Hi, I'm Dr. Ali Mattu 👋🏽

I'm a clinical psychologist who has spent his life focused on anxiety.

I've struggled with it. Studied it. Treated it.

Now I'm trying to scale what works to as many people as possible.

Start Lesson #1

My story

Anxiety has been part of my life since I was a kid. For years I thought the only way to deal with it was to get rid of it. Be calm enough, then show up. Feel ready, then reach out. Get my head right, then take the risk.

I was wrong about all of it.

The thing running my life wasn't anxiety. It was avoidance. Every time I let anxiety make the decision, skip the call, delay the email, stay home, my world got a little smaller. Learning to do the thing anyway, with anxiety still in the room, is what actually changed my life.

It's also what I've spent my career helping other people learn.

How I got here

I spent over a decade in hospitals helping people navigate anxiety, panic, phobias, and stress. I trained and worked at some of New York's leading hospitals and taught at Columbia University Medical Center, where I saw thousands of patients and supervised the next generation of clinicians.

What I kept finding was that the people who got better weren't the ones who finally figured anxiety out. They were the ones who stopped waiting to feel calm and started doing the things they'd been putting off.

That insight is what pulled me out of the clinic. At the hospital I could see twenty patients a week. On the internet I could reach millions.

What I’m doing now

I make videos for over 350,000 subscribers about anxiety, avoidance, overthinking, and what it actually takes to do the things you keep putting off. No internet guru nonsense. No pretending anxiety is easy. Just practical psychology for building a bigger life with anxiety in the room.

I'm also the Cofounder and Chief Science Officer at Oriscen, where I lead the science behind how people actually build and sustain connection, the internal barriers like anxiety and the external ones like logistics. It's the same problem I've worked on my whole career, now being engineered for scale.

My work has been featured on Netflix, HBO, and The New York Times. I once got roasted by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, which felt like a strange but solid endorsement.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife, our two kids, and a lot of books about Star Trek, psychology, and the future.

Background

• Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology
• Cofounder and Chief Science Officer at Oriscen
• Over 20 million views and 350k subscribers on YouTube
• Former Assistant Professor at Columbia University Medical Center
• 10,000+ hours supporting people with anxiety, OCD, and related challenges
• Psychology License # California PSY34269, New York 020357