Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Animal IZZI. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Animal, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

In early 2020, I finally had a chance to visit the tiny fishing village of Caraíva, an isolated sanctuary in northeastern Brazil that can only be reached by boat.

I was surrounded by people I loved: my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my girlfriend. I was experiencing one of the most charming beach towns on the planet.

It should have been one of the happiest moments of my life.

Instead, I felt like shit.

For months, my body had been sending signals that something was wrong. I was experiencing constant mood swings, shortness of breath, and a persistent sense of being trapped in fight-or-flight mode. Eventually, that evolved into anxiety attacks, paresthesia, and gastritis, which became chronic during that trip.

Looking back, the symptoms began shortly after I made what I thought was the responsible decision: I put my artistic ambitions on hold.

I left a band I had spent five years building. We were growing steadily, but still struggling to make money. I told myself it was temporary.

Three years later, I was still waiting to return.

As I approached my thirties, after six years in a relationship, the pressure to have my life figured out kept growing. And when I left the band, I felt so creatively drained that I started wondering if I had simply gotten lucky with the dozens of songs I had written before. Maybe I had already used up whatever creativity I had.

As soon as I got back home from that trip, I went to see a doctor. But as a healthy 29-year-old with excellent test results, a good diet, and a consistent exercise routine, the only explanation she could offer was:
“You’re stressed. Here are some pills for your reflux.”

She was right about one thing: Something was stressing me out. The life I was living was no longer aligned with my values.

I’ve always been the adventurous type. I love camping, skateboarding, traveling, and, of course, touring with a band. I’ve always been comfortable taking risks and have valued freedom far more than security.

But growing up in an opportunity-scarce country like Brazil, I rarely met people who shared that mindset. Music wasn’t just a hobby to me—it was the thing I wanted to dedicate my life to. But hat made me feel like an alien.

So instead of embracing that difference and investing fully in developing the skills needed to stand out as a musician, I subconsciously suppressed what I truly wanted. I spent years half-heartedly pursuing a variety of careers: marketing, hospitality, customer success, and even stock trading, convincing myself these were the responsible adult choices.

Then an opportunity appeared: I was offered a position at a large investment office in my hometown.

This was supposed to be the moment everything finally made sense. Stable income, career progression, marriage… the adult life everyone around me seemed to be building.

One of the firm’s partners was my girlfriend’s cousin. He personally interviewed me and told me he was excited to have me join the team. The only problem was: I wasn’t.

Then, right after the interview in March 2020, the pandemic hit.

The world shut down.

The position disappeared.

Most people would have been devastated. I felt relief.

While the world was panicking, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years: Peace.

That realization told me more about the source of my suffering than any doctor ever could.

With the world on pause and social distancing becoming mandatory, I started spending more time in nature again. I picked up the guitar. I returned to many of the things that had once made life meaningful, and little by little, the symptoms started improving.

The distance from my girlfriend also gave me space to reflect. As much as I loved her, I began to realize that I either wasn’t ready to start a family, or perhaps that simply wasn’t the life I wanted.

For years, I had been trying to force myself into a version of adulthood that looked right from the outside but felt wrong on the inside. Still, my ego wasn’t ready to admit it yet, So life stopped giving me room to negotiate. Two weeks before my 30th birthday, everything collapsed.

Over the course of four days, one crisis followed another.

On the first day, my girlfriend and I had a major fight and put our relationship on hold.

On the second day, I received liver test results that deeply alarmed my doctor.

On the third day, I discovered that both my parents and I had contracted COVID, back when vaccines didn’t yet exist.

On the fourth day, the anxiety returned with full force and developed into severe insomnia.

For three nights, I barely slept. I lay awake imagining every possible outcome. The end of my relationship. A serious illness. My parents getting worse. Death.

But then something magical happened.

After days of fighting reality, I became exhausted. I stopped resisting. I stopped trying to solve every problem.
I stopped trying to control the outcome.

I entered a strange state of detachment. The problems were still there, but they no longer felt like they owned me.

Suddenly, it became obvious that I couldn’t control any of it. Not my relationship. Not my health. Not my parents’ health. Not the insomnia. Nothing.

And the moment I fully surrendered to that reality, something shifted.

I accepted that anything could happen—including death. And I wasn’t afraid.

Suddenly, I felt guided. Protected. Connected to some deeper intelligence that I couldn’t explain. And in that moment, all my problems lost their importance.

So I thought to myself: “If I’m about to die in a few days, I’d better write as many songs as I can before that happens.”

So I got out of bed, picked up my guitar, and something extraordinary happened.

The songs came back. Not gradually. All at once.

For the first time in my life, I was writing one to three songs per day, helped in part by all the extra hours that insomnia gave me.

The moment I stopped trying to control everything, creativity returned. And with it came a lesson.

I realized that most of my suffering had come from expectation, much of which was external to me. From pursuing things not because I loved them, but because I expected a specific outcome. Because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t get it.

For years, I had treated music as a means to an end. Now it became the end itself.

So I made a promise. If I survived, I would never ignore that lesson again. I would create music that reminded people of it too.

So the best songs I wrote during that period ended up becaming Superastral Hell, my first EP under the solo moniker Animal IZZI.

The project went through a long production process before finally being released in October 2025. Today, it is approaching 100,000 streams on Spotify, and I plan to continue growing my audience and begin touring in 2027.

In the end, I survived.

My parents survived.

My relationship didn’t survive, although we managed to part on good terms.

The liver scare turned out to be a misinterpretation of the test results.

The insomnia stayed for a while, but eventually faded.

And the other symptoms slowly disappeared as I brought my life back into alignment with what I truly valued.

Looking back, Caraíva wasn’t the beginning of my breakdown. It was simply the moment I finally noticed it.

My body had been trying to tell me something for years:

A life built around safety can become its own kind of danger.

The uncertainty never disappeared.

But neither did music, health or happiness

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a musician performing under the name Animal IZZI.

This project was born after spending three years of supressing my true calling in music, trying to “play safe”, until the frustration and lack of meaning started manifesting in the form of health conditions. The experience taught me that the life that works for most people isn’t necessarily the life that works for you, and that sometimes, the greatest risk isn’t pursuing your passions, but abandoning them. That realization became the foundation of “Superastral Hell”, my first EP, and continues to shape everything I create. Through my music, I explore freedom, identity, and the tension between who we are and who we think we’re supposed to be.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

“The One Thing” by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan was a big eye-opener for how backup plans sometimes serve no purpose other than holding your main plan back. It mentions how the most successful people are rarely those who try to be great at everything, but those who identify their strongest skill and relentlessly focus on becoming exceptional at it solely.

It made me realize that every time you’re spread thin across unrelated activities you pay a hidden cost that goes far beyond the hours spent on each one, because our mind needs time to fully immerse itself again. The deeper levels of focus, where your best work happens, become harder to reach.

Even more importantly, you lose access to those moments when an idea keeps developing in the background long after you’ve stopped working. The moments when you’re taking a shower, going for a walk, or working out, and suddenly the solution or inspiration appears out of nowhere. In reality, it didn’t come out of nowhere—it was the result of your mind continuing to process a problem because it had been deeply engaged with it for long enough. When your attention is constantly divided, that process rarely has a chance to happen.

That’s why I came to believe that people often underestimate the power of focusing on the thing they are naturally drawn to and capable of excelling at. Chasing opportunities based solely on perceived financial upside can be a trap if you’re competing against people who not only possess greater talent in that field, but are genuinely obsessed with mastering it. In the long run, it’s hard to outperform someone who is doing exactly what they were meant to do.

Don Miguel Ruiz’s “The Four Agreements” was lifechanging book. It helped me understand how much of my anxiety came from living inside what he calls “the “dream of the world”—the collective beliefs and expectations we inherit from society without ever consciously choosing them.

Looking back, I wasn’t suffering because I didn’t know what I wanted; I was suffering because I had accepted the idea that what I wanted wasn’t a realistic or legitimate path. The further I moved away from my own nature in order to fit that inherited definition of success, the more that disconnection manifested itself through physical symptoms.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Yes. To awaken those who are still asleep in “the dream of the world” I was just describing, so then can reclaim their rightful paths in life, like I did.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamanimalizzi

Image Credits

José Marcio Lara
Gustavo Borges
53HC