From burnout to Breathtaking

My name is Alex.

I’m a former Google engineer and PM. During my burnout, depression and anxiety hit me hard. I tried everything my therapist suggested: EMDR, hypnosis, CBT, psychodrama. I downloaded every meditation app. Read all the threads. Nothing stuck.

I kept asking my therapist to just give me a plan. Tell me what to do each day and I’ll do it. But she couldn’t, because what works for one person doesn’t work for another. That frustrated me as an engineer. I wanted structure.

After months of trial and error with techniques, reading ancient philosophy books, learning about my personality, and going to retreats, I found two breathing practices that I kept doing. 20 minutes total, followed by meditation. I did them every day for a month. Nothing fancy. But I kept doing them.

Slowly, things shifted. The anxiety started loosening up. My focus started coming back. My nervous system relearned to regulate itself. After three months, I started feeling like myself again.

That’s when I understood: mental fitness is like physical fitness. It takes finding the right exercises for your body, then doing them consistently. Not once in a while when you feel like it. Every day. Patience, persistence, discipline. That’s why I still do my practice every day.

But the right exercises are not the same for everyone. Things that worked for people I trusted did nothing for me. The two practices that finally stuck weren’t better than the rest. They fit me: how I’m wired, how my days run, what my body was actually asking for. Someone wired differently needs something else, and that isn’t a flaw in them or in the practice. It’s the whole point.

There was something deeper I learned, too. All that searching, all that thinking about what would fix me, was part of the problem. The body already knows how to regulate itself. We just forgot how to listen. Practices like breathwork, meditation, movement and journaling kickstart the process and bring us to a state of listening. Ancient traditions call it different things, but the message is the same: stop forcing, start allowing. In Taoism it’s “wei wu wei,” doing by not doing. The practices work not because they add something new, but because they quiet the mind enough to let your own wisdom come through.

I found the practices that fit me through a lot of hard work, over months. That’s how I came back to myself, and nobody should have to go through what I have.

So I built Breathtaking, to help people like me skip the hard work and get straight to what works. I mapped 62 techniques across breathwork, meditation, movement and journaling, and designed the system I’d wanted my therapist to have. It starts by understanding your personality, behavioral patterns, how you tend to think, feel and react, so it can pick the practices that work for you. Then, every week, it asks how you’re doing and adjusts, and tells you what to practice today. No browsing through thousands of options. No guessing what might work. Because the truth lies not in more answers, but in fewer questions, in practicing every day.

I’m not here to promise miracles. Some days you’ll do your practice and feel nothing different. That’s fine. That’s normal. The effects build over time. Week by week. Month by month. Your baseline shifts.

If you’re ready to stop searching and start practicing, if you’re willing to show up for yourself every day even when you don’t feel like it, then start here. Pick your plan length. Do the practice. Come back tomorrow.

And if you want company, I do my own practice every day, and on weekdays I do it live and online. You can do it with me for free.