It’s 2010. I’m in a meeting, presenting a website proposal for a corporate client through my small design business. The slides are solid. I know my pitch inside out. On the outside, everything looks sharp.

Inside, I’m unravelling..

Years of anxiety and panic are starting to take their toll. My body feels like ice cracking under pressure—fragments of me falling away as I try to hold it together. Wave after wave of anxiety crashes through me.

My voice echoes in my head like I’m underwater. I can barely hear what I’m saying. I just keep going.

Nobody in the room notices. I’ve gotten good at masking it over the years.

Somehow, I make it through. I walk out, sit in my car, stare at the steering wheel, and feel like I’ve barely survived a war no one saw.

That moment broke something open. I’d been living like that for nearly a decade—locked in anxiety, afraid to feel anything, terrified of what might surface if I did.

Something had to change.

That day pulled a thread I’d been avoiding. I started to realise just how long I’d been out of sync with my own body. Years of tension I’d called normal. Panic I’d tried to outthink. Emotion I’d numbed or ignored. I wasn’t living—I was managing.

What followed was a long process of coming back. Not just mentally, but physically. I studied neuroscience, somatics, breathwork, regulation. I trained as a yoga teacher. Sat through silence on Buddhist retreats. Practiced meditation until the edges started to soften. Different methods, same underlying question:

I became a kind of mad scientist, testing, practicing, learning.

Slowly, I rebuilt trust with my own system.

Slowly, I began to feel more like myself again.

That led to the next chapter: helping others do the same.

I co-authored The Binge Code and The Bulimia Help Method, two best-selling books that have helped thousands of people reconnect with their bodies after years of disconnection and shame. We reached people around the world, and I saw first-hand how much pain lives in the gap between how we look and how we feel.

Eventually, I wrote F**k Fear—a book about what it really means to live with anxiety, and how to stop letting it run the show by changing your relationship to sensation. That book is the one I wish I’d had when I was drowning in it.

Now, I help others do the same.

I work with leaders, creatives, and coaches who are tired of pushing through. People who want to feel grounded, congruent, and present in their own skin. People who are ready to stop performing and start leading from somewhere deeper.

This is the work: to reconnect with the body, rebuild trust with your own system, and show up fully—not as a polished version of yourself, but as the real one.

I want to live in a world where people can actually feel their lives—not just think about them. Where presence isn’t rare.

Where your body isn’t a battle zone. Where your nervous system doesn’t have to do all the heavy lifting in silence.

In the end, I think we’re all looking for the same thing: to feel alive, connected, and engaged. To have deeper experiences. To stop missing our own lives.

In the end its simple: The deeper your connection to your body, the more fully you get to live your life.

BIO

Richard Kerr is the founder of Human Engaged, a training system that works with the body to create change. His approach brings together neuroscience, somatics, and perception in a way that’s practical and direct.

He teaches people how to regulate their nervous system, deal with stress, and lead without burning themselves out. Most of the people he works with are leaders, coaches, and creatives who are done with surface-level fixes.

He’s the author of F**k Fear and co-author of The Binge Code and The Bulimia Help Method. Those books hit #1 in multiple categories on Amazon and have helped a lot of people break out of loops they’ve been stuck in for years.

He’s spent the last decade helping people move through patterns that feel impossible to shift. His work is grounded in science, but lived experience is what shaped it. He draws from neuroscience, psychology, yoga, and a long process of figuring things out the hard way.

He lives in Glasgow. Drinks too much tea and secretly judges your sitting posture.