Soon I will have been in the security industry for 20 years. In 20 years of hacking the hardest thing to hack has been my own mind. When your own mind isn’t playing ball there doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it initially.

I am taking a moment to talk about some personal growth. I will return to technology and cyber security in due course. But for this post I am talking about hacking my own squishy brain.

For several years I have lived with severe anxiety. The kind of anxiety which seems to bubble out from nowhere. You are walking round the corner from your house and suddenly *bang* you are having a panic attack. You are sitting in a restaurant, then *bang* there you are again.

I had anxiety about traveling. Probably because my first panic attack happened when I boarded a train. I stepped on. The doors closed. Then I was in a personal hellscape thinking I was having a heart attack. You brush that off as a one-off and try to move on with your life but it steadily gets worse.

So you choose to stay home. You limit your choices. You enjoy life but only in a small radius. I am thankful that through this I have never felt depressed about it and I have never felt awkward about talking about it. I am sure this would have been far worse if either were the case.

I would also like to point out that despite my issues as a family we still did some things together outside the house. We still travelled within an hour of Glasgow a few times a year. But each of these would trigger weeks of me worrying about it beforehand before the inevitable triumphant drive home feeling like a king. 

I started to take photos of me getting on a train heading into town (a max 15 minute journey). I would always look franky shit scared on the way out. But the selfie on the way home was always unbridled joy. I started to ask myself why the heck I couldn’t just treat the outward leg like the return leg and be my usual delighted self both ways!

Come Christmas 2025 I had frankly had enough and so I started to educate myself. I listened to an audiobook (Audible – Anxiety: Panicking about Panic), I read more, I found podcasts. I found a lot of excellent things in there since it explained exactly these points that I am paraphrasing:

• “Nobody has ever died of a panic attack”.
• “It is just unwanted adrenaline. Adrenaline you don’t need right now as nothing is wrong. Your body can only make so much adrenaline at once so the good news is that once you start feeling the panic you have about 20 minutes until you feel fine again”.

In particular I have latched on to the thought that “hey it feels bad now, but it’ll be over soon” and then you can enjoy whatever it was you were doing. 

In order to help me reduce the power anxiety had over me I made a plan:

• Exercise more: this helps burn adrenaline in a healthy way (so there is less to just pop out unnecessarily), provides endorphins to help lower blood pressure (reducing physical symptoms that can trigger spiralling thoughts), and improves my sleep immeasurably. I cannot stress enough how important SLEEP is. Analysing all the panic attacks I ever had looking for patterns as to why they happened revealed an ever present lack of sleep.
• Leave the house every day: as I was anxious about going places I simply had to do it so frequently it became absolutely normalised, expected, and even enjoyed.
• Set a goal: My anxiety has kept not only me but my family close to home for years. Let’s go on a foreign holiday as this will feature a myriad of the situations I have been avoiding. I marked this on the calendar and counted down the days. Something that I rarely do.
• Be thankful: Taking time to remember all the good things in life. To revel in the things you CAN do and not focusing on things you CANNOT do. This meant changing internal narratives from things like “I have to take my kids to school” (onus on “have” making it a task and a duty) to instead “I get to take my kids to school” (onus on “getting to” it is a privilege to ensure my kids are educated and an excellent chance to talk to them before they are exhausted by school). 

In summary, that was a plan with two habits (exercise, and go outside every day), a goal to shoot for, and a shift in internal language to focus on what I get to do and to be mindfully thankful about it.

I am returning to work today after a successful trip away to Barcelona for a full 7 days. We ate some delicious food. I met a friend from university I haven’t seen in nearly 25 years! I was on buses and in taxis and on planes and in loads of situations where I have panicked before. It all pretty much melted away the second the plane was in the air.