My Journey with Mental Health

I used to think “mental health” was used as an excuse for being lazy.

Luckily, I’ve met incredible people in the past few years who openly talk about their internal struggles, which showed me that I suffer from them too and it’s nothing to be ashamed about.

But first, let me explain where that initial statement comes from.

As a father, husband and CEO, I have a ton of responsibilities which I need to take care of irrespective of how I feel.

When your kids bring back a cold from school and pass it on to you, you still have to function as a parent. You still have to cook for them whilst coughing away. You still have to clean up after them although you need to lie down and rest. And you still have to drive their siblings to school despite a splitting headache.

The same is often true for business owners and executives of small teams.

Deadlines need to be met, bills need to be paid and the operation needs to carry on despite you feeling ‘low’. This is especially true for the sector that I work in, where you care for others who rely on you and your team to help them master their already more complex daily struggles.

So when people used to say that they needed time off for ‘self-care’ I used to struggle to empathise with it.

I understood what it meant to take care of your physical health through regular exercise, diet and rest.

I understood that we need to work on our emotional control to be calmer parents and partners.

But mental health was a mystery to me.

To complicate matters further, we have several family members who themselves struggle with their mental health.

Those struggles resulted in a lot of pain for others in the family through missed family celebrations as well as the dangerous combination of substance abuse to cope with their internal struggles which deepened depression and also led to death.

As a result, I saw 'mental health' both as an excuse not to do what we ‘need to do’ as well as a smokescreen for behaviours which negatively affected our family.

But the more I struggled with the increasing use of the term in modern society, the more I realised I had misunderstood it.

Our mental well-being is of paramount importance to us all and although I do still believe that modern society takes the whole ‘self-care’ movement too far, it is good to normalise protecting and nurturing our mental health the same way we have normalised working on our physical bodies.

But where does this leave us parents and/or busy professionals?

Truth is, we often still need to just suck it up.

There is no ‘time off’ as a mum or dad.

So you will still need to just get on with it when you are ill and your kids need you.

Yet, we have to realise that when we stress our physical bodies during a marathon, for example, we take time off afterwards to recover and reset.

But often when we go through stressful times in our lives we just push through and then just get on with our lives as if nothing extraordinary happened.

And that’s a mistake.

We need to realise that we pushed our mental well-being too far and now need to recover and reset.

As a parent and executive, this means being open and honest with your partner and seeing how you can cover for each other to take some rest time around any non-negotiable obligations.

The other side to it is to work on our mental resilience by building in daily moments of calmness: time in nature, reading a physical book or just enjoying a cup of tea without scrolling social media.

And I’ve realised that the most important investment for your mental health is nurturing close relationships. Because to be able to talk about how you’re really feeling is the most powerful cure for any problems with your mental health.

What is your take on all of this? What can parents or busy professionals do to enhance their mental wellbeing?