Hi, I’m John. You might have landed on The Shack’s Guide looking for the original BPD articles,or maybe you have come across via on one of our products pages. While the heart of the site is still here, it’s just grown into something bigger. Here’s the story.
My background is in Training and Development. I spent about fifteen years in management, business, and service training across the health, travel, and small business industries, with side study in rehabilitation, facilitation, counseling, and negotiation. The common thread through all of it was people. How we think, why we get stuck, and what actually helps us move.
My first real experience with mental health wasn’t academic. It was a relationship. Years ago I was with a partner who had Borderline Personality Disorder, and at the time I had never heard the term. When I asked doctors and therapists what I was dealing with, I mostly got shrugs and a suggestion to “look online.” There was almost nothing useful where I was living.
So I did what I always do when I don’t understand something. I started reading. Everything. Books, forums, international clinics, and long conversations with anyone who had lived it. That research became mjtacc.com (The Shack). For years this site was a quiet corner of the internet for the BPs and especially the non-BPs: the partners, parents, siblings, and friends trying to hold their own ground while loving someone with BPD.
But my story didn’t stop there.
2016: my Adult ADHD diagnosis
In 2016, after decades of assuming I just wasn’t wired for structure, I was told I had Adult ADHD. It reframed my entire adult life. All those years of scattered focus, half-finished projects, feeling like I was working twice as hard for half the output. It wasn’t a character flaw. It was a brain running on a different fuel mix.
I went the conventional route first, and I’m not against it, but I hit a wall a lot of people hit: what worked in month one didn’t work the same in month twelve. And more importantly, I wanted to understand why. Same instinct that drove the BPD research years earlier. I needed the mechanism, not just the label.
So I went back to reading. Dopamine pathways. Acetylcholine and cell signaling. Amino acid precursors. Adaptogens. Sleep architecture. The nervous system as a whole system, not a list of symptoms. That research led me to nootropics, the broad category of amino acids, botanicals, and natural compounds people use to support focus, mood, memory, and stress resilience.
My first stack was modest. A choline source, something for calm focus, and a couple of basics for sleep and stress. I journaled everything: what worked, what didn’t, what worked sometimes and why. When I felt my focus return in a way I hadn’t experienced in years, I kept going. Friends started asking. Then friends of friends. That informal consulting eventually became a big part of what I do.
The more I got into supplement formulation and stack-building, the more I wanted a proper framework behind it. That curiosity pushed me toward formal study in sports nutrition. I completed the CISSN certification through the International Society of Sports Nutrition, which gave me a rigorous, evidence-based foundation for understanding how compounds interact, how dosing matters, and how individual variation shapes outcomes. It was the natural next step from years of self-experimentation and reading the primary research on my own.
Helping BPD authors
My thoughts behind this site were simple – to fill an information void within mental health space, to assist people in finding experienced professional help, to promote the disorder within Australia (and now globally) and to offer a safe, friendly environment where people can gain a better understanding and talk to others about Borderline Personality Disorder.
My knowledge on this topic is what I have learnt from reading, talking with doctors, therapists and people who suffer with this disorder. Overall, I am very proud of the efforts of the site and my personal involvement in the design and development of a BPD recovery workbook written by American Psychologist and recovered BP, Laura Paxton. I was honoured by Laura’s acknowledgement of my work in her workbook.
I have also worked on an education program for family/partners to assist in understanding the disorder and to give them some coping skills as they support the one they love.
The most important thing I learnt about this disorder is to gain an understanding of it and whether you suffer from this disorder or a love someone who has it I urge you to find out about it and to openly talk about it. One point I do want to stress is that there is no better form of diagnosis or advice than from that of a qualified professional who is experienced in dealing with such disorders.
Why The Shack?
The name of this site is very relevant to me. Like this site, my shack is a getaway in the bush where I can escape to and unwind, relax and get back to basics (you can’t take the country out of the boy).
It’s a quiet place where I can go and unwind. It is the perfect atmosphere for writing my book and to enjoy a walk in the bush, a snooze on the verandah, or even a gallop through some of the most spectacular countryside – the Victorian High Country. If you ever want the thrill of a lifetime sign up for the weekend cattle muster. It is an amazing experience, one I will never forget and one I’d like to share.
2018: the move
In 2018 I moved from Australia to New Jersey. New country, new pace, new pressures, and honestly a very different conversation around mental health than the one I grew up in.
The move sharpened my thinking about modern burnout, how it creeps in without warning, and how differently it hits people depending on their environment, their work, and their nervous system baseline.
It also connected me with a much wider community of researchers, formulators, and practitioners in the cognitive wellness space, which shaped how I think about stacks today.
Where The Shack’s Guide is now
The site now reflects what I actually do. Alongside the original BPD material, we cover:
Stress and burnout. Recognizing the early signals and building in real recovery, not weekend patches.
Emotional resilience. The daily habits, breathwork, sleep hygiene, and lifestyle foundations that keep you steady when life doesn’t.
Cognitive support. Focus, memory, and mental clarity, plus the compounds and routines that support them.
Caring for the carer. Because this site was born out of that exact experience, and it will always have a home here.
We also run an ecommerce shop stocking the compounds I actually use and recommend. The current range covers the foundations I come back to again and again: L-theanine paired with caffeine for calm, steady focus without the edge; choline sources like Alpha-GPC and Citicoline that most people are quietly underconsuming; magnesium L-threonate for the sleep and cognition overlap that tends to be the first thing to slip when life gets busy; and high-DHA omega-3 for the brain lipid baseline that almost everything else builds on.
These aren’t exotic or complicated. They’re the starting point I’d give anyone before they worried about anything else.
We also offer personal consultations for readers who want a tailored approach: building a customized nootropic stack for your specific goals, looking at where your current routine might be working against you, or just wanting a second opinion before you commit to a new protocol.
How I write about this
Everything on this site comes from lived experience, a lot of reading, and years of conversations with people working through their own version of “why doesn’t my brain work the way I want it to.”
The CISSN gives me a solid scientific grounding for the nutrition and supplementation side, but for any diagnosis, prescription, or clinical concern, a qualified professional is always the right call. What I offer is the layer around that: the daily practices, the frameworks, the questions worth asking, and the small experiments that add up over time.
The site is still called The Shack for a reason. The original shack was a small place in the Australian bush where I could switch off, breathe, and remember what “steady” felt like. That’s still the goal here. A quiet place on the internet where you can slow down, learn something useful, and leave a little sharper than you arrived.
Thanks for stopping in.
John