I'm Maura Arendesmeli, 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 back up, and how they help workplaces can change in the future.

Today, we're going to look deeper at the issue of substance abuse and anxiety through the lens of an exceptionally high functioning addict and the underlying issues that lead to those addictions.

Imagine being in one of the most stressful times of your career or your education,

working long hours, your personal life is non-existent, you might not be sleeping, you're not

eating well, and to take the edge off, you have a drink and then a few more.

Or a friend offers you an Adderall pill.

You take it and all of a sudden the work just happens and you're so focused.

Or maybe you completely separate your working professional self from that other self. Dependence on alcohol or other

drugs is common in the public at large. One of every eight adults struggles with both alcohol

and drug use disorders simultaneously. Mental health disorders and substance use disorders are quite often co-occurring. And in 2017,

there were 8.5 million American adults who had both. Addicts are people like us, people who are

high functioning, who succeed in business, who become leaders. Substance abuse and misuse and addiction are a mental struggle in and of themselves, of course,

and they often mask other issues like anxiety and depression.

So later in the show, we'll hear from Dr. Zev Schulman-Olivé, an addiction psychiatrist who focuses

on meditation, self-compassion, and awareness as a way to

find a light at the end of the substance abuse tunnel. First, a firsthand experience. My guest is

Seth Mnuchin. He's a longtime journalist who struggled with addiction, and now he works in the

Comparative Media Studies Department at MIT. And you may wonder, how did someone who teaches at an esteemed education institution,

who's a best-selling journalist who got in early to Harvard, hit rock bottom?

So I want to start off by going back deep into the days of your addiction so we can paint the picture for our audience so they understand how serious a disease this was for you.

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