Transforming Human Suffering: Facing What You’ve Been Running FromTransforming Human Suffering: Facing What You’ve Been Running From
I Love Being Sober
Marine veteran and coach Akshay Nanavati shares how PTSD, alcoholism and a near-suicide moment led him to darkness retreats, ultra-endurance challenges and a new way of relating to suffering. Tim Westbrook ties Akshay’s story to practical tools for sobriety, showing how facing pain and directing attention can reshape life in recovery.
1:05:28•25 Aug 2026
Facing the Pain: Akshay Nanavati on Fear, Suffering and a Kick-Ass Sober Life
Episode Overview
- You can’t control most thoughts or feelings, but you can control your actions and where you direct your attention.
- Relabelling experiences like PTSD as normal responses instead of “disorders” can reduce shame and self-attack.
- Facing pain directly — through stillness, journaling, or conversation — is the only way to move through it; the way out is through.
- Choosing from the future identity you want, rather than from your past self, helps break repetitive patterns in addiction and life.
- Progress comes from creating new, meaningful problems and learning to do the right hard thing, not just any hard thing.
“Where your focus goes, your reality flows.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This live episode of *I Love Being Sober* drops you right into a room at Camelback Recovery in Scottsdale, where Marine combat veteran and mental performance coach Akshay Nanavati shares how he went from drinking a bottle of vodka a day and standing in his kitchen with a knife, to skiing 500 miles across Antarctica alone and spending days at a time in total darkness.
The conversation, led by host Tim Westbrook, centres on suffering, trauma, and the choice to face what you’ve been running from. Akshay talks openly about PTSD, survivor’s guilt, and the binge–sobriety cycle that brought him to a rock-bottom moment. He doesn’t pretend it turned around overnight; instead, he describes a slow climb shaped by neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, and the simple but brutal practice of sitting with pain rather than escaping it.
You’ll hear how he reframed “post-traumatic stress disorder” into “post-traumatic stress”, seeing his hypervigilance as a normal response to war rather than proof that he was broken. He shares practical tools like directing attention on purpose — “Where your focus goes, your reality flows” — and the idea that we only truly control our actions and our attention.
From darkness retreats where he sat for seven and then ten days in pitch black, to dragging a 420‑pound sled across ice, every extreme challenge becomes a way to test those ideas in real time. Tim links Akshay’s experiences back to everyday recovery: the cold plunge that starts the day with something hard, the danger of chasing an “I’ll be happy when…” future, and the importance of building an identity beyond addiction.
The audience Q&A adds powerful moments around grief, childhood abuse, and using loss as fuel rather than a lifelong sentence. If you’re tired of running from your own feelings and curious what it might look like to walk straight into them, this conversation might be the nudge you’ve been waiting for.
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