Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

“The key is building fires where you can warm yourself as you wait for the tempest to pass.”

UPDATE: Tim has courageously shared the precipitate of his lifelong depression.

Most people know Tim Ferriss as the amicable, quick-witted, high-energy writer, adventurer, and interviewer, who has devoted his life to optimizing human performance across the full spectrum of physical and mental health. But few know that, in addition to nearly dying at birth and growing up with no material luxury, Tim survived a period of suicidal depression that nearly claimed his life — the kind of suffocating grimness which William Styron so unforgettably described.

Tim discusses that dark episode for the first time in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (public library) — his compendium of learnings from more than two hundred interviews with entrepreneurs, artists, writers, scientists, and other titans of achievement, including philosopher Alain de Botton, musician Amanda Palmer, mindfulness and meditation teacher Tara Brach, neuroscientist Sam Harris, writer Malcolm Gladwell, social scientist Brené Brown, and writer and former firefighter Caroline Paul. In a chapter dedicated to the darkest period of his life, he shares the most any of us ever can: his subjective experience and his personal coping strategies, in the hope that they might help others who are also struggling.

Reflecting on why he kept his suicidal depression a secret for many years, Tim distinguishes between two kinds of secrets — those we keep because we fear fleeting mortification, like accounts of embarrassing things we’ve done in sub-optimal moments, and dark secrets that paralyze us with deep shame, “the shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives.”

Noting that a number of his closest friends in high school and college had killed themselves — and, lest we forget, there is perilous social contagion in suicide — Tim outlines the downward spiral which he himself barely escaped. He writes:

In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality.

Tim goes on to trace his downward spiral, precipitated by his failing senior thesis at Princeton — a pinnacle of education for which he had labored ...