Mind MiddlewareA Mind Middleware conversation
⚠️ Content warning: This article discusses suicidal thoughts, depression, anxiety, panic attacks and medication. Please read with care. In Aotearoa New Zealand you can call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.
I usually try to keep this podcast from being about me. But some episodes won't allow it, because the people who shaped you are part of the story. In some of my darkest thinking, I was lucky enough to meet someone who helped me understand that sometimes your nervous system simply won't let you regulate — won't let you talk to people, or hear them, or frame yourself in a way they can connect with. That person is Sachin Jain, and what he taught me about how our brains work, and how we connect, I use almost every single day. So this episode is a little different from the usual. It's also one of my favourites.
Sachin is an experience-design consultant, a certified Whole Brain® Thinking coach, and the author of a new book called The Ripple Code. But the through-line of everything he says is a single, slightly confronting idea: no matter what happens to you, you have a choice. We spent the better part of an hour testing that idea against each other — and not always agreeing, which is exactly why it was worth doing.
The question companies dodge
Ask Sachin his "human doing" and he'll tell you he helps companies design experiences their customers love, and that their own people are proud to deliver. But push a layer down and the real work reveals itself. "Most people are very clear what they do — they describe it by their title. Try asking them why they do it. That's the one they struggle with." Same with companies: ask why they exist and you get boilerplate about putting the customer first, or an entrepreneur saying "to make money." Neither, he says, is a purpose.
He came to this honestly. Born into a family of entrepreneurs in India, he started out in business with his dad, walked away from his own company after a falling-out at 22 or 23, and only found his thread in his first proper job: "I realised I get my energy from helping people, or helping people see things differently." Help desk, then trainer, then fifteen years working with people across every kind of industry. The industry was never the point. The people were.
A big rock in the pond
When I ask every guest for a metaphor for their relationship with work, Sachin reached for one he uses constantly: ripples. "Work is like throwing a big-ass rock into the pond of your life. The ripples go far and wide." Not just money through the door — your stress, your body, your mind, your relationships. Most people, he reckons, treat work as a means to an end and never notice the ripples reaching the far bank. His whole pitch is to be thoughtful about the rock.
That tipped us, briefly and happily, into a rabbit hole — souls, energy, karma, the butterfly effect — the kind we've fallen into many times. Sachin is spiritual, not religious, and his view is that everything connects: the millions of precisely-timed events that had to occur for any of us to be sitting where we are. You don't have to share the metaphysics to take the practical point he lands on: "Be aware of every single thing you do, because it does have an impact." A random chat with a cab driver, a Friday-night tangent with your team about investing — small rocks, long ripples.
"You always have a choice"
Then we got to the argument. Sachin's core claim is that what upsets us, depresses us, makes us feel small, comes from the value we assign to events. "Why is gold valuable? It's a metal. Because we put value into it." We're choosing, consciously or subconsciously, all the time — and realising that, he says, hands you back control.
I pushed back, because I don't think it's that simple. I gave him the hard case: you pour three weeks into something, you're proud of it, and someone walks in and tears it apart for reasons you don't believe — and everyone else says it's good. In that moment, I said, a lot of people genuinely can't go "meh, it's just you." Sachin didn't budge, but he didn't bulldoze either. He broke it down: in that moment, what choices do you have? Many. You can't control what the person said — but your response is one of a million choices, and the one you make sets the dominoes in motion. We agreed on the foundation — you had a choice — and kept wrestling over the rest, which is the honest place to leave it.
His evidence is the extremes. People with no limbs climbing Everest. Wim Hof at altitude without clothes. Himalayan monks who, by his account and by documented research, raise their body temperature at will. "What are we? A bag of biochemical mass. And if you can control your chemistry at will — which they're showing they can — how can you disassociate your emotions, thoughts or actions from that?" Willpower, in his framing, is just belief: "Willpower is essentially how strongly you believe." He's careful, importantly, not to weaponise this. He's not saying people bring their suffering on themselves. He's saying that taking ownership of your choices is the first step out of helplessness — because at least then it isn't all just happening to you.
Do something
The practical version of this is refreshingly un-mystical. If something's not right, Sachin says, don't just talk about it — investigate. Rule out the biochemistry first: see a doctor, check your blood markers. "If it's a medically driven condition, get that sorted." If the doctor says you're clear, then start exploring — exercise, meditation, sport, whatever aligns with you. "The point is, do something. Don't just sit there and simmer and use it as a crutch."
This is where I told him about the medication. I took it for about two years, and I say plainly that it's part of what kept me alive — the same way I'd take medication for any other biochemical condition. I'm against the stigma. But I've also seen the other side, where the pills create the space to do the work. The image I use is my son, who has cerebral palsy: when they Botox his hypertonic muscle so it relaxes, they spend those months strengthening the other side, so that when the tightness returns he has something to draw on. Medication, for me, was like that — numbing things down just enough that I could recognise the destructive thoughts, the suicidal thoughts, and start to understand what drove me there. And part of that understanding, it turned out, was about how my brain is wired differently from everyone else's.
Whole Brain Thinking: the trigger is the opposite of you
Which is Sachin's actual expertise. For about fifteen years he's coached Whole Brain® Thinking — a four-quadrant model of mental preferences. The short version: the brain is lazy and doesn't like to overheat, so it programs the neurons you use most, building preferences over a lifetime of genetics, upbringing and experience. Split into four, most people have a strong preference for three of the quadrants and one they find genuinely hard. Top-left is the logical, analytical, numbers-and-Excel mind; top-right is creative, intuitive, big-picture; bottom-left is the primitive, safety-seeking, organising brain; and the fourth (bottom-right) is the relational, emotional, expressive one.
The insight that lands hardest is this: the preference you don't have is the one that triggers you. "It could be people saying the same thing in different words." A plan versus an idea. "I think" versus "I feel." Sachin can read someone's preference in under thirty seconds from their tone and their clothes — he cheerfully diagnosed me on air as a right-brain dresser who "dresses to express," and pegged the tech-CEO uniform of a black t-shirt and jeans as classic top-left. The line that makes the penny drop for most people is that, in his experience of debriefing thousands of profiles, partners are almost always opposite preferences — which is precisely why the fights feel so extreme. (A producer's note for honesty: this is a well-used self-awareness model — the HBDI, built by Ned Herrmann on the back of split-brain research — not a literal map of your neurons. Held that way, it's genuinely useful.)
What I love is what Sachin insists it is not: boxes. "Preferences aren't your skills or experiences. It's stuff you do when no one's looking." Every quadrant matters, you can use all of them, and your opposite-wired partner brings exactly what you lack. I've come to use it as a compassion tool. When I clash with someone now, I can think: this is how your brain works, this is how mine does, and neither is right or wrong. It's just different. That reframe takes a surprising amount of heat out of a room.
The Ripple Code, and his own anxiety
All of this feeds his book. The Ripple Code starts with purpose and ownership, then sets goals across four pillars — health, wealth, relationships and career — and, crucially, fits the how to your brain. If your goal is to lose 10kg but you're right-brained, the standard advice (track macros, follow a regime, be disciplined) is built for someone else. So you adapt: Sachin, by his own account, got nowhere in gyms until he kept it unstructured — five push-ups out of bed, back to bed, build from there. It's a small example of a big idea: stop fighting your wiring, and work with it.
He's also not immune to any of this, and didn't pretend to be. His first panic attack was at a school reunion in 2001, before he'd ever spoken on a stage; he's an introvert who'd rather have one deep conversation than work a room. (I've been his anchor at those rooms, for the record.) More recently, an acquisition at work left him inexplicably anxious — "it just felt like it wasn't me." His response was the thing he preaches: he noticed it, and he did something. He saw a doctor, took the offer of anti-anxiety medication seriously even though he didn't end up using it, went back to the meditation tapes, started exercising — and within days it lifted. Now he knows the situations that trigger it, and prepares.
The part nobody talks about
The most important stretch of the conversation, for me, was about the people we never mention. Sachin splits the mental-health picture into those with serious, medically diagnosed conditions, and — more controversially — those he thinks lack mental resilience and "jump on the bandwagon." We didn't fully agree there, and I said so. I keep arguing that in tech we don't talk about mental health enough, or maturely enough, and that too often nothing comes of the talking. Sachin's sharpening of that is fair: talking is the start, but "don't just talk — do something." Build honest bonds. Ask people about more than their work, because the person who most needs help is usually the one best at hiding it.
And then he named the group nobody protects: the supporters. The friend, the partner, the HR lead, the "designated strong one" everyone leans on. "Nobody talks about the people supporting everyone else." They give and give, often without a support system of their own, and — "not tomorrow, not next week, but in a few years" — they collapse. "You can't give something you don't have." He called mental health "infectious," a word I both like and don't; I told him it risks adding stigma even as it drives the point home. But the warning is real, and my answer to it is boundaries. Having been the person people come to, I've had to learn to say: I'll listen until I drop, but I'm not equipped to fix this — you need professional help. Or, some days: I'm not okay right now, and if we sit in this together we'll both go under. Without that self-awareness, those of us who aren't clinically trained risk falling in too — especially in our personal lives, where the savior complex runs hardest.
Choose your next decision carefully
I end every episode the same way: if you could whisper one thing to everyone in tech tomorrow morning, what would it be? Sachin didn't hesitate, and he even named the episode while he was at it. "You have a choice. Choose your next decision carefully." Consciously design your day instead of just going with it. Stuff you can't control will happen — people will press your buttons, plans will blow up — and in that moment, you still have a choice.
His parting note was about purpose, and it's the kind of thing worth writing on a wall. Most people, he said, go through life without one, and that makes everything heavier. Find yours and it takes the pressure off the rest. His test for it is the cleanest I've heard: what would you do for ten years even if nobody paid you — that you'd happily do every day for the rest of your life? That, he reckons, is where your purpose is hiding. I think he's right. And typically, he turned the whisper back on me before we finished: keep doing what you do. I intend to.
Mind Middleware is a podcast about the invisible space between doing and being — honest conversations about mental health in tech. If this resonated, share it with someone you care about. And if you're struggling, you're not alone: in Aotearoa New Zealand, call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.**