In 1991, Shanti Das got her start in the music business with an internship at Capitol Records; about a decade later, she had worked with everyone from Outkast to TLC to Usher to Prince. Around the same time, she recalls, “that’s really when I first started dealing with some of my anxiety, but I didn’t really know what to call it.” By 2005, she was working 18-hour days and -- in a pre-hashtag age -- proudly a member of Team No Sleep. “When I looked back on it, it was like, gosh, my body was just crying out for wellness.”
Four years later, she made the difficult decision to quit her job -- despite her upward trajectory, in which she was eyeing roles as general manager or president or urban music at a major -- and move from New York back home to Atlanta, where she started consulting. “It was really hard walking away from, you know, a career that I had worked so hard for,” she says today. But it was also a career that was no longer just taking a mental toll, but a physical one, too. Das was soon after diagnosed with cervical spinal stenosis, “which people typically get when they're like in their 60s, and I was in my late 30s. My doctor was like, ‘This is definitely a result of stress.’”
In place of corporate stress, Das was dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer's, the death of her uncle, financial instability and her best friend’s suicide. She hit a low, turning to pills over grief counseling, and remembers clearly her sister suggesting she call the national suicide prevention lifeline. She took her advice and also texted her pastor who said, “I'll pray with you, but you need to get help.”