The Anxious Achiever

4 Face Your Past

Jason Miller had always driven himself very hard—the first in his family to go to college, an excellent student, a senior executive at a global company—until he ended up in the emergency room at the age of forty, convinced he was having a heart attack.

Miller grew up in Sandusky, Ohio, surrounded by men who were living with potent yet hidden anxiety. He still remembers coming home from school one day to find that his dad had been laid off from his job at General Motors. At first, eight-year-old Miller was excited about having his dad at home more often. “But that wasn’t what really happened, because he was working too hard to find a way to make money,” he says. Miller’s dad eventually started his own business, but the family ...