Overcoming Depression, Burnout, Anxiety and Insomnia with Dan Murray-Serter | E54

Dan Murray-Serter walks Steven Bartlett through his sequence of mental health struggles: a buried teenage bulimia, depression after his father's death, burnout while running his failed startup Grabble, and six months of anxiety-driven insomnia. He describes how repeated ayahuasca ceremonies reshaped his beliefs, cured his depression and removed his fear of death, and how a dietitian's omega-3, B-vitamin and blueberry-extract advice cured his insomnia and inspired him to start Heights. The conversation ranges over imposter syndrome, personal branding, scheduling habits to prevent burnout, and treating a marriage like a business with OKRs and habit trackers. They close on death, happiness versus fulfillment, and Dan's ideal dinner-party guests.

• Dan reveals he had bulimia for about four years in his twenties, throwing up involuntarily, a story he had buried and never told publicly until a recent newsletter.
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• He once coughed a hole in his throat (a pneumomediastinum) at a festival, his head swelled, and he spent a week in intensive care.
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• His only real depressive episode followed his father's death, after his dad survived six months on life support only to die of a cold caught in recovery.
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• Ayahuasca flipped him from a cynical atheist to spiritually 'enlightened'; he has now done it about 12 times, going back roughly every year.
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• He had insomnia for six months waking at 2am unable to sleep, and a dietitian's three supplements (omega-3, B vitamins, blueberry extract) fixed it within two weeks.
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• Dan and his wife spent their first year together non-monogamous and have openly discussed reopening the relationship in future if attraction fades.
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• Steven shares a never-before-told story of ending a relationship with an intellectually perfect, gorgeous partner because the sexual chemistry simply wasn't there.
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• Dan grew up Jewish and notes Judaism is both a race and a religion, so you can lose the religion but keep the cultural identity.
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• Ayahuasca is tree sap from the Amazon, practiced for thousands of years, and shamans hold a legal license to administer it.
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• Heights began as a weekly newsletter where Dan distilled one science paper at a time; he had read over 100 papers in about 100 weeks.
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• Dan's number one health hack is an undistracted daily walk, through which he gets through roughly 50 books a year via audio.
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• The human brain is about 60 percent fat, and roughly 90 percent of that fat is the compound DHA.
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• The minimum legal omega-3 dose to matter is around 250mg, but Seven Seas allegedly puts only 45mg in its bestseller, so you'd need six days' worth for one day's dose.
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• Dan frames his life through the Japanese concept of ikigai and honeymooned in Japan after discovering it.
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• He and his wife apply OKRs to their marriage, breaking goals into mind, body and soul with a nightly habit tracker.
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