While it may be hard to believe today when one sees “Hangman” Adam Page on national television as the AEW World Champion, the popular superstar once suffered from severe social anxiety.
Page spoke about becoming AEW champion, his brief reign atop the promotion so far, and his early life struggles with anxiety during a recent appearance on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette.
“I’m not a conversationalist, I don’t know,” Page began. “Anxious maybe, and maybe like… This is a story I’ve never told. In — I don’t even know if middle school, maybe high school age — I had super, super bad social anxiety, like diagnosed, medication social anxiety.
“But like, I can remember one time sitting at my desk, right, this was like, in the middle of taking a test or something and I could remember my whole body would like, turn flush red. I would start sweating, then I would become aware for, God knows what reason, like no one’s looking at me, this is happening to my body. So then, you know it gets like 10 times worse, what’s going on? Like, my eyes start watering, like I’m just sitting at my desk.”
The man who has been nicknamed the “Anxious Millenial Cowboy” went on to discuss how pro wrestling has helped him with his anxiety.
“I think wrestling helped me get out of that to an extent because, not that like, not that I had like low self-worth or anything like that,” Page explained. “But, like, wrestling was always my passion and where I felt comfortable, and what I like doing. Once I was able to do that and see some success in it, being surrounded by like 20 people to 200 people to 2,000 people, 20,000, like, as that grew, I think you get more comfortable with that and yourself.”
“I think wrestling helped me get out of that.”
Adam Page on overcoming anxiety
Page also discussed his rise in AEW since the company launched in 2019.
“I wouldn’t even talk about, at least, my journey to the AEW World Championship as some kind of ‘grand scheme’ that was hatched on day one or something like that, because it never was,” Page said. “At least to me, it was never that way. When AEW started, and I, you know, realized I was going to be suddenly, like, I was just the guy, like, losing all the Bullet Club multi-man matches. I was, you know, not to say a nobody, but I certainly wasn’t like ‘the main event guy’ who was suddenly going to be main-eventing the first-ever title match in AEW.
“I knew people wouldn’t buy it and it didn’t matter what I said, it didn’t matter what I did in the time between. It was too fast. It was too soon. I knew people might, they would be forgiving, they would go ‘oh yeah, okay okay,’ but I knew deep down they wouldn’t buy it. It felt like I got off on the wrong foot and I wanted to rectify that, and I felt like the only way you (Hangman) can is to be vulnerable and to, you know what I mean, let that loss and disappointment come out.”
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H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcript.
