The prologue to Daniella Moyles’s recently released book Jump, certainly packs a punch. She’s driving on the M50 with her boyfriend at the time and is being enveloped by a panic attack.
“I don’t remember doing it but I have stopped the car – my internal state has clearly spilled over into something undeniably physical, judging by the wide-eyed, ashen look on the suddenly unfamiliar face of the man beside me.
“His expression, a mixture of pure bewilderment and concern, only fans the flames of my terror. I am convinced there is no salvation from this place. I am breathing but I am gone. On the thin, wavering edge of an abyss I feebly try to explain, ‘I don’t know who or where I am’.”
In the lead-up to this day there were plenty of signs of burnout, panic and anxiety, but it was this event that undeniably changed Daniella’s life and caused her to really examine things.
A model, presenter and influencer at the time in 2017 Daniella was co-anchoring the radio station Spin 1038’s breakfast show. She had worked for 10 hard years to get to this point; at 18 she began her modelling career, transitioning then into presenting also.
Her life was a busy and stressful compilation of work; presenting, modelling and endorsing products, which she began to no longer enjoy.
“Every time I was forced to say our breakfast show’s sponsorship tagline – ‘McDonald’s making mornings tastier’ – or smile for another picture endorsing some product I wouldn’t dream of using myself, I felt like nothing more than a soulless, fake, glorified walking billboard.”
For some time before the M50 incident, Daniella’s level of anxiety began to grow steadily. This affected her life to the point that, after that day, she quit her job and subsequently went backpacking around the world for two years.
Reflection
Jump, in Daniella’s own words, is a cross between memoir, self-help and travel. In the book, Daniella is excruciatingly honest. Speaking to Irish Country Living on the phone from her “home-house” in Kildare where she spent lockdown, Daniella says writing the book was both healing and harrowing in equal measures. 
“Everyone is coming around to the knowledge now that scripting or journaling is a very cathartic thing to do. It gives you great clarity of mind. It is also quite healthy to process things in that way, to get something quite physically out of you.
“That said, there are moments when the only way you can write those words is by getting into the mindset of ‘absolutely no one will ever read this’ because otherwise it would be far too vulnerable and far too intimidating.”
Undoubtedly, some readers will relate to the raw manner in which the author describes her anxiety. Daniella wasn’t always anxious; “I can’t say it was a predominant thing in my life up until the point that it was” but on reflection now, she can see the ingredients were there.
“In hindsight, I see my predisposition and maybe ways that this would have appeared throughout my life. But there was no conscious awareness of that at all, at all. I didn’t label it as anxiety and I think that’s actually really useful, because I think your beliefs are fundamentally important to how you feel.
“In my ignorance I actually kind of saved myself for many years. You can have a temperament that is more anxious, maybe you are a little more sensitive or maybe you are a little bit more inclined to feel that way. But it doesn’t really affect you to the point of being an issue until the stress gets too much and it spills over then.”
Examination
Daniella’s travels around the world after leaving Spin 1038 make up a large portion of the second half of the book. While her journey to find herself happened while she was travelling, Daniella is adamant this process of self-reflection can occur anywhere, you just need time and space.
“I fully believe that someone can go and travel the world and come back the exact same person.
“Yes, you will have a new cultural understanding, you will have new memories, you will have expanded in terms of your knowledge of the world, but you can still come back the same person,” she reasons.
“The work that I ultimately did while travelling is actually something I think you can do in your own bedroom. The reason it happened while I was travelling is, travelling afforded me as an adult nearing my 30s, the space most of us don’t get, because people have responsibilities; jobs, houses, partners and children. You don’t get that space to look at the automatic things that make you who you are.”
For Daniella, there was no lightbulb moment she can pinpoint and say: “That’s when I changed.” Instead it was a much more real experience; a long and slow process of reflecting on lifelong behaviours and trying to change them. Naturally, this was a very uncomfortable, but also necessary process.
“There was no pivotal moment, I wish I could be poetic and tell you there was a single moment or even a single series of moments that are the point on which I can hinge enormous human growth, but that’s just fundamentally not the case.
There were many small almost seemingly insignificant moments where your mind just has space to think
“While I was travelling and I had nothing to do except pick the next town I was going to get a bus to, I had a lot of time to think. The process of actually changing those automatic parts of myself was really long. It took a lot of ‘one step forward, five steps back’ moments,” explains Daniella.
“There were many small almost seemingly insignificant moments where your mind just has space to think. You will think on the same topic over and over before you fully accept a part of yourself, that maybe you are not proud of or don’t want to look at.
“Once you have done that then you can go, ‘God, I don’t want to do that anymore’ and you decide consciously to change that.”
Evolution
Since Daniella returned from her travels, her life is substantially different to before she left. At the age of 21 she started a degree in psychology, which she completed two years of before dropping out. Now, almost 10 years later, she has returned to college to undertake a psychology degree again and is in her first year.
I decided to examine why my reaction to yoga was so irrational
While she was travelling, Daniella got into yoga and completed her yoga teacher training, which is now a big part of her life. Interestingly, she had a poor relationship with yoga in the past. It wasn’t always a practice she loved.
“I thought it was such nonsense,” she recalls. “It used to just make me so frustrated. Ultimately, in a roundabout, strange way, I decided to examine why my reaction to yoga was so irrational. It made me love the practice and realise in my ignorance, it was trying to show me something.”
Going forward, Daniella’s dream is to combine psychology with yoga and open up a holistic wellness centre somewhere sunny and exotic.
She wants it to be the kind of place she could have gone to when she was struggling; somewhere to escape the stresses of modern life.
Also, looking at things from the perspective of, “what did I need when I was faced with challenges?”, Daniella has launched The STLL, a resource of remedies for a slow and steady life. Essentially it is made up of online workshops, yoga and information on wellness. When able, Daniella hopes to run these events in person, but at the moment they are all virtual.
Overall, Daniella is a very different person now to the woman on the M50 three years ago, but she works at this every day. Anxiety is not something you overcome, she believes, it is a relationship you change.
As she writes in the book, what seemed terrible at the time, was actually a blessing in disguise. “It was a glorious gift, wrapped like an onion in the thickest skin.”
Read more
Living Life: a band of brothers
Living Life: the baleout
The prologue to Daniella Moyles’s recently released book Jump, certainly packs a punch. She’s driving on the M50 with her boyfriend at the time and is being enveloped by a panic attack.
“I don’t remember doing it but I have stopped the car – my internal state has clearly spilled over into something undeniably physical, judging by the wide-eyed, ashen look on the suddenly unfamiliar face of the man beside me.
“His expression, a mixture of pure bewilderment and concern, only fans the flames of my terror. I am convinced there is no salvation from this place. I am breathing but I am gone. On the thin, wavering edge of an abyss I feebly try to explain, ‘I don’t know who or where I am’.”
In the lead-up to this day there were plenty of signs of burnout, panic and anxiety, but it was this event that undeniably changed Daniella’s life and caused her to really examine things.
A model, presenter and influencer at the time in 2017 Daniella was co-anchoring the radio station Spin 1038’s breakfast show. She had worked for 10 hard years to get to this point; at 18 she began her modelling career, transitioning then into presenting also.
Her life was a busy and stressful compilation of work; presenting, modelling and endorsing products, which she began to no longer enjoy.
“Every time I was forced to say our breakfast show’s sponsorship tagline – ‘McDonald’s making mornings tastier’ – or smile for another picture endorsing some product I wouldn’t dream of using myself, I felt like nothing more than a soulless, fake, glorified walking billboard.”
For some time before the M50 incident, Daniella’s level of anxiety began to grow steadily. This affected her life to the point that, after that day, she quit her job and subsequently went backpacking around the world for two years.
Reflection
Jump, in Daniella’s own words, is a cross between memoir, self-help and travel. In the book, Daniella is excruciatingly honest. Speaking to Irish Country Living on the phone from her “home-house” in Kildare where she spent lockdown, Daniella says writing the book was both healing and harrowing in equal measures.
“Everyone is coming around to the knowledge now that scripting or journaling is a very cathartic thing to do. It gives you great clarity of mind. It is also quite healthy to process things in that way, to get something quite physically out of you.
“That said, there are moments when the only way you can write those words is by getting into the mindset of ‘absolutely no one will ever read this’ because otherwise it would be far too vulnerable and far too intimidating.”
Undoubtedly, some readers will relate to the raw manner in which the author describes her anxiety. Daniella wasn’t always anxious; “I can’t say it was a predominant thing in my life up until the point that it was” but on reflection now, she can see the ingredients were there.
“In hindsight, I see my predisposition and maybe ways that this would have appeared throughout my life. But there was no conscious awareness of that at all, at all. I didn’t label it as anxiety and I think that’s actually really useful, because I think your beliefs are fundamentally important to how you feel.
“In my ignorance I actually kind of saved myself for many years. You can have a temperament that is more anxious, maybe you are a little more sensitive or maybe you are a little bit more inclined to feel that way. But it doesn’t really affect you to the point of being an issue until the stress gets too much and it spills over then.”
Examination
Daniella’s travels around the world after leaving Spin 1038 make up a large portion of the second half of the book. While her journey to find herself happened while she was travelling, Daniella is adamant this process of self-reflection can occur anywhere, you just need time and space.
“I fully believe that someone can go and travel the world and come back the exact same person.
“Yes, you will have a new cultural understanding, you will have new memories, you will have expanded in terms of your knowledge of the world, but you can still come back the same person,” she reasons.
“The work that I ultimately did while travelling is actually something I think you can do in your own bedroom. The reason it happened while I was travelling is, travelling afforded me as an adult nearing my 30s, the space most of us don’t get, because people have responsibilities; jobs, houses, partners and children. You don’t get that space to look at the automatic things that make you who you are.”
For Daniella, there was no lightbulb moment she can pinpoint and say: “That’s when I changed.” Instead it was a much more real experience; a long and slow process of reflecting on lifelong behaviours and trying to change them. Naturally, this was a very uncomfortable, but also necessary process.
“There was no pivotal moment, I wish I could be poetic and tell you there was a single moment or even a single series of moments that are the point on which I can hinge enormous human growth, but that’s just fundamentally not the case.
There were many small almost seemingly insignificant moments where your mind just has space to think
“While I was travelling and I had nothing to do except pick the next town I was going to get a bus to, I had a lot of time to think. The process of actually changing those automatic parts of myself was really long. It took a lot of ‘one step forward, five steps back’ moments,” explains Daniella.
“There were many small almost seemingly insignificant moments where your mind just has space to think. You will think on the same topic over and over before you fully accept a part of yourself, that maybe you are not proud of or don’t want to look at.
“Once you have done that then you can go, ‘God, I don’t want to do that anymore’ and you decide consciously to change that.”
Evolution
Since Daniella returned from her travels, her life is substantially different to before she left. At the age of 21 she started a degree in psychology, which she completed two years of before dropping out. Now, almost 10 years later, she has returned to college to undertake a psychology degree again and is in her first year.
I decided to examine why my reaction to yoga was so irrational
While she was travelling, Daniella got into yoga and completed her yoga teacher training, which is now a big part of her life. Interestingly, she had a poor relationship with yoga in the past. It wasn’t always a practice she loved.
“I thought it was such nonsense,” she recalls. “It used to just make me so frustrated. Ultimately, in a roundabout, strange way, I decided to examine why my reaction to yoga was so irrational. It made me love the practice and realise in my ignorance, it was trying to show me something.”
Going forward, Daniella’s dream is to combine psychology with yoga and open up a holistic wellness centre somewhere sunny and exotic.
She wants it to be the kind of place she could have gone to when she was struggling; somewhere to escape the stresses of modern life.
Also, looking at things from the perspective of, “what did I need when I was faced with challenges?”, Daniella has launched The STLL, a resource of remedies for a slow and steady life. Essentially it is made up of online workshops, yoga and information on wellness. When able, Daniella hopes to run these events in person, but at the moment they are all virtual.
Overall, Daniella is a very different person now to the woman on the M50 three years ago, but she works at this every day. Anxiety is not something you overcome, she believes, it is a relationship you change.
As she writes in the book, what seemed terrible at the time, was actually a blessing in disguise. “It was a glorious gift, wrapped like an onion in the thickest skin.”
Read more
Living Life: a band of brothers
Living Life: the baleout
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