As a cardiologist, Christopher Leet dispenses advice to his patients about how to live a healthy lifestyle:

"Exercise is very important. Stress is a real big item. And diets are really important."

But for years, he didn't practice what he preached. In the '90s, Dr. Leet was overweight and out of shape.

My blood pressure was elevated, my cholesterol was elevated. My family history was very abnormal. But like a lot of people do at that age a lot of people just say, 'well, next year I'm going to do something about this.'

For Dr. Leet, 'next year' was almost too late.

"One day at the end of the day, I began developing chest pain while I was finishing making rounds at the hospital."

"So actually I came over to my office across the street and decided to do an electrocardiogram on myself. And that showed that I was indeed having a heart attack."

He was rushed to the emergency room.

"I laid there, watching the monitor, and sure enough after a few minutes I saw my own cardiac arrest."

"I knew that I only had about five seconds of consciousness after that, and i even reached up and tried to thump myself in the chest at the time, and then the lights went out."

Chris Leet woke up with a stent in his heart—and a change of heart.

"It was time that I start doing everything that I'd been telling all my patients to do for years."

That meant exercise—and a healthy diet. But as his weight dropped and his health improved, he soon learned mending his body was the easy part.

"One day I was sitting at home and had a panic attack. And even as much as I knew about the situation, I wasn't sure I wasn't having another heart attack. It's probably the worst that I ever felt short of actually having the heart attack.

Three months after surviving his cardiac arrest, Dr. Leet was suffering from anxiety and depression.

"I tended to get some really bad dreams, every night, every night, for like a couple of weeks. You'd wake up in the morning and you hadn't gotten a good night's sleep, and you thought, no, I really don't feel like going to work, (and all these sorts of things)."

Leet's case is far from unusual. In fact, one in five heart attack patients experiences depression during the initial months of recovery.

"A lot of these episodes, like post-traumatic stress, regular depression and those sorts of things, usually happen about two or three months after the episode— just about the time that everybody thinks that everything is going well."

Though the problem is often overlooked, Leet says it's important to recognize and treat it.

Studies show patients who suffer from depression tend to fare worse than those who don't.

The treatments Leet recommends include medication and counseling.

He also says relaxation techniques like meditation and yoga can be effective.
So impressed with his own results, today he teaches these techniques to his patients.

Regular exercise can be another way to help your mind, as well as your body.

As Dr. Leet has learned from his own experience, such steps can make a difference, and people with heart disease don't have to live with depression.

"Many patients say, 'well, you just don't understand what I'm going through.' This has given me the opportunity to say, 'Yes, I do understand what you're going through.'"