It Just Arrives: Brandon Fairweather on The Hell Inside Our Heads
Show notes
Brandon Fairweather, author of The Hell Inside Our Heads, has lived through years of medical shocks, some of them near fatal. His worst moments, he says, weren't in ICU. They came on holiday, out of nowhere: a cold feeling, sweaty palms, a racing heart, and no reason at all. That is anxiety as he lived it, a blanket that comes over you "where you didn't choose it, it just arrives."
Brandon is 43, the second of four brothers from a close family, and he has spent his career in health and fitness, helping other people get well while his own body kept letting him down. Out of years of anxiety came the book, written from the patient's side. He's not a doctor or a psychologist, and he says so plainly. It's the manual he wishes someone had handed him.
We talk about why anxiety isn't logical, and why his biggest discovery was to stop trying to beat it and learn to manage it. We get into how a run of medical shocks wears away your trust in your own body, the free things that help, from sunlight and sleep to a ten-minute walk around the block, and his plan to give copies of the book away. His advice to anyone in the thick of it is simple: go again tomorrow.
Brandon's shout-out goes to Exclusive Books, who have backed him with launches and publicity. The book is also on Takealot, at Bargain Books too as far as he knows, and as an e-book on Kindle and Apple Books. His own website for the book is coming soon, and he'll announce it on his socials.
If someone you love is carrying this, send them this conversation. And if it touches something raw for you, the SADAG Suicide Crisis Helpline is free on 0800 567 567.
Thank you to Janine, Brandon's publicist, for making this conversation happen.
Keep listening
Deep Work: The Neuroscience of Real Focus
Deep work isn't a personality trait — it's a trainable capacity, and the modern world is engineered to fragment it. David unpacks the mechanisms behind focus failure: attention residue, the 23-minute ramp, and the dop…
Why Your Brain Hates Uncertainty — and What It Does to Your Decisions
David Watts unpacks the neuroscience of not-knowing — why a 'maybe' hurts more than a definite 'no', and how a brain wired to predict the world treats uncertainty as a threat. Drawing on the 2016 UCL snake study and t…
Death on Toast: An Honest Health Update
Recorded live, from bed, on a Saturday afternoon feeling — in David's own words — "like death on toast." Ahead of a hospital admission on Monday, David sat down to give an honest update: where his health actually stan…
The Overloaded Mind: When Nobody Hears Your Best Idea
A brilliant engineer pitched a groundbreaking solution across sixty dense slides — and watched a room of investors stop listening. This episode unpacks John Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory, the hard limits of working…