Kiwi gold medal winning Paralympian Liam Malone has opened up to TVNZ1's Sunday show about his battles with anxiety.
In the past decade the number of young kiwis on medication anxiety has doubled, with Malone no stranger to dealing with the sometimes crippling affliction.
"It builds up over time, like a snowball, building and building and building," Malone said.
Before he was the successful athlete we know today, he too battled anxiety, starting in intermediate when he started getting teased about his artificial legs.
"My first year of intermediate I was teased a lot and I became insanely self-conscious so I started wearing pants all the time.
"The idea of people seeing my artificial legs was what was causing my anxiety," Malone said.
Anxiety goes past every day stress, to a clinical disorder, producing a chronic sense of worry, fear or panic.
"My dad has often said, like he would frequently come into my room and I’d be crying, and he'd ask me what are you sad about?
"I’d say like why can't I have real legs, why can't I be like my friends?" Malone told Sunday.
Malone says he made some bad choices "as a teenager I was insanely reckless, had a number of car crashes, and was involved in selling weed at school".
All this while his mum Trudi was battling cancer, which added to his worries even more.
"When my mum died I blamed myself a lot I had to really figure out how to turn my life around and it was extremely hard. it was extremely hard".
He needed something positive to focus on so he decided to turn to athletics which came with its own challenges.
"Before I could even think about becoming a professional athlete first of all I had to get comfortable with people seeing my artificial legs right and it was horrifying before going to the track I would curl up in a ball in my bed and it would physically make me want to throw up that's how anxious I was".
Liam turned to meditation to relieve himself of the anxiousness. Research has shown that meditation can calm our nervous system and helps rewire our brains.
Proving that meditation can help, he became a Paralympic champion last year.
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