that that a psychiatrist called it the most ketamine, specifically the most incredible advance in psychiatry in the last 50 years.

25:07Morra Aarons-Mele: I would like to shift a little bit to leadership and management because because of your extraordinary success. And, you know, you're talking about this with me. You know, I love mushrooms. I am fascinated by them. One of my favorite things to do is in New Hampshire to go on mushroom exploring walks with a renowned naturalist, Riley McHugh. Riley has taught me to put on my seeing eyes. And when I do, I see purple mushrooms and red mushrooms, big mushrooms, gross mushrooms, cute mushrooms. And I was thinking about the holidays upcoming and, you know, how we use mushrooms as a decorative theme. Think about it.

25:46Morra Aarons-Mele: You probably have a mushroom ornament or a little mushroom figure that you may put out sometime in the fall or holidays. Mushrooms. If I had an online store, I would sell all manner of decorative mushrooms. I know it sounds silly. And I would do it on Shopify. Shopify is the platform for a record-breaking, reliable holiday selling season at every stage. There's a reason why so many businesses thrive on Shopify. You can easily sell everywhere people shop, online, in person, across social media, even in AI chats. If you launch your store before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy, you can take advantage of the extra online traffic.

26:32Morra Aarons-Mele: If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to shopify.com slash anxiousachiever and start your free trial. shopify.com slash anxiousachiever to hear your first. This episode is brought to you by Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app. You know, I love clothes. And I love when the seasons change to spend a good amount of time, you know, moving out, reviewing my summer stuff, bringing in my fall stuff. I live in New England, so I love a great sweater. I love a great tweed blazer. And now I have a way with Vinted that I can sell clothes I no longer want, but I know someone else will love and buy some new clothes.

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28:06Paul Greenberg: and maybe bringing in some new clothes with that extra money.

28:09Morra Aarons-Mele: You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist. We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month.

28:54Morra Aarons-Mele: And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say, to how that S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me frankly take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code Achiever at Monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Corps at half off just$50. That's$50 off your first year at Monarch.com with code Achiever.

29:35Morra Aarons-Mele: When did you go public with your depression? And why? Like, you know, why at that moment did you decide? I read about you in The Hollywood Reporter of all places.

29:48Paul Greenberg: Yeah, that was the first time I went truly public. I wrote about my depression right after Robin Williams committed suicide, which was shortly after I finished ECT. And I thought, Robin Williams, if he wanted to commit suicide, and I know there were some extenuating circumstances, but I just thought if he wanted to commit suicide, it could affect anybody. And so I wrote what you basically read, but I shared it only with friends. And within a week of each other, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain committed suicide in 2018. And I just thought this is an epidemic that I have to speak out against. I have to destigmatize this.

30:24Paul Greenberg: I have to share my experience. And to your point, you know, I'm a normal looking, quote unquote, successful guy who's got a family and has run businesses and blah, blah, blah. So if it can affect me, it can affect anybody. And it doesn't and I don't mean affect anybody, meaning you have to be depressed, but you know somebody who's depressed or it's in your family or you're living with somebody who's depressed or you're, you know, whatever. but it is absolutely stigmatized. You know, I mean, it, and I said this to Dr. Conwin, he said, get ACT. I said, well, what am I, he said, you know, you may have, you may have to skip work for a month.

31:00Paul Greenberg: I said, I can't, what am I going to tell him? He said, well, let me ask you a question. If you had to get a stent put in your heart because you were having a heart attack, would you stop going to work and go to the hospital? And I said, of course, he said, this is the same thing. This is a medical illness. It just happens to be in your brain as opposed to another part of your body. And so until we're able to see that, it's never, people are not going to get the help they need. And so I just felt, I mean, and they both, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, both had kids near my age. And I thought this is an epidemic of monstrous proportions.

31:33Paul Greenberg: 25 % of the people in the country are affected somehow by depression. And yet it's humiliating, you know?

31:40Morra Aarons-Mele: The veil of shame is so intense. But I will ask you, when you went public, were you working for yourself at that time or were you still?

31:47Paul Greenberg: Yes, I was. Do you think that made a difference, honestly? I think it made it easier because I didn't have to check with HR and, you know, the press department. And I didn't have to go to the CEO and say, hey, this may affect the stock price. And, you know, it was really my decision. but I think if even if I had been working at a big company at that point I would have pushed unless they just said you absolutely can't do it for whatever reason I would have said okay now is the time to tell my story because it just got to I don't know those two suicides

32:20Morra Aarons-Mele: obviously I didn't know them personally but we felt like we did though didn't we I mean especially people our age who grew up you know when I graduated college my mother gave me for my present a Kate Spade bag that was all I wanted as my coming out into the world

32:34Paul Greenberg: And you watch these Anthony Bourdain shows and, you know, he's our John Wayne, right? I mean, he's rough and rugged and he goes out and he sees these cool cultures and does all these amazing things and is so miserable he had to commit suicide. And you're just thinking, well, the disconnect, the dichotomy is so great. But I know that dichotomy of being in constant pain and yet pretending you're not and pushing through. So why not tell everybody else who's in that pain, there is help. You have to work hard to find it. I mean, I went through 75 drugs to find it and finally found it somewhere else.

33:09Paul Greenberg: But giving up is brutal. And too many people give up, partly because that's what depression does to you. It makes you feel hopeless in addition to being depressed. But I was hoping that I could tell my story and, you know, de-stigmatize it to some extent and let people know there's an opportunity to get healthy.

33:25Morra Aarons-Mele: Well, so you have a culture to create at your own company. How does your life story inform the culture that you've created?

33:38Paul Greenberg: I'm very honest. My team knew I was going for ketamine treatments. I said, I'm sorry, I can't come to this meeting. I'm going to be in ketamine treatments. And I, you know, maybe a little loopy the rest of the afternoon, so I can't do it. And it wasn't saying I have a doctor's appointment, I'll be busy. I just was very open about it. And, you know, you really begin to destigmatize it by talking about it as if it were normal, which it should be. And you know, it's like, Oh, I'm sorry, I have to go. I have to take my car in for a tune up. You just you know, if you say it as casually as that, people kind of look at you funny for a while for a second.

34:16Paul Greenberg: But then if you just say it like, Oh, you know what, I can't be here today. I had my therapy appointment this afternoon. And they start to use it as the vernacular of normal conversation. And then, you know, people started to ask me about it. And then they felt like they were intruding. But if I was able to say, no, please, I want to talk about it. Yes, it was on ketamine. And this is what it was like. And this is what happened. And this is, you know, these are the doctors. And it's unbelievable how many people have come up to me now and said, oh, you know, can you make a recommendation for a doctor for me?

34:43Paul Greenberg: You know, you do have to look for lots of different ways to get better. It's not, there's not just one.

34:49Morra Aarons-Mele: It takes a village, doesn't it though, too? It's like you have your care team. Yeah.

34:53Paul Greenberg: Right. You have your care team, but it takes persistence to try lots of different things because not everything's going to work. And, and some things work better in conjunction with other things.

35:02Morra Aarons-Mele: Do you think that if you saw a young person at your organization or, you know, in the course of your professional life, who's not the boss, right. Who can't stand up and say, I'm going for my ketamine because they may feel that that would hurt their future. Like, what's your advice for them? And how could how can a boss support that person in the right way? That's sort of a two part question. So what would you say to your younger self about asking for help? And then what would you say out there to people in management positions who want to help?

35:37Paul Greenberg: I would say the old cliche of if you don't have your health, you don't have anything applies and therefore do everything you need to do 28 year old self to get the help you need. And, and you don't have to tell everybody because, you know, you don't want to overshare either. You don't want to overshare about other things that are going on within your life, but, you know, tell the people you need to tell. Um, and honestly, if they don't support that, get out because it's not a culture in which you want to build a career or spend another minute of your life. It's just, it's toxic. If people don't understand and have the empathy for somebody who's literally, we're, we're on, at the same time, they would say to somebody who needed, you know, a stent, oh, of course, go ahead.

36:23Paul Greenberg: But you, you have mental problems. No way you're nuts. I mean, that's just crazy. And so again, no fun intended, but if they, if you're not finding that in the atmosphere you're in, get, go somewhere else that, that will support that because it's just too important. And I would say to managers, don't overdo it, but de-stigmatize it. Talk about it in normal terms. I mean, don't reveal confidences of people, but I would say, again, if that manager is in therapy, mention it, but be sensitive and explain to your team, listen, we're all in this together. Please come to me with anything you need personally that will help you.

37:00I mean, at the end of the day, it's a business.

37:03Paul Greenberg: The manager wants that person to be as productive as possible. And so creating an environment where somebody can come and talk to them and say, I'm not doing so well today. I mean, it's really interesting. If you have a meeting and somebody, your head data scientist is miserably depressed, she's not really going to contribute much to your meeting. So giving her the space to come to you and say, I'm just feeling horrible today. I'm just not there for whatever reason, or I need to do this treatment. Again, you don't want to make her feel like she has to spill her guts, but being able to say, I'm just not fully there today.

37:43Paul Greenberg: It's good to know as a manager and to know which of your team members is there and is not on certain days and who can contribute and who can't. But it's also the right thing to do, you know, just as an empathetic human being.

37:54Morra Aarons-Mele: Well, Paul Greenberg, I just really want to thank you. I want to wish you good mood, good health. Thank you.

38:04Paul Greenberg: Thank you so much.

38:07Morra Aarons-Mele: I also want to offer the number for the Suicide Prevention Hotline in the U.S., which is 1-800-273-8255. or you can visit the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at suicidepreventionlifeline.org. If there's a young person in your life who you're concerned about, I'd like to recommend the Jed Foundation, which is jedfoundation.org, and that's Jed with a J, J-E-D. You can also always reach out to the crisistextline.org for support, and that's at crisistextline.org.

38:47Morra Aarons-Mele: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.

39:20Thank you.