Ferranti has been a member at IA for almost 3 years, but work got in the way of his fitness and mental health journey. Despite this, he was able to push through his anxiety and find his way back.
Ferranti Grantham
Ferranti Grantham has been a member at Industrial Athletics since May of 2022 thanks to a push from his husband, Jeff. He could mostly be seen in the evening classes, but would take hiatuses thanks to plenty of travel from work. He can now be seen in the mornings working with Coach Jen G or attending the 7:15 AM class. He has decided to share his story of fighting through the ever changing weather in his head to make fitness and exercise a priority in his life. A life changing event and a new job made him busier than ever, making the gym low on his priority list at the time. He began noticing changes in himself and the way he felt, knowing the change was from no longer making his fitness a priority. Ferranti’s story shows that what your mind is telling you is not always the truth.
Understanding the Weather in My Head
Anxiety is something you hear just about everywhere. From television, to books, to conversations with friends or family. In my lifetime I can remember a period when it wasn’t a typical topic and I can mark the point where we started the cultural dialog about what’s actually going on in our heads. The trouble is, the word ‘anxiety’ is an abstract – it doesn’t translate for everyone the same way because we all experience it differently. So, before I tell you about my practice of overcoming anxiety, I want to establish what it felt like for me first. I’ve had anxiety all my life, but if you’d asked me a decade ago if it’s something I struggled with, I would have dismissed the question with a simple ‘no’. I wouldn’t find the awareness of or approach the conversation about anxiety until I started working with a therapist about eight years ago, who identified that I’m type 2 bipolar. ‘Bipolar’ is another word that is casually mentioned without context and there certainly isn’t a general awareness between the two types. To summarize, type 1 bipolar individuals experience periods of mania where they may adopt high-risk habits, or exhibit erratic behavior. The ‘bi’ part of the polar for type 1 individuals appears as depressive episodes. For type 1s, the manic episodes are typically longer and more intense, where the depression is shorter lived and milder. In contrast, those of us with type 2 experience hypo-manic episodes – so we may do some silly things here and there, but it’s typically less severe than real mania. In exchange, the other side of the coin for type 2s is major depression, or longer, more intense bouts with depression. If you were to chart out the weather in my head over the course of a month, you’d easily spot that in my hypo-manic periods, my anxiety is at its lowest – I feel like I can overcome anything. But in my major depressive episodes, usually three-to-four weeks at a time, my anxiety peaks more readily and often.
What My Anxiety Feels Like
Some days it is a struggle to find a way to get myself out of bed – not because I feel sad, but more because I can’t fathom how I’m going to face the world that day. Other times, I get so overwhelmed at the slightest things that I isolate and avoid friends, family, and responsibilities. The worst part of all of this was feeling completely out of control over not only my body, but my perspective on reality. It felt that I was completely at the whims of whatever my brain chemistry was and it was never predictable. After dealing with more than my fair share of erratic mood swings, peaks and valleys, my husband suggested that I try exercise. Now, anyone you talk to about effective means of coping with bipolar type 2 will tell you that exercise ranks high on the list of ‘must dos’. I scoffed at this at first. I’d suffered an injury several months prior during a camping trip, and had overcome it with some basic physical therapy. I didn’t emotionally feel any change from that effort. Even though I knew that was different than the exercise my husband was recommending, I talked myself into believing it “wouldn’t make a difference”. That immediate denial response was exactly that – denial. Turns out, the biggest obstacle to helping myself feel better was the doubt spurred on by the very anxiety I wanted to correct. “What if I can’t do it?” “If I don’t try, I can’t fail.” “It’s better not to try than to try and learn you’re doomed.” “What if people judge me?” These were all questions that played on my mind for the first week leading up to my initial consultation.
Finding My Secret Weapon
The rumors you’ve heard are true – CrossFit is as rewarding as it is intense. Before you can officially start with Industrial Athletics, you go through a consultation with a coach to make sure you can do the exercise without hurting yourself. I remember being so nervous – that I’d find out that this would be it. That the worst-case scenario would be true and I’d learn I just didn’t have what it took to feel better and to control my life. Well, that didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, after completing my consultation, I signed up for private training. After a year of hard work and consistent effort, I wouldn’t recognize the person I was on the first day. My moods felt regular, and when I did hit a peak or valley I couldn’t quite shake, it was exceptionally less severe. My health was improving, my sleep was consistent, and for the first time ever I felt like I actually had a choice in how my days went. More importantly, I felt like I’d discovered the secret code to feeling good – that moving my body and making the effort directly correlated to feeling better and making gains (both at the gym and in my overall sense of wellbeing). I was on top of the world. And then it happened.
Change is Constant
It first started with being laid off by my job. Then, my financial situation took a turn for the worse. Thankfully, it didn’t take me long to find a new role in my field, but every new role comes with its challenges. Over the course of the next weeks and months, I spent more time working evenings, nights and weekends than I ever had before. To add to that, after some changes in the organization, I suddenly had a significant amount of travel added to my remit. My life ultimately became a cycle of fly here, live in a hotel for two days, fly back, do laundry, and repeat next week. As you can imagine, being on the road for four days at a time, week after week, made getting to the gym nearly impossible and I pretty much exclusively lived on a diet of takeout and delivery. After about the sixth month of this routine, I felt something shift internally. My peaks and valleys had intensified again, I was smoking cigarettes like it was my occupation, drinking heavily, and had no motivation to even attempt to course correct. That was it – the ride was over. I’d failed and lost everything I’d worked hard for.
Fears of Starting Again
Or so I told myself. I recognized that I was back to a pattern that I had decided I didn’t want to live with anymore. I knew I needed to make a change and get back to what I knew worked. But starting again felt impossible. Even sending a text to restart my suspended membership became something I put off for weeks. And over time, the same internal line of questioning and judgement resurfaced: “I’m lazy, I really let myself go.” “Now that I’ve lost all this momentum, I can’t start again.” “I did so well and failed. I should be ashamed to go back.”
Taking Back Control
Finally, one day – call it hypo-mania, desperation, or fate – I decided that I’d had enough and that I was going to go back and regain control of my own internal rhythm. Sure, I’d lost some strength, I’d certainly gained weight back, and lost definition, but it wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle to overcome. One of the things we learn in challenging ourselves, be it through exercise or any other endeavor, is resilience. Very few people start things at a level of mastery, and even those who are at the pinnacle of their field will tell you that the secret is to approach things from a mentality of practice, rather than as a set of instructions. It is more important to fail than to succeed because failures teach us to avoid the same pitfalls in the future. We don’t fail the same way a second time. And success, ultimately, is just the absence of failure. This way of thinking is how I found my way back. that every workout didn’t need to be 100% perfect. That it was okay to make mistakes. That the objective was to try, not perform. If I could get myself to show up and participate, the rest would fall into place. All I had to do now was trust the process.
Where I Am Now
At this point, after traveling for 28 weeks over 2024, I still haven’t cracked the code on obtaining the perfect work-life balance. I still feel burnout and stress from a demanding but rewarding job. The main difference in my life during the back half of the year has been that I feel like I have recovered my ability to choose. Every day I get to make a decision on how I want my reality to go. And with that choice, I have chosen to try – even if it means doing calisthenics in a hotel room, the important thing is that I try and trust myself. If you’ve found your own narrative to be similar to my story, I encourage you to do the same. Give yourself the room to make mistakes and believe that you can change – once you have those two things worked out, all that’s left is to trust, try and transform.
Happy new year, everyone.
