Michael: Interrupting the loop

“You don’t notice your heart stopping, it’s the restarting.”

Michael had known about his heart condition since his early twenties. It was congenital. It showed up on check-ups, but it stayed roughly the same. Nothing to worry about, but something to keep an eye on.

Then, early in 2025, the year when he joined Slingshot, it started to feel different.

He struggled to describe the sensation. Not the absence of a beat, but what came after. Pressure, a strange fullness. Something that made it hard to ignore. A few times a day, without warning, his attention snapped inward. He started paying closer attention to his body, trying to interpret what it was telling him.

That attention had consequences. Every sensation asked a question. Every question wanted an answer. He found himself monitoring constantly, scanning for meaning, trying to decide what mattered and what did not.

There were trips to A&E. Something felt wrong, and he could not tell how seriously to take it.

“In retrospect, you can easily say it’s a panic attack,” he says. “But at the time, I thought I had a heart attack.”

The scariest part was the self-doubt. “I didn’t know whether my thoughts were reliable,” he says.

From the outside, his life still looked solid. A good life. A loving partner. Work that felt mission-driven. None of that helped here. He had always trusted his judgment. Now he could no longer count on it.

The recalibration did not arrive all at once. It came first through therapy. He was lucky to get six free NHS sessions, and one of them stayed with him.

He was on the phone with a therapist. She asked him to hold his hand out in front of him for two minutes and describe what he could see. For someone used to poring over charts and graphs, this felt small. Almost trivial.

One vein looked darker than the rest. Should it really be that colour? His attention narrowed, pulling him toward finding signal in the data.

“The longer I looked,” he says, “the more I realised that if you give something enough attention, you can find anything.”

His hand was still his hand. The sensation did not stop. But something else shifted. “I realised I don’t have to believe every thought just because it shows up,” he says.

The thoughts still came, the sensations lingered. What changed was the meaning he gave them, and how he chose to respond.

CBT helped in that specific way. It taught him how to interrupt loops, how to notice when attention was helpful, and when it was hindering. He is clear that it did not solve everything. “It’s like taking a picture,” he says. “This is what things look like right now. Not what they are forever.”

While CBT helped him notice the loops, it didn’t fully loosen them.

Michael had tried psilocybin for the first time the year before things began to unravel. He approached it carefully, with medical supervision and a lot of preparation.

That experience created space. It wasn’t boundless, just enough to show that another internal state existed at all. 

Even then, something else weighed heavily. The question of children. IVF. A process that sat entirely outside effort or control.

The second time trying psilocybin happened much later. By then, his heart was no longer an abstract worry but an ongoing medical reality. During that second experience, an image stayed with him. Not symbolic in any grand sense. Just clear. The outline of a future he wanted, and could not force into being.

It did not arrive as comfort. It arrived as responsibility.

“I was sort of psyching myself up,” he says. “Expecting to face my demons.” That is not what happened. The experience felt quieter. Less dramatic. More like confirmation than discovery.

“I don’t think ‘cured’ is the right word,” he says. “It sounds too permanent.”

He reaches for an analogy instead. “I’m not an alcoholic,” he says, “but it’s the same sort of thing.” There is a part of him that can tip into obsessive thinking. That part has always been there. It does not need much encouragement.

What matters is not feeding it. “I don’t need to give it more focus, time, attention, energy,” he says.

The physical picture stabilised faster than the psychological one. The pacemaker addressed the heart. The anxiety took longer. 

When he joined Slingshot, a month after the surgery, he was not in a good place.

“Full transparency,” he says, “I was not great when I started.”

The company itself was still forming, and figuring itself out. Which was comforting, in a way, for someone doing the same.

As Slingshot evolved, so did his relationship to the work. After losing trust in his own internal signals once, he became careful about where he placed his attention. That instinct  now applied everywhere.

It shapes how he manages people. He is open about his own experience when it is relevant, and quieter when it is not. “As the company has grown, I’m not going to share my story in a full company setting as much because it’s not about me,” he says. But in smaller rooms, when there is reason, he does. Less as a confession, but more as helpful context.

That sensibility carries into how he thinks about Ash.

He uses it constantly during work, often in a technical way. “Sometimes, when I’m speaking with Ash, I’m just testing nonsense,” he says, often pressure-testing some rabbit hole in the model.

And sometimes, precisely because there is no pressure, something real slips out. “Ash then gives me some question or some insight,” he says. “Some spin on a situation you hadn’t quite put words to.”

That is what he finds most useful. Not answers—because these sorts of problems don’t always have a clear answer—but language that can lead you toward one.

For his wife, who lives with chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis, Ash’s value is simpler. It’s presence. “For someone with her condition,” he says, “it’s just really helpful to have someone saying ‘it’s going to be okay’.”

Just having something that is always there. Always listening.

This is why he talks about Slingshot as his last job.

Last doesn’t necessarily mean final. It means refusing misalignment.

He’s careful about the environments he commits to, and the kind of work they ask people to do.

The work has to be worth the attention. The part of him that can spiral is still there. He’s just learned not to follow it.