About

I was confident that I’d find another role quickly with my outstanding qualifications and blue-chip company experience. However, month after month, nothing came through. As my savings dwindled, the confidence turned to desperation.

I was having panic attacks at 2am, suffering from the deepest depression I’d ever experienced. I felt completely hopeless. Nothing was working and the toxic thought narratives were dragging me deeper into a depression that became life-threatening. In the absence of any logical reason for why I wasn’t getting any responses from my efforts, I started thinking that I was too old, too male, too white, too experienced, too expensive – the list went on and on. The depression was also dragging me down to the point where I didn’t have the energy to do normal every day things anymore.

Like most men, I’d been conditioned to handle things on my own. Asking for help felt like admitting failure. I didn’t really believe that anyone could help. Some words of support weren’t going to solve my problem – I needed a proper responsible role that matched my skillset and experience and a commensurate level of remuneration.

As I got more desperate about the dwindling savings I was living off, I started thinking it was all I was going to have to carry me through to retirement and knew it wasn’t enough to survive on. I became less willing to spend anything on counselling and support services. Although I’ve had good results from counselling in the past, I also knew that when the counselling ends I’m on my own again.

The whole situation was compounded and exacerbated by the fact that I had been the primary income earner for my family and suddenly my kids and partner couldn’t rely on me to provide for them. The threat became existential – would we lose our house? Who would feed us?

My partner encouraged me to try find a simple job packing shelves in a supermarket or driving a goods vehicle but one look at my CV and no-one was interested. During one of the three interviews I had for a role that paid half what I had been earning before, the manager was honest and admitted they didn’t want to offer me the role because they suspected that I would find something else that paid more and would leave.

My thoughts kept telling me I was a burden rather than a provider. I felt like a failed role model for my kids. Repetitive thoughts became beliefs. I started believing that no one wanted the value I had to offer anymore and that I no longer had a contribution to make to society or a role on the planet. I started believing that everyone would be better off without me dragging them down.

Then one day, I found myself seriously considering ending my life. The thought terrified me—not just because of how close I came, but because I genuinely believed my family would be better off without me. That’s how deep the depression had taken me.

It wasn’t a magic silver bullet or a stroke of luck that changed things. It was a combination of factors that created the right conditions for the solution that emerged. It was partly my performance-driven mindset; partly my discipline to keep showing up no matter how I felt (just like those endless early-morning athletics sessions); partly the habit I established to track my job applications (even without any sign of progress); and partly my faith in the universe that I wasn’t entirely alone in this.

When the new employment opportunity emerged I took some time to settle into the role and then I turned my focus to the things in my life that needed to change.

The depression had taken a toll on every aspect of my life, including my closest relationships. Getting back on my feet meant making difficult decisions about my future, including a fresh start in a new city.

I also realised that I never, ever want to go back to the desperation and depression that nearly cost me my life. So the next thing I started working on was my mental health fitness and resilience. For too long I had taken my mental health for granted and I realised that I had to proactively work on it. I realised it’s just like highly competitive athletics or working to be the top student in an MBA course or consistently delivering in a high performance professional work environment – I had to work on it every single day. I realised that the same principle applied to mental fitness as to physical fitness – if I wanted to get fit and be more resilient I needed training.

No one taught me how to look after my mental health in the MBA course, or the athletics track or the years I spent rock climbing, so I started researching what works and why, and I started doing regular mental health exercises while applying what I had learnt from decades of establishing and maintaining routines and habits.

As I rebuilt my mental fitness, I realised something crucial: there was no ongoing ‘gym’ for mental health maintenance. Therapy ends when you’re stable and recovered. Support groups focus on crisis. But where do high-performing professionals go to train their mental resilience the way we train our bodies or our professional skills?

Mental health fitness is a mastery practice, just like martial arts, playing a musical instrument or climbing rock. That’s when I knew I had to create it. Not as a therapist or guru, but as someone who understands what it takes to maintain elite performance—and who knows firsthand the cost of neglecting mental fitness.

I’ve been through enough challenges to know that life will continue to throw setbacks at me but I am determined to never go back to that dark place again.

The Mental Health Gym isn’t therapy. It’s not a support group. It’s training. It’s community. It’s the daily practice that keeps you strong, resilient, and never going back to that dark place.

I’m still working on it myself, every single day and I’d be honoured if you’d join me as a member of the Mental Health Gym.