With campuses near Nashville and San Diego,Onsite supports people navigating burnout, relationship strain, addiction, trauma, or the sense that life feels off. Learn more at experienceonsite.com or call 1-800-341-7432. A simple conversation can be the first step toward livingmore fully.
What if the music you've been making your whole life was actually the therapy you never knew you needed?

What if chasing someone else's version of success is the very thing keeping you from discovering who you actually are?

Hunter Hayes has been on stages since he was a toddler. He earned Grammy nominations before most people have figured out what they want to do with their lives. He toured with Taylor Swift, scored radio hits, and built the kind of career that looks flawless from the outside. But behind all of it was a kid whofelt deeply lonely, who learned early that love and acceptance were things you earned by performing, and who spent years chasing a version of success that someone else had defined for him.

In this episode, Hunter goes into the emotional terrain behind his music: the relationship between performance and belonging, the cost of tying your identity to external validation from the time you're five years old, and what it feels like when early success levels off and you must decide who you are. Hereveals how years of therapy, intensive work, and learning to understand his brain finally gave him permission to stop performing his life and start participating in it. He shares the moment that songwriting stopped being about writing hits and became therapy set to a melody.

What makes this conversation unique is that Hunter and Miles don't just talk about the destination, they walk through the actual work. This is a conversation about what it looks like to come back to yourself after years of giving yourself away and how creativity, when it's rooted in honesty rather than performance, can become the most powerful tool for healing you've ever had.

In this conversation, you'll learn:

• How to Use Songwriting, Journaling, or Any Creative Outlet as a Form of Emotional Processing
• How to Rebuild Your Identity When Your Career Has Always Been Your Entire Senseof Self
• How to Redefine Success So the Numbers Stop Running Your Life
• How to Invite Your Inner Child Back Into Your Creative Process Instead of Locking Him Out
• How to Protect Your Energy on Social Media Without Disappearing
• How to Find the People in Your Life Who See You for Who You Are, Not Just What You Produce
• How to Use Structure, Checklists, and Consistency as Mental Health Tools
• How to Write About Where You Want to Be Before You've Arrived There
• How to Be Proud of Yourself Out Loud Even When the Road Looked Messy From the Outside

Follow Human School: YouTube - Human School Podcast Instagram - @humanschoolofficial Threads - @humanschoolofficial TikTok - @humanschoolofficial

What We Discuss:

00:00:00 Welcome to Human School00:02:30 Why Hunter Spent 10 Years Chasing Someone Else's Version of the Dream00:05:00 What's Different About Hunter Today00:06:35 How an Onsite Intensive Became a Turning Point00:08:28 The Music That Taught Hunter He Had Permission to Write With Hope00:12:55 Music at Two Years Old and a Career No One Planned00:34:07 The Move to Music City from Louisiana00:43:15 Songwriting Became His Version of Journaling00:46:58 The Loneliness That Hid Inside an Idealistic Childhood00:56:25 The Sentence That Shattered Him at 1501:02:40 Letting the Inner Child Back Into the Creative Work01:05:30 Transactional and Purely Relational Friendships01:16:12 Storm Warning, Dan Huff, and the Radio Tour That Changed Everything01:26:48 Navigating Life After the Biggest Season of Early Success01:32:50 Why He Started Talking Openly About Mental Health01:39:46 Learning to Fly and the Life Metaphors Hidden Inside Every Pre-Flight Checklist01:48:04 The New Project: Evergreen Season One01:53:40 How Hunter Manages Social Media Without Letting It Manage Him

With campuses near Nashville and San Diego, Onsite supports people navigating burnout, relationship strain, addiction, trauma, or the sense that life feels off. Learn more at experienceonsite.com or call 1-800-341-7432. A simple conversation can be the first step toward living more fully.

What if the discipline that made you a champion is the same thing quietly destroying your most important relationships?

What happens when two elite athletes stop chasing gold medals and start chasing something far more meaningful — each other, their kids, and a life that actually feels like home?

Shawn Johnson East is an Olympic gold medalist and one of the most decorated gymnasts in American history. Andrew East is a former NFL long snapper, entrepreneur, and now holds a doctorate in psychology. Together, they've built a marriage, a family of three young kids, businesses, and a media platform in full public view. But what stands out in this conversation is the radical honesty they bring to the parts of their story.

In this deeply personal conversation, Shawn opens up about the dark side of elite gymnastics — going professional at 12, being trained to go emotionally numb under pressure, and how that survival skill followed her into adulthood and marriage. She reveals her years-long battle with disordered eating and how retiring from gymnastics left her without an identity. Andrew shares the performance anxiety that blindsided him and how losing football forced a painful gift that ultimately shaped everything good that came next. He also opens up about losing his father, Guy East, and how his dad's relentless curiosity modeled the kind of partner and father he's worked hard to become.

We talk about what it means to protect a marriage when the odds are stacked against you, and why commitment, not chemistry alone, is the thing that makes it last. Shawn and Andrew also share more about their upcoming book, The Courage to Commit, and how the title is the foundation of how they live their lives.

In this conversation, you'll learn:

• How to Use Your Athletic Background to Build a Stronger Marriage
• How Going Numb Under Pressure Creates Hardness at Home and What to Do About It
• How to Navigate the Identity Crisis That Comes After Leaving a High-Performance Career
• How to Recognize When Your Greatest Strength Has a Shadow Side That's Hurting the People You Love
• How to Create Daily and Weekly Rhythms That Keep a Marriage Connected Without Over-Complicating It
• How to Relearn How to Play, Fail, and Start Over After Reaching the Top of Your Craft
• How to Use Curiosity Instead of Criticism When You Don't Understand Your Partner
• How to Commit Fully to Something and Discover That Sticking With It Creates Beauty You Could Never Have Planned

Welcome to Human School, where we learn what matters most - Miles Adcox

Follow Human School:

YouTube - Human School Podcast

Instagram - @humanschoolofficial

Threads - @humanschoolofficial

TikTok - @humanschoolofficial

What We Discuss:

00:00:00 Meet Shawn and Andrew East

00:05:02 The Athletic Brain Meets Married Life

00:08:34 The Special Forces Experience

00:10:21 Going Professional at 12

00:13:26 Two Different People Behind Closed Doors

00:15:15 The Debate That Started an Honest Marriage Conversation

00:18:23 Andrew's Dad Taught Him About Curiosity

00:22:00 Having Each Other Changed What Was Possible

00:27:52 Their Marriage Game Plan Day to Day

00:37:47 What Miles Learned Watching Thousands of Couples

00:40:27 Having Kids Rewired Andrew's View of Optimization

00:44:12 Depression, Eating Disorders, and Breaking the Cycle

00:51:27 The Career He Thought Would Last 15 Years

00:56:18 How to Navigate a Major Life Transition

01:01:04 Miles's Two-Word Prayer That Got Him Through His Darkest Season

01:03:32 What The East's Are Most Excited About Right Now