Work is key to your mental health yes. Let me rephrase that for you. Meaningful work, work where you feel valued and safe is good for your mental health. If it isn't, it's bad for your mental health. You can feel intimidated, coerced, undervalued, a bad parent/child/partner because of the amount of time you give to work over your loved ones. One girl I recently worked with, when I talked to her about how she was working 12 hours a day for her clients and her boss, said "I'm a people pleaser see" to which I questioned "is your husband and child happy you're working all these unpaid hours?" Funny enough, they weren't. In fact they were far from pleased. I suggested that her people pleasing should start with her loved ones. At its core, work is simple. You do something that someone else can't or doesn't want to do, and in return, you're paid. You use that money to pay for food, shelter, health, and if you have a family, theirs too. If there's any left over, you use it to enjoy life a little. It sounds basic. That's because it is. Don't lose sight of that. Somewhere along the way, society muddied the waters. We started defining people by their job titles. We looked down on so called "low skilled" workers and placed others like CEOs, surgeons and lawyers on pedestals. But all work has value. All workers deserve dignity. Doctors, teachers, builders, nurses, cleaners, drivers, paramedics... society doesn't function without them. But neither does it function without supermarket staff, factory workers, bin collectors, or delivery drivers. You don't know someone's story or their circumstances, so it's worth keeping that in mind before drawing conclusions about anyone. Now, when it comes to your own job, remember this: You're lucky to have a job. But they're lucky to have you too. Work is a two way agreement. You give your time, energy, skills, and often your patience. They give you money. That's the deal. And your time? That's the only thing in this world that truly belongs to you. Don't give it away for free.

The day after I lost my job, I went to a 7am Jiu-Jitsu class. I was terrible. Heavy, slow, uncoordinated. My body moved but my mind was underwater. I came home, collapsed onto the settee, and that old familiar weight settled back over me. That specific kind of darkness, not dramatic, just numbing, crept in around the edges. It was as if my two year depression had been tracking me like a bloodhound. It had found my new address and settled in. I didn't want to move. Not even to take my little dog out. I just sat there. Hours passed. Ten hours later I walked through the front door with the dog. Twenty minutes. But I had done it. How? It wasn't motivation. It wasn't some breakthrough moment. It was just a task. One small task I had set myself when I was feeling okay and saved for when I wasn't. Leave instructions for your future self. Not big ones. Nothing ambitious. Ten small things, each doable in ten minutes or less. Nothing that requires you to leave the bed if that's where you're stuck. Some days you won't shower. Won't reply to messages. Won't eat properly. But maybe you'll tap through a few French phrases. Solve a chess puzzle. Write three lines nobody will ever read. You'll have done something. There's a strange little spark that comes from finishing even the smallest thing. It doesn't fix anything. But it interrupts the slide. I never thought I'd walk the dog that day. But I did.

Kindness can help people. But it can also be used badly. I worked with someone who used to film herself handing out Greggs pasties to homeless people for social media. She couldn’t see the problem. That people still have dignity. That turning someone’s worst moment into content isn’t kindness. It’s using them. Its shittiest of the shitty. When I was in a two year depression, I barely moved off the settee. People would say things like “pull yourself together” or “just think positive” like it was a switch you could flip. It just made things worse. What hit harder was the silence. Friends I’d known since I was four. People I’d gone to war with on a rugby pitch. No one came. Not one. Except one. A lad from Jujitsu. We’d got close over lockdown, a lot of laughs, a lot of stupid nights. On the mats he’s relentless. Tough. Loves taking the piss when he taps you. Not the kind of person you’d expect to just sit quietly with someone falling apart. But he showed up. Didn’t try to fix anything. Didn’t tell me what to do. Just sat there and listened to me talk absolute nonsense for hours. Didn’t judge it. Didn’t rush it. Just stayed. He had a young baby at the time as well. Still made the effort. That stuck with me more than anything. Not advice. Not solutions. Just someone showing up when it counted. It made me rethink who actually matters. There’s a line in Derek where someone says “kindness is magic.” It sounds soft, but there’s something in it. Not because the world rewards you for being kind. It doesn’t. Good people get shafted all the time and plenty of arseholes do just fine. But kindness changes something in you. It pulls you out of your own head for a bit. Reminds you there are other people out there dealing with their own mess. It keeps you grounded. Same with integrity. It’s just doing the right thing when there’s no upside. No audience. No credit. No one watching. Not because you’re trying to be a good person. Just because you don’t want to turn into someone you don’t recognise. When everything else is unstable, that stuff holds.

In 2016 I worked for someone who was unpredictable in a way that made every day feel uncertain. I never quite knew what version of him I was going to get. I started keeping a record of conversations and decisions so I would have something to refer back to if anything became disputed later. I did not want to keep a paper diary because anyone could read it and I would probably have lost it anyway, so I used an app instead. At first it was just protection. Later it became something else entirely. When I walked out of that job due to my boss being too much for too long, the journal mattered. I had a record. More importantly, I had a timeline. After that I began using it differently. I started noticing patterns in my mood. I could see what triggered difficult periods and what helped me recover from them. Off an on for 10 years and everyday for the last 3 years. It has become one of the most useful habits I have. Journaling is not complicated. It is just a place to put things when they are too noisy to keep in your head. Research supports this. Expressive writing has been linked with reductions in symptoms of anxiety and depression in multiple studies, including work published in the Journal of Affective Disorders examining structured writing exercises over several weeks. Example review evidence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15094266/ Getting Things Out of Your Head Writing things down changes how they sit in your mind. Thoughts that feel overwhelming when they stay internal often become clearer once they are on the page. They stop looping in the same way. You can look at them instead of being inside them. It does not need to be structured. It does not need to make sense to anyone else. It just needs to be honest. Spotting Patterns Over time a journal becomes a record. You start seeing what affects your mood. Certain conversations. Certain environments. Sleep. Exercise. Stress. Isolation. Digital mood tracking research suggests that people who record emotional patterns are more likely to adjust behaviour in ways that support mental health.