#54 : Debugging The Self | IIT, Mental Health Struggles, Product Management, Emotions, and More
Life at IIT Bombay, early-stage startups, product management, mental health struggles, AI for mental health, and a note on navigating life.
Hello hello hello, welcome to letter 54.
I have been following Sreerag Panat on LinkedIn for a while. He writes on mental health and also guides young folks starting out as product managers.
There was a certain honest attractivness in his posts, expecially the ones that talk about his mental health struggles and what he observed during his time at IIT Bombay.
I hope you like this letter. Please take your time to read them slowly and also reflect on the sections that talk about emotions, journalling and healing.
Early Childhood
I was born and raised in Calicut, Kerala, where my father worked as a news editor. His natural gift for storytelling and teaching meant he was deeply involved in my education from the very beginning. Having spent my entire school life at the same institution, I knew almost every face around me. This familiarity created a comfortable environment where I felt free to explore and learn.
My childhood was split between playing cricket with my elder brother (and his friends) and genuinely engaging with my academics. What drove me wasn't the pursuit of marks, but pure curiosity about the world around me.
Class 10 and Entrance Exams (JEE)
Everything changed in class 10 when my brother intensively prepared for IIT coaching. The realization hit me: I would soon walk this same path. Almost overnight, the atmosphere at home changed. My father's approach to my academics became more serious, and what had once been joyful learning transformed into something that felt like a burden.
When studying becomes a burden, you stop being a curious child learning for the joy of discovery. Instead, you mindlessly chase a goal simply because you've been told it's the right thing to aim for.
My first JEE attempt yielded a decent score, but not a great rank. I decided to take a gap year and prepare again. This time felt different. Less hectic, perhaps because I already had a strong foundation. The residential coaching gave me space to breathe, with no one constantly telling me what to do or what not to do.
IIT Bombay and Startups
In 2015, I joined IIT Bombay for aerospace engineering. Moving to Mumbai turned out to be one of the best decisions I made. I grew at an incredible rate as a person. I initially struggled to express myself in English and Hindi. But like wearing shoes that are too big for you, I eventually grew into the language, becoming more comfortable with time.
IIT Bombay’s culture fascinated me, especially how people seemed to do things primarily to beef up their resumes. While I understood this approach, I could not engage with anything unless I felt authentically curious about it. This led me and a friend to spend nearly a year and a half building 'Skutops,' a platform for hiring house help. We even expanded it to Kochi, and the experience became a steep learning curve.
Between 2018 and 2020, another friend and I ventured into building ProboT Labs, focused on hardware robots. It was an incredibly challenging domain, but the difficulty made it all the more engaging.
We closed operations in 2020. I have loved working on side projects in college and encourage all college students to work on something they like. It teaches you so much more than the classroom. Some of these lessons are registered in your subconscious, and they are very powerful lessons.
My second year also saw me becoming more active in college life. I joined the football team, practicing for about 1.5 hours daily, and took on the role of sports secretary for my hostel. I found myself increasingly involved in various college events, discovering a side of myself I hadn't known before.
I was just going with the flow and not thinking much.
Realizing My Struggles
It was during my third year that I noticed something troubling. A quiet sadness had been growing within me, and I could feel it spreading dominantly. I didn't understand what it was, but I knew that if I didn't address it, it would eventually consume me. This realization prompted me to dive deep into reading about mental health and psychology.
The turning point came in 2020 during COVID-19. The lockdown gave me quality time for self-reflection while working from home as a data analyst.
I began to understand how early childhood events shape our adult lives, and suddenly, my quiet suffering started to make sense. Pain becomes more tolerable when you can even remotely understand its origins.
Therapy and executive coaching became instrumental during this period, helping me decode my emotional patterns and responses. For the first time, I felt like I was truly getting to know myself.
Product Management, Early-Stage Startups and LinkedIn
The data analyst role, while stable, began to bore me.
Having worked on founder-like projects during college, the entry-level grunt work felt limiting. A friend referred me for a PM role at her friend’s company. I jumped at the opportunity. Being their first PM meant I could take real ownership of my projects, something I had been craving.
Eventually, I moved to another company where the challenge was even greater. Not only did I need to take ownership, but I also had to build an entire team from scratch.
I also write on LinkedIn about mental health and help early-career folks in product management.
You can follow Sreerag on LinkedIn here.
Understanding Mental Health & Journaling
My path to understanding my struggles began with self-education by diving deep into emotions, mental health, and psychology. This was back in 2018, two years before COVID made mental health conversations more mainstream. It's encouraging to see how much has changed since then, with more people openly acknowledging their struggles and sharing their experiences.
Journaling made life easier. Not the surface-level kind of journaling where you write the sequence of events that happened in a day. The right way to journal is to be brutally honest about your emotions, expressing whether you're happy, sad, or angry, and being descriptively honest about those feelings.
There is a power to clear articulation. The reason language is important is because it allows us to organize and give structure to our suffering and pain. When we can do that, we can bear any kind of trouble. That makes you resilient to the difficulties of life. And eventually interact with life in an optimal manner.
A few months later, when you revisit your old entries, you begin to understand yourself in ways you never imagined. Writing about emotions is challenging because it forces you to confront your reality head-on, without the usual filters or justifications we create.
Emotions Are Insights, Not Commands
Your feelings aren't objective truths about the world. They're insights about yourself. At best, they're signals that point toward your beliefs and value systems. Your emotions aren't needs that must be immediately gratified or acted upon; they're information about what drives you.
This helped me become more understanding in my interpersonal relationships with parents, friends, and colleagues. When you acknowledge your belief systems, managing these connections becomes significantly easier.
I used to struggle with a particular pattern: when I saw someone struggling, I'd immediately offer advice. Often, they'd become irritated, which I found absurd. But sitting with this reaction taught me something important. I was finding joy and meaning in helping others, which made me automatically put on the "Mr. Here's-the-Solution" hat.
But people don't always want solutions. Sometimes they just need to be heard. If you can understand this better, it will save you from a lot of interpersonal relationship problems.
Creating Safe Spaces
When I started opening up to friends about my feelings, I noticed something interesting. Even if people didn't fully understand, they became more comfortable sharing their own struggles. I learned that it's okay not to know how to react when someone opens up to you. The least you can do is create a safe space for them to share.
The more I observed my emotions and traced the logic behind them, the more confident I became. I was no longer a stranger to myself, and that brought immense relief.
There's no ideal way you must feel. It's not about striving for certain emotions but about developing the ability to articulate how you're feeling and understanding, even remotely, why you feel that way.
Relationships
This emotional awareness has improved every relationship in my life. Being in touch with my emotions helps me judge people less and recognize that they, too, are navigating their own emotional landscapes.
The quality of your life genuinely improves when you invest time and effort in becoming emotionally intelligent.
Words are abstractions. We all carry different definitions for the terms we use. The ability to break things down into honest emotional expressions becomes critical for meaningful communication. Society would benefit immensely if we all became better listeners.
Intense Emotions
My approach to intense emotions evolved significantly. Instead of letting them drive my actions or escaping them through life's pleasures, I learned to sit with them and investigate their origins.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." — Blaise Pascal
The emotions we try hardest to avoid often carry the most valuable information about ourselves.
AI For Mental Health
AI could help with mental health, but we need to be careful. AI cannot read body language or understand emotions like human therapists can. It misses the understanding that comes from shared human experience.
But AI could work as a "co-pilot" instead of running everything alone. Think of an AI that helps you ask better questions about yourself or guides you through daily emotional check-ins. It could be available 24/7 when you need support but cannot reach a therapist.
The biggest problem is that AI only works if you are honest with it. If you are not willing to be open with yourself, even the best AI cannot help much. But for someone who journals honestly, AI could make their efforts much stronger.
The goal is not to replace therapists or human connection. It is to make mental health tools available to more people.
Advice to my 20-year-old :)
If I could advise my 20-year-old self, it would be to do the same things, but with less stress. All your struggles, sadness, and suffering, even if others may not understand them, will become sources of meaning in your life.
We can deny many things, but we cannot deny our pain. Pain demands acknowledgment because it cannot be ignored. And if you cannot ignore it, it becomes your reality.
Acknowledge it. Articulate it. Respect it. And know that other people are also emotional creatures like you.
The path to emotional intelligence isn't an act of eliminating difficult feelings but developing a healthier relationship with the full spectrum of human emotion. In doing so, we heal ourselves and become capable of holding space for others to heal as well.
Key takeaways for me from the letter :
There is a great upside in every effort invested in understanding why you are the way you are. I suspect we may not fully figure it out, but all clarity and data points about yourself helps you reduce suffering in some way. Maybe the whole point of literature was its ability to organize our feelings (the good and bad ones) because not having them organized seems very painful and chaotic.
Just because someone has all the labels that are conventionally desirable does not mean that they don’t have their own struggles. It is often our ignorant conclusion of what is good and bad that makes us callous to other’s struggles.
One key trait that makes us humans, different from monkeys, is that we know the idea of sacrificing the impulse to act on every emotion as if they were objective truths of reality.
Don’t participate in blame games. It is the design of life to get hurt by someone’s action or words, even if the source of this pain are your loved ones. And you will eventually develop an understanding to decide when to confront and when not to depending on the context. But for silent emotional scars, that often happen without your knowledge and the other person’s knowledge, it is more convenient, and maybe morally correct to take active efforts to seek help.
Do all that you love with lesser stress (also something he advices his 20 year old self )
The interview went on for 90 minutes. We also spoke about things apart from the interview, about my college life, the projects I have worked on and he was kind of enough to guide me in some aspects like a senior would.
He is very active on LinkedIn and you can connect with him there. (click here for Sreerag’s LinkedIn) He is an active voice in the mental health space and helps people navigate a career in Product Management.
I hope you found the letter useful. In case there is anything you would convey to me (feedbacks, advice, suggestions) you can do so here in this short google form.
If you are here for the first time, you can read about me here. Similarly, my previous letters can be found here in the archives.
Thank you, take care of yourself and your loved ones.
3 Favorite Quotes Of The Week :
Trying is the closest to god you can ever be.
The desire to tell a story is what keeps artists going on despite all the reasons not to. This desire is the common thread between film makers, writers, painters, musicians, the guy doing a corporate but stays up for hours in the night to create something.
Looking over the shoulder of the present moment is a guaranteed way to ensure that you miss whatever is true and beautiful in your life right now.
Now this is called an inspirational story :)