Hi, my name is Alex Botvinnik. I’m a PhD-trained neurobiologist.

For many years I lived with severe panic attacks, chronic anxiety, and stress-related physical symptoms. It affected everything—sleep, work, relationships, and the basic feeling of being safe inside my own body.

Because of what I was going through, I studied neuroscience not only as a profession, but as a way to survive and understand what was happening inside my brain and nervous system. Over time, that combination—lived experience and scientific training—pushed me to build a structured self-experiment.

Over about nine years, I gradually recovered. Today I’m stable. I have my life back. What makes this unusual is that I believe I recovered from multiple mental health–related conditions outside standard clinical pathways, and the remission has been durable.

Important: I’m not offering therapy, and I’m not recruiting patients. I also do not suggest anyone repeat what I did—it was long, demanding, and deeply personal.

My goal now is scientific: to understand the brain-and-body mechanisms that may explain this kind of recovery, and to translate them into testable research that could one day support simpler, safer, standardized solutions—ideally medications or non-invasive devices—for people living with anxiety disorders and PTSD.

What your donation supports (this phase):

Basic living expenses for a limited period so I can dedicate protected time to research planning
Literature access and research materials
Methodology/statistics/ethics consultation
Writing a structured mechanistic research roadmap and clear explanatory figures
Thank you for supporting careful, mechanism-first science—and for helping me turn a personal recovery into research that may eventually help others.