Ben’s Story

Todays #myomindstory is about Ben Croucher: Sports Broadcaster, Senior Duty Editor, Video Journalist and Assistant Producer for BBC news; Assistant Producer at BBC Radio Five Live; Ambassador and Writer for Switch The Play; Ex Sports Presenter for the London 2012 Olympics and Ex Broadcast Journalist for BBC Radio Kent (Just to name a few…).

Ben began our interview explaining his lifelong struggles with mental health (MH), he “didn’t have a great time at school” and was bullied at a young age. He feels that this experience is what gave him the motivation to strive in his career, almost as payback or to “stick two fingers up at” those who picked on him.

Ben has always been someone who is more sensitive, more emotional and his emotions seem to waver more than the average person, something I’m sure a lot of the MyoMinds community can relate to as strugglers in MH.

Over the last 6 years MH has been an issue for him, particularly 4 years ago, where he struggled to get out of bed whilst battling with dark thoughts. This led to a big turning point for Ben, when 2 years ago he reached the point where he knew he needed to seek help and reached out for counselling sessions via the BBC’s counselling service for their employees. He explained how this helped him in some ways, gaining awareness of his feelings and helping him learn to accept that feeling “rubbish” sometimes is okay and how to face the accompanying thoughts head on.

It is often hard to distinguish between the feelings of, so called, “normal” upset and feelings that aren’t within your control, and Ben found this too. Over time he learnt to differentiate between these two states, through conscious effort and talking through things with his counsellor.

Ben mentioned how it is typical that mental health issues are dealt with expectations that you “shrug it off”, as appose to physical illness where a doctor will give you clear steps to get better. Bens counselling helped him, but he felt it lacked “active steps” to follow up with. We at MyoMinds hear this quite often, we feel work and research need to be done to give counsellors, doctors, coaches (etc) a clear pathway to signpost mental health suffers towards. It is so difficult to give a path towards getting better as everyone’s mental health is so different.

When at work, Ben stated that he feels his best, progressing in his career and working towards his goals helps his mental health. Even recently he has had days where he has felt “terrible” but he did not allow it to effect his work (although he may have not been the happiest person to be around, behind the scenes). Presenting and broadcasting is like acting in many ways, Ben explained to me, so showing a professional face, even when feeling down, isn’t too difficult. Work has been very important for Ben and often his mental health improves as his work progresses, motivating him further to get the best out of himself. But this has led to some things that he feels he may have “missed out” on, as he struggles to balance work and social life at times.

Ben’s mental health, like most people, revolves around multiple aspects of his life. As well as his work, a contributing factor for him is his social life. Having recently turned 30, Ben mentioned how he has started to notice that his friends are all getting married and starting families. This has been something he has struggled to do himself, whilst juggling his hectic work life, and contributes to his MH issues as he can feel like he is missing out.

Ben explained how meeting new people is a difficult for him. His job requires a confident, extroverted approach but this is not who he feels he really is in day to day life. He can often “feel like such an outsider” and struggle in big groups of friends and new people.

Something he admitted (and something I feel a lot of people struggle with) is that he often defines himself as his job or as his current situation, rather than truly understanding who he is. Saying that he believes his next step in his mental health journey is to step back from his identification as the man who has his job role and instead find out what “makes [him] tick as a person”.

One way that Ben clears his head and helps regulate his MH is through exercise (Woo). He gave this advice: “one thing I can recommend to anyone that is struggling with their mental health is, little bits of exercise do make all the difference”.

Ben was struggling with some body image issues and in a further push to “be the best [he] can be” he signed up with a personal trainer. Ben’s PT gave him weightlifting exercises, but Ben found he didn’t fully enjoy this and changed things up! Bens real love is running and so, for the last 12-18 months, Ben has been averaging around 40km of running a week. A recent #thinkmyominds post touched on the topic of choosing an exercise method that you love, and Ben is a perfect example of this. As we said in that post: “Do what makes you happy, not what other people think will make you happy”.

Throughout the interview with Ben, one thing that stood out was an understanding of finding his personal way to fixing his mental health. Ben often spoke about making “active steps” towards getting better and this is something that I believe all people can take from his story. Understand that your MH issues are different to others, find out what it is that is making things worse and then take the steps to remove that or change it. This is such a huge step in progressing with your MH and is harder than it seems. It requires conscious effort, and this is something Ben is aware of and is improving over time.

I hope this post reaches people who need to hear these messages. Ben is the perfect example that you can be successful, even when struggling with MH. Your MH issues don’t define you. Ben is a role model for so many people struggling with thoughts of being unsure of who you are and how you feel. Even though he still struggles, he progresses everyday (even the days it may feel like he doesn’t) by actively trying to understand himself and make the changes that fit him.

All of us in the MyoMinds community should work together to give out this same message, and work on doing this ourselves too.