CLIP: "I Was Sober, Healthy And Meditating Every Day, I Still Got Sick!" | Founder, Hector Hughes

0:00What would happen then is in my drinking days is I take it too far, wake up, feel so much shame. And then I just bury it all away, laugh about it with friends and go again. And so it just had this decade of things building up and building up and building up. And so what then happened in 2019 when I started the business is I actually got quite ill a few months afterwards. So I stopped drinking. And then about four or five months afterwards, I started to get these weird autoimmune issues. so i started to get this like burning sensation that my skin would go red i'd feel yeah yeah and it would last for seven to two hours keep me up during the night uh couldn't figure out what it was i was living a very healthy life at that point it was eating very healthy it was in a very meditating a lot and a really chilled headspace yeah so i was feeling good but then then this this thing would just come on spend a year seeing an allergy clinic it wasn't allergies but they gave me all these antihistamines which would keep it away but every time i stopped it would come back then i saw a chinese doctor for a year which was a bit of a pantomime because he couldn't speak any english i couldn't speak any cantonese so just turn off every two weeks and we'd laugh and smile at each other and do some acupuncture and then he'd give me these 14 bags of twigs and leaves uh and and every day i'd have to brew one of these into a potion basically for two hours um so yeah my girlfriend at the time uh put up with the house smelling like chinese medicine for weeks and weeks so I think that must have had anti-histaminic properties because that had a similar effect right and then after another year so there's two years at this point I started got a lot worse and moved with my partner then up to Epping Forest and started to feel rough and hung over every day but you were this is when you're sober was sober yeah and every day I would just feel rough in 23 24 and work was challenging and my whole focus each day was just turn up and grip my teeth and just put on a positive presence for the team and the people around me and i eventually found out that was due to mold poisoning which is yeah yeah and the more you look into that like

1:59Olly Fawcett:it's actually far more common than is that we think do you know chris williams that yeah it's exactly is that what you have to do that yeah yeah really yeah and there's something about i mean i've gone into this a lot since and actually uh people like gabble mate talk a lot about how uh suppressed emotions and traumas compound these chronic issues right and chris williamson how he lives his life was quite similar to how i was living my life then which is like very optimized yes you know everything is very strict and tight and and the problem with that is it adds a strain to some extent so this cult of optimization uh fundamentally is just not how we are talking about at the moment as well aren't they 100 so i think it's really not good for your long-term health i think it makes you much more susceptible to things like this uh and so so yeah through that That experience just led me to unpack a lot of what I was talking about earlier, which is all of these suppressed emotions and traumas and all of these kind of things.

2:53So that sent me on a fascinating journey and actually realized how just on some spiritual level, I think I've always been quite chilled naturally. Like if you met me four or five years ago, you would think I was very chilled, like meditate a lot, all this kind of thing. But there's always been some torment on some spiritual level. and so actually the last year has been a big year of of um just working on that which has been how did you recover some mold poisoning yeah how did you recover from that uh so it's a long and awkward

3:23Olly Fawcett:thing to recover from and complicated i think i saw chris's video where he documented like a six month journey of like yeah moving out he was doing like i mean he obviously went pretty hard and if you did the same thing he was doing some trial stuff and like it looked fucking intense Yeah, and it also wasn't working, right? Like, I think this is the big thing. So a lot of it is for me now is I tried all the things I threw a lot of money at it, ran myself into the ground financially, tried every therapy imaginable, peptide therapy, ozone therapy, all the things, all the supplements. And actually, in the last year or so, the approach has just been to just chill out more.

3:59Really? Yeah. Which for a founder is hard, right? Fucking hard. Yeah. And the natural stresses and strains of running a business, I think, are really not susceptible not helpful for healing uh but being in nature more being offline more like all of these things is just actually chilling out because the body can heal itself but i think it's when we when we just overwhelm our systems which living in london working as a founder like all of these things can really really dial up everything in as part of the system so that's been the big thing for me in the last year or so and it's there have been times when it's been easy there are times when it hasn't so we've been through a lot of challenging times business-wise there's been lots of fundraising and various things which has added a lot of stress and so um i'm actually in a period now where i could do with i'm actually going to next week just go and spending a couple of weeks out in the countryside somewhere and just chill out and just deregulate my system a little bit how do you know that you're getting close to the close the line um so so i as i said for two decades was very emotionally suppressed and right could not was not in touch with my body at all and as part of the last year or so and digging into all of this a lot of that has just been learning to just like sit and just feel what's what's going on you can really feel it like if we actually sit and listen to our body the signs are there and i think it's so easy to numb ourselves and just ignore what signals the body's telling us.