There are mornings when putting on a shirt stops being routine. For Prince Harry, buttoning up a formal collar was enough to make him feel short of breath.
He shared this in his new MasterClass, “Redefining Grief”, alongside neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor. He says he had panic attacks “only in the car, on the way to work”. And for 15 or 20 years, whenever someone asked him how he was, he gave the same answer: “I’m fine”. Beneath it all was an emotional block he had carried since his mother, Diana, died in 1997, when he was 12 years old.
According to him, the adrenaline-fueled pace of military life seemed to awaken traumas he had kept buried.
Public appearances, he says, made him feel panicked from start to finish. And after moving to Canada in 2019, within just two or three days he felt a drop in energy unlike anything he had ever experienced, as if his brain needed stress to function.
What looked like control from the outside was a different story on the inside. How many times have you answered “I’m fine” when it wasn’t true?