I was arrested while high on meth. That is not a detail I soften. It is where the story starts. I was deep in meth addiction, I made a decision that resulted in federal charges, and I went to prison for 4 years. Six months of that was solitary confinement.
In prison, there were mental health programs. I sat in them. I talked. I did what they asked. I am not saying the programs were bad or that the people running them did not care. I am saying they did not reach me. And when I got out, I still carried everything I had walked in with, plus the weight of 4 years.
I had to find something that worked. What I found was wingsuiting.
The Most Beautiful Wingsuit Fly-By of My Life, Swiss Alps (Cinematic) | Battling Monsters
What Happens to Your Brain
The first time I flew in a wingsuit, I was terrified. Not in a metaphorical way, physically, overwhelmingly terrified. And then the canopy opened and I landed and I realized I could not remember a single thought from the previous 90 seconds. Not one. My brain had been completely occupied with staying alive.
For someone who had spent years trapped in a loop of regret, craving, shame, and projection into an imagined future, 90 seconds of complete silence in my own head felt like something I had never experienced before. It felt like being free.
"Adventure forces you into the present moment. The monster lives in your past and your future. It cannot follow you there."
That is the mechanism. It is not complicated, but it is real. When your body demands everything you have to keep yourself alive, your brain cannot simultaneously run its default loop. The loop stops. And in the silence, you can see yourself differently.
Why Sitting Still Did Not Work
I want to be clear: I am not saying therapy is useless. I am saying that for me, and for many people I have since worked with, sitting in a chair and talking about your trauma while your nervous system is in a chronic state of dysregulation is extremely difficult. The brain does not want to process the hard things when it is already overwhelmed. It wants to defend.
Movement changes that. Physical stress, real physical demand, regulates the nervous system in a way that talking does not. You go in dysregulated and come out calm. Not because you fixed anything. Because you gave your body something real to do with all that cortisol and adrenaline instead of letting it eat you from the inside.
Extreme sports amplifies that. The higher the stakes, the more complete the reset. That is why I built Battling Monsters around adventure. Not because everyone needs to jump off a cliff. Because everyone needs their version of the thing that makes them completely present.
From One Person's Discovery to a Movement
After I got out of prison, I rebuilt. I built a business. I traveled. I flew wingsuits in more than 80 countries as Captain Manicorn. And somewhere in that process, I started talking openly about what I had been through, the addiction, the prison sentence, the process of putting a life back together, and I discovered that people were hungry for this.
Not the inspirational version. The honest version. The one that said: this is hard, it does not get easy, there is no graduation ceremony, and here is what helps anyway.
Battling Monsters is now a program of Just Care More, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. More than a half million people across 80+ countries have found it. Most of them came because something else was not working and they were looking for an approach that told the truth.
What This Means for You
You do not need a wingsuit. You do not need to jump off a cliff. You need to find the thing in your life that makes you fully present, where the loop stops and the silence comes in, and you need to do it every day, especially on the days you do not want to.
For some people it is running. For others it is surfing, or rock climbing, or mountain biking, or cold-water swimming, or martial arts. The specific activity matters less than the commitment: show up, do something genuinely hard, do it again tomorrow.
The Battling Monsters framework is free. The daily practice guide is free. It takes five minutes a day. It will not fix you. Nothing fixes you. But it will give you a practice that works even on the days everything else feels like it has failed.