One beer. Fifteen seconds. The anxiety was gone.

Daniel Andersson used to run an experiment on himself. He would open the first beer of the afternoon, count to fifteen, and the anxiety would be gone. “Like magic,” he says. “I couldn't feel any anxiety whatsoever.”

That is why it took him so long to stop. It worked.

His last drink was the final day of November 2018. He was living in Tokyo — a manager, a father of two, a man everyone thought was doing well. His daughter had started asking why he smelled strange. Nobody ever said, “Daniel, you have a problem.”

In this conversation he tells the whole story: a Swedish village where every boy played football and every Friday was about drinking. A father he adored and could never resemble. One free year in Florence at 21, and the emails from that year his mother showed him decades later, in which he barely recognised how happy he had been.

Then 2019 — twenty-five kilos gone, two years of near-solitude, and one desperate afternoon when he locked the bathroom door, prayed a prayer he had not said since childhood, and felt a hand on the back of his neck.

He talks about the woman who gave him back his sense of being a man, at forty, after years without so much as a hug. About his daughter asking at dinner to move to Sweden. About meeting Hannah at a comedy club and being asked, on their first date, how he receives love — and having no answer.

And about what sat underneath all of it: he was afraid of men. Today fifty of them meet him every Sunday in Malmö at Lighthouse, the community he founded. Nothing leaves the room. Nobody gives advice.