I'm Maura Aaron's Mealy, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

We look at stories from business leaders who've dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges,

how they fell down, how they pick themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change for the better.

On this show, we talk a lot about very common, very normal ways of feeling and ways your mental health can go astray. Depression and anxiety, they are super prevalent, especially right now.

And we also talk a lot about the connection between mental health and achievement,

and that many of the most successful people we know, including us, deal with these issues

and manage to achieve incredible things. Today, we're going to look at mental health from the lens

of a creative industry, an industry that might feel some ways more open and less formal.

I'm thinking about the way that advertising has morphed into social media and films online

and a very experiential cool thing.

But this also comes with a whole kind of creative pressure that many industries don't necessarily carry because the pace is so fast.

And it's adopted the sort of addicted, gamified cadence of our modern social media age, selling to clients and the thrill of the chase, I feel this myself.

These habits that are permeating, I think, a lot of different jobs can exacerbate mental health challenges, but they can also make you forget about your depression or your anxiety for a bit.

And our guest today and I are going to reflect on how to let go of some of the small winds

and get back to your bigger picture.

And we'll also talk about a severe and relatively rare mental health issue,

obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a specific kind of OCD, pure OCD. Now, there's a natural

connection between the hypervigilant obsessive type and the kind of person who succeeds at

running a company or winning other professional accolades. This isn't really that kind of

OCD. In fact, we have so many misperceptions about OCD.

Our guest today is Aaron Harvey. He's a principal at Ready Set Rocket and a founder of the Made of Millions Foundation, and he's become someone outspoken in the advertising space, at

times brutally, painfully honest, because he wants creative industries and the workplace in general

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