The Netmums Podcast - S17 Ep7: Happy kids, happy lives: parenting insights from Dr. Alex George

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

This week on The Netmums Podcast, Wendy Golledge and Alison Perry are joined by A&E doctor turned mental health campaigner, author and Stompcast host Dr Alex George. Together, they dig into what young people are up against right now, how tiny daily routines can build big resilience, and why honest, calm conversations at home matter more than perfect fixes. Dr Alex talks through “mental fitness,” the case for more wellbeing in schools, and his new children’s book Happy Habits, which helps kids build small, realistic routines for happier, healthier days. (Plus: Alison’s “raffle to buy a toy” saga becomes a teachable moment on dopamine!) In this episode: Why schools should balance grades with wellbeing (and life skills like money basics) The “life audit”: a 5-minute way to choose the one habit that moves the needle Simple family habits that stick (hello, 10-minute morning nature walk) How to talk to children about grief, worry and eating disorders without “fixing” Mental fitness vs. mental health: building resilience and capacity for joy Alex on ADHD & OCD: what diagnosis changed and what “normal” even means Boundaries with reality TV and choosing goals that align with your values A sneak peek at Alex’s next book, Am I Normal?, coming in January This episode is proudly sponsored by Aldi Mamia.  Stay connected with Netmums for more parenting tips, community support, engaging content: Website: netmums.com / Instagram: @netmums  Proudly produced by Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative

You're listening to the NetMums podcast with me, Wendy Gullich, and me, Alison Perry. Coming up on this week's show, what is obvious to me, and I think to most parents, is that happy children are more likely to work hard at school, be successful and enjoy their lives. But before all of that, this episode of the NetMum's podcast is brought to you by Aldi Mamia. One of my favourite things about being a parent is when clever people come up with genius solutions to problems we have. Oh my goodness, me too. Can we please give a dame or a knighthood to whoever invented those little syringes for kids' medicine? It makes it so much easier to look after a poorly little ones.

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and a flexible fit. They are. Plus, they're dermatologically tested and suitable for newborns. Brilliant. They've thought of everything. Get your Aldi Mummya Nappies in store now. Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the NetMum's podcast. Alison, how goes it?

Oh my goodness. I'm feeling a little bit frazzled today, Wendy. It is my twins' seventh birthday today. And obviously, we've had the usual madness of me making pancakes for the breakfast and them refusing to eat them. And on their wish list was a Lubbubu, which I have in my hands here for you to see, which are these kind of crazy, so hard to get toys. When I tell you that in order to buy these, you have to enter a raffle.

And only if you win the raffle do you get to then queue up at the shop on Oxford Street and buy one? It is insanity. What if you only get one and you've got two? twins. When you enter the raffle, you say I want two or I want one or I want seven or whatever it is. But I am questioning my life choices right now. I'm thinking, am I actually going mad that I have done this and jumped through these hoops in order to get these little furry creatures for my twins? What do you think? What say you? I think you've lost the plot. What are they? They're disgusting. This is the advantage of having slightly older children.

and the boo-boo madness has not entered my house. But did they do anything? No, no. They're little key chains so that you put them on like your bag. I've seen grown adults with these. Tell me you didn't spend like 50 quid a pop on these things. No, no, that is the good thing. They are like 17 pounds, which they're not cheap, but 17 quits.

It's not like you're spending an absolute fortune on them. It's just the effort to get them. So I am slightly questioning my life choices today. So I feel like this competition may well be a dose of sanity to me. I think our guest is going to walk off and just say we've lost it already. Tell us, Timis, on the podcast today, please. Well, today, Wendy, I'm thrilled. We're joined by Dr Alex George.

A&E doctor turned mental health campaigner, author and host of the Stompcast podcast. Now, Alex first hit our screens on Love Island, but since then, he has become one of the UK's most prominent voices on wellbeing, serving, no less, as the government's youth mental health ambassador for four years. And now he's writing a new children's book, Happy Habits, which helps kids build small, realistic routines to boost happiness and resilience. Alex, a warm welcome to the Netman's podcast. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. But yes, I mean, I can't understand this stuff. So you raffle, so you basically have to raffle to be able to buy something. They're not paying you, you're paying them. Yeah, I know. So you have to raffle to get a ticket to them queue. So the raffle isn't even the cue. That's the permission to cue.

When I tell you the thrill I felt, Alex, when I got an email saying, you've won the raffle. I was like... You had dopamine. You had a beautiful hit of dopamine. So it's great. We'll be talking about dopamine today. It's great.

You had a lovely hit of dopamine. This is it. It all comes round. And so adults are buying these as well. It's where crazy. I have seen some adults that some women with them on their handbags. I don't think I'm going to go that far. I've got to be honest, Wendy.

It's like a Pokemon thing. I remember when I was young ago, like it was the Pokemon thing. The Pokemon cards is the craze and you're trying to get shinies and all that. So it's probably the same thing. So I can relate to that. Yes. So we always start the pod, Alex, by asking, how are you? But as you're a mental health advocate, we really want to know how are you?

Well, thank you for asking. It's a good question to ask. And I guess there's a very British response is, yeah, I'm absolutely fine. That's what everyone kind of says, isn't it? Which is why it's so important to ask twice. I think the time to change campaign around, you know, if someone says they're fine, but they don't seem themselves is probably a good idea to say, no, how are you really doing?

But yeah, I mean, I'm a mixture of everything. I'm kind of work and stuff still going good at the moment. Very proud of me, but being released. Personally, I'm doing better than I was. The last couple of years have been tricky and difficult. And a lot of the stuff I've talked about in my work, I've had to very much implement my own life. I was recently diagnosed with OCD as well,

which has been kind of a long-standing 15-year experience that I'm now kind of tackling. It's just taking a very long time to pin down what it was that was going on, how much of it was my ADHD, which I have, how much of it is OCD or obsessive compulsive disorder, how much of his trauma in life. And it's kind of been quite kind of a process of unpacking all that stuff. But, you know, it's all in the name of getting kind of better, which is, which is great. But I must say, you know, if I was going to say one to ten, how do I feel? I'm kind of seven out of ten, you know, despite all these things, you know, I think something I've realized in

recent years is that you have to find, like, joy in life, despite your challenge. There's no time where everything's perfect. I'm certain that both of you will have something in your life right now that you're facing or dealing with. And it's learning to live while dealing with your challenges. That's the kind of name of the game. At least that's what I think. There's no time we've got clear air.

And I can't think of any time in my life where there's been nothing that's been a challenge or a problem. Absolutely. I think for us as parents as well, it's teaching our children that as well. And you spent four years, as I said, as the youth mental health ambassador to the UK government. What do you think is the biggest challenge?

facing young people and their mental health right now? How long have we got? No, I think this is, it's an important question because only by naming the problem can we look to change it. And I think the first thing to say is that I think there's plenty of hope and opportunity to change the direction that we're going in. I think the good thing about this situation is that the answers are there and the things that we need to do are available to us.

It's about recognizing this and making a shift, both societally, but also, I think, as individuals, look, the children are facing a digital age with a hyper-connected online. They're disconnected in-person, so less kind of in-person connection. They're seeing too much information. The information diet is overloaded, and it's often full of things that are probably not helpful to them. The world is much more kind of available in the sense that you can see and hear and everything that's going on on the outside world, no matter how scary it is. So there's almost too much of that, I think, out there. And children also worrying about things like the climate, job security in the future, what is the world going to look like?

I think also young people are probably earlier than ever feeling the pressures of expectation. I think some of that's driven by social media, but I think this is an ever-evolving landscape of individualism and people being like, I need to achieve my goals to be successful. So I think you've got lots of things that are in the mixing parts, And that's driving issues like anxiety, worry, eating disorders and so on. Loneliness is a huge issue. And of course, the pandemic, what that did is it kind of accelerated a lot of those issues

and probably made some of those kind of worse. The kind of flip side of it is that we are having much more awareness of what mental health is and that it's not just illness, that mental health can be really positive. You can build, you can create resilience, you can build this thing called mental fitness, which is what I'm passionate about. and actually by acknowledging some of these challenges, we can give young people tools and parents to be able to kind of face it head on

because, as I say, a lot of the answers are staring us in the face and a lot of the answers are kind of harking back to what our grandparents, for example, would have done and how they would have grown up. So if you could parachute yourself into every school in the UK, what's the change that you would make so that they were better supporting children's mental wellbeing? I think if I was going to do one thing, I would shift from the academic focus to a more holistic, let's grow this person up to be a happy, healthy, well-rounded individual approach.

So the academic-driven approach is very Victorian. It's been most for a long time. It's like learn something, revise it, test that knowledge, repeat, repeat, and essays and homework and all these different things. And what we've kind of lost amongst that is that actually what school is supposed to do is, well as that as part, you know, learning things. It's supposed to help you develop emotional maturity, teamworking skills, resilience, understanding of how to go and be an adult in the world. And if I ask, I often do people at talks and things, like, do you feel that school prepared you for the outside world? I don't think I've had anyone ever put their hand up and say, yes, I feel that it did. I ask people, you know, okay, let's talk about one of the biggest causes of worry for adults, financial stress, financial worry. Did you learn anything?

about finances at school, about what nicer is, what are mortgages, how inflation works, how do loans work? What does APR stand for? How does debt work? Taxes. No one tells you tax. You go to school and then you leave school and you work and you pay taxes for a significant proportion of your life. No one tells you what a pay slip is and what's on your pay slip, how to read your tax code. So when I talk about well-being, I'm not just talking about sitting down meditating, although that is something I really want kids to do because meditating changes the structure of a brain. It's amazing for mental health. It's also teaching about things like through maths, I believe, we should be teaching about finances and financial health, which is a word a lot of

people haven't even heard of because we've not been taught about it. We should be talking about things like stigma through the lens of history. When you sit in history classes, why don't we learn about the history of mental illness and why up until 1961 it was illegal to attempt to take your own life? In fact, the word committed suicide comes because we used to be a crime. And up until this modern, up until this day, and during my time as mental health, very, very senior people within health, senior people within politics would keep using word committed suicide. In fact, most people still use it. And I don't blame them. But the reason that they use it is because they don't understand where the word comes from. You commit arson, you commit theft, whatever it would

be. It's not a crime to take your own life, but until recently it was. And so let's learn about stigma through that lens. And then let's empower kids through science. Like, you know, why do you exercise each day. Well, when you go outside for a run, you put pressure through your long bones. That pressure in your long bones triggers a release of an immune cell that goes up to your brain, tells it good job, and tells you to release endorphins. Why? Because the body understands that being fit and healthy is a survival mechanism. So if we teach kids about like how cool science is and why exercise is important, I think they're much more likely to engage in that. So I would certainly look at Ofsted and I'd strip that back and say, look, this is ridiculous. Why are we, you know,

Maths and English is something, but it's not everything. And take probably more of approach that Wales has moved to in very recent years, which is a four, it's called a four-purpose approach. So they put wellbeing and emotional development on the same level of importance as academia. And the people say, well, why does this matter? And what if all by kids stop learning to be clever and do well and go to university? Well, if you look at other countries that have that approach, they don't have that issue. Look at the Nordic countries, look at Sweden, Switzerland, who learn through,

play till the age of like 11, then they slowly bring academia in as the kids age. They do very well. They're doing extremely well and they have much better academic outcomes than we do. So what is obvious to me, and I think to most parents, is that happy children are more likely to work hard at school, be successful and enjoy their lives. And that's true in the workplace as well. I mean, if you want to improve your productivity in the workplace, help your staff be happy, improve their working environments, make sure they go access to mental health support when they need it, care about the issues of they're facing. And you'll find your productivity will double far better than spending all your money on any workflow system. I think what you've proved there,

Alex, is you need to become the Secretary of State for Education. So let's start a campaign today. That's very kind. No, no, no. I tell you now, that's very, it's very flattering kind. But I would a, I do not have the skill set that you need to do that is more than, more than ideas. But also, I would never do it. I would never, yes. I definitely, the biggest thing actually, you know, the biggest thing was starting to go into politics is that you have to tow the party line.

And I'd go in with big ideas and I'd two years, it would be, within a year or so, it would be beaten out of you and then you don't. You know, if you join the Labour Party, you have to follow their manifesto and their beliefs, even if some of it you agree with and some of you don't, if you end at the Tory party, you might agree with some things, not the others, but it's like,

you have to follow it. You join that party. You're all on the same team. And I just wouldn't, there's no way. There's no way to get me into politics. I've been close enough and I wouldn't want to get any closer. I wouldn't want to be any closer. You're busy writing books and your new book, Happy Habits, is all about tiny daily habits rather than those big sweeping changes that can quite often feel quite intimidating. Why do you think it is important to break down change into those bite size actions? Well, the thing is, if you look at it this way, I mean, we have an opportunity with children

to shape their brains, literally, to a way they see the world, their habits, the way they're respond to things like stress and challenges, and we can help them move towards a healthy way of doing that versus allowing society to shape them with end up being 25 roles, that maybe drink alcohol to deal with stress, don't exercise, eat loads of processed foods, don't have any structural ways to improve resilience. You know, we have this blank canvas almost, that I think of it this way, is like you think of a dump of snow in a mountain. That mountain is fresh and beautiful snow, and anyone that wants to climb that mountain can create their own path. The first person to climb the mountain, has a bit of a job to kind of push through the snow, and that's where habit

development takes time to develop. But then, as the next load of mountaineers come along, they just follow the path of the mountain. So it's a great opportunity. It's a great to do that. Now, of course, as adults, we can change. We don't know that neuroplasticity, this idea that we can change the way that we operate and think and move through the world is absolutely true, but it requires a bit more work because all of a sudden a mountaineer halfway up, the mountain has to go, well, I'm going to step off the easy path I always take, and I'm going to dig a new one. And of course, when he pushes through, people start to follow some got the old path, and the new path. Eventually, people move over to this new direction, and the snow will cover

over the old path. That's absolutely true. But in childhood, you've got this great opportunity to say, hey, this science and these interventions can make a difference to this child's life. Let's use these habits to build a healthy child. So, you know, it's things like, for example, if you want a child to eat more fruit and vegetables, say you want them to have an apple a day or fruit a day, you can use the kind of habit approach to make that happen. So it's a good example of this is, okay, how does a habit work? Well, and habit is a cue.

So a cue is almost related to time or something happening. So, for example, you wake up in the morning and that cue is then to go and brush your teeth because you've woken up. The action is brushing your teeth. and the reward is, oh, my teeth are minty and fresh, and in the long term, I've got healthy teeth. So when you do that enough times, you go and move past the motivation part, you use a bit of discipline to kind of maintain that. And eventually, after, well, they say an average of 66 days, but it does depend on the habit, you then do that automatically. So, for example, things like fruit, you could say, right, well, every day after school, there's an apple in your bag.

I want you to grab the apple and eat the fruit as you walk home from school. and the first few days it requires memory and did you have your apple? I'll do it tomorrow and, you know, reminding. But eventually it becomes automatic. In fact, the child will reach into their backpack to grab the apple without even thinking that they're actually doing that.

It's not a cognitive decision. And that is where habits are formed. So, you know, it's using the cycle of motivation, which is our awareness of we need to do something. And that's why I think it's really important. I'm with happy habits. I talk about the science and the reason why. Like, talk with a child and say,

look, this is why exercise is helpful. this is how it's going to benefit you in your older. Let's work on this together. Use the motivation curve to start doing the thing. So that might be going out for a walk for 10 minutes of the morning together outside of nature. Then after a while, you have to deal with the motivation dropping and it's rainy one day. And oh, gosh, I can't be bothered. You need to use a bit of discipline and say, hey, let's remember, why are we doing this?

Because we know it will benefit us in the long run. It's kind of like when I was at med school, I used to have a picture of King's College Hospital on the wall of my university. room because every time I was like, I can't bother to revise and look at the photo and think, I want to get there. I want to work in that hospital. And I'm going to work hard and it worked. And I kept doing that. So that's the discipline bit. And then if you do that long enough, eventually you end up in the habit where you very really need to apply any motivation or discipline just kind of happens automatically. So rather than allowing kids to develop habits passably and habits that can be unhelpful, we can establish habits that actually benefit them.

And that's, that's the beauty. We've got that snow on the mountain. Let's carve some helpful habits before the bad ones come in. Just a reminder that this episode of the NetMams podcast is brought to you by Aldi Mammaia. As well as award-winning nappies with P-Zones that enhance absorption, we love Mammaeer wipes. Plastic-free and gentle enough to use on your little one from birth. They make nappy changes so much easier. Head to your nearest Aldi store to check out the entire Mammae range. There's so much of what you've said there and what you wrote about.

in the book applies as much to us as grownups as it does to our kids. So as a parent, I'd love to know, what could I do, a habits that I could do that would have a knock on effect on the whole family's wellbeing? I guess what I say with this, and then people often ask me, and actually in the talk, yes, I'm going to where do I start? There's so much stuff I need to do in my life. And I think it's really useful, particularly for an adult, you know, you've moved through life and there's lots of things that have happened. I would sit around and do a life forward it. And it's very, very simple. It sounds complex. It's very easy. It's a pain piece of paper. I don't want to do that. Honestly, it sounds terrifying. It takes five minutes. And actually,

it's a good opportunity as well to recognize how much is good within your life, as well as things you want to improve. So you just literally do a word dump and you write down things in your life. So it could be friends, family, exercise, food, sleep, hobbies, just whatever comes to you in your mind that's kind of important, you feel it's important in life, time with children, etc. then next to it you just rate one to ten as to where you're at with that. So you might be like friends, actually, I've got a really good friendship group. I'll put that out as a nine out of ten. And do you know what?

I've actually been able to spend time with the kids recently. It's been quite good. I put that eight out of ten. But hang on, my sleeps are three. I haven't actually exercised in four months. That's a two. And all of a sudden you can circle things. And you'd be really surprised some of the things come up.

For me, for example, when I did it a few months ago, the thing that I circled and thought, Oh, God, I need to work on that as friends. I was like, I haven't seen my friends in months. I've been working so hard. I haven't seen my friends. So it allows you to kind of illuminate an area that you can work on. And then if you're going to go and pull that area, then use signs to help you fix it. So, for example, if we say, if we say, for example, exercise, all right, time in nature is a good one, actually, because there's an easy one to kind of explain.

Time in nature. I don't actually get, I don't get much time in nature. I love being outdoors. I know the benefits a bit, but I'm kind of always stuck at the laptop or whatever. it is. It's going right, well, how do I create an intervention, if you like, that means I can do this each day. So you ask you the question, like, when's most suitable? Well, maybe I should go for a walk in the morning. It's great to get morning light, our circadian rhythm, our sleep cycle benefits from it. We get serotonin. We get morning sunlight. Okay, let's do it in the morning. So

using the signs there, you then say, right, every morning, I'm going to get up, I'm going to have my shower or I'm going to get the kids ready for school, and then either with them or without them having you know even 10 minutes you go outside for a short walk a short loop to be outdoors ideally in a park or if you're in the countryside along around nature and then making sure that that you know motivation that keeps you doing it becomes a discipline and eventually as you do that long enough it becomes a habit and like any habit it's difficult at the start and you kind of go oh god have i got time i'm like so busy but you like it's just about finding and carving that time and like i'm not a parent and i know i could almost hear people saying ah but it's easy it's easy to say

you're not a parent. And of course, it isn't easy. If it was easy, you would all just be doing it. But it's trying to find those little gaps of time. And if you're trying to find time, by the way, a good place to do this is to go on your phone, go on the screen time and see how many hours you spend on your phone each day.

The average 25-year-old spends about six hours a day on their phone. If you think about eight hours, eight hours at work, so six out of eight of the kind of three hours that are on the phone, I'd imagine the number still quite high. Well, it is. I mean, the average adult's about four hours. So if you want to steal some time, don't take it away from time with the kids. You know, take it away from that screen time. Have a look at where you're spending dead time in the day and think, well, can I use that?

Rather than scrolling, can I listen to some music? Rather than scrolling, can I read? Rather than scrolling, is that a catch-up of my friend, rather than scrolling, is that going to the gym or going for a speedwalk outside. So I think it's when you're doing this life order, it's look at the areas of life, pat yourself on the back for all the good you're doing because you'll find actually, do you know what, I'm doing a pretty damn good job, and then the areas that you want to improve, circle them. But the key thing is, is only start with one. Human beings are not actually good at multitasking when it comes to making changes

in their life. You are all the other things, but when it comes to ourselves and creating a habit, one at a time, I didn't start, like, I've changed my life in the last three years, and I didn't start doing that by overhauling everything. The first thing I did was going for a walk every day. I promised myself that every single morning I'd go for a walk. And that was the first habit I sat and everything else came off the back of that. But that's what I wanted to ask actually because, so Michael Mosley did his wonderful Just One Thing podcast. And personally, the thing I ended up doing at the end of each of those was deciding I needed to do all of them. And what you're saying here about healthy habits, I'm like, well, yes, I need to go for a walk and I need to eat more food.

fruit and I end up in this spiral of trying to do them all. I'm the same, Wendy. I'm the same. Every expert that we speak to on this podcast, I come away going, I'm going to change my life and I'm going to do what they're telling me to do. And then I end up doing nothing. So how do you pick that one? That's the problem, isn't you?

Absolutely. If you can't do, if you try to do everything, you don't do anything. And that's so important. The most important one is the one that you feel drawn to. I think if you look at it. at your list and your life audit and you go, which one would have the biggest bang for its buck in my life? So look at it this way, right. So often what people do at the start of January, they go, right, new year, new me, right, I'm going to get in the gym. So people often say I'm going

to get in the gym, even when they're already walking every day, they're moving. They're actually getting quite a lot of exercise where actually they'd be better off focusing on their sleep, which is like 5%. Their movement is like 60% already. They're already doing a decent amount of movement, they're on 5% on their sleep. So they'd get, you know, 10x benefit if they increase that to 50% rather than pushing the dial on 60 to 70%. And this is really important. So as humans, we tend to move towards a thing that we know well, that we feel comfortable doing or the thing that the thing that we kind of are already doing some of and we kind of enjoy. So it's thinking like this, you know, the magic is in the work that you're avoiding. That is what it is. So look

at that list and go, well, where is that, where is the thing that I need to deal with? Actually, do you know what? I'm really not a very good sleeper. If I slept better, my energy would better, my relationships be better. I'd have more capacity to eat well. All these things would kind of knock on. So it's kind of picking that root cause thing. If you're extremely stressed, then it's looking at, okay, maybe my coping mechanism for stress

needs to be looked like. Or actually, I need to look at the things that are causing my stress. Maybe I need to actually dig into what is going on here. Maybe I do need to push back and have a difficult conversation at work. Or maybe I need to have a conversation with my partner about sharing the workload at home. Like, it's kind of, I think it's really useful often when you look at these life orders. Because often it'll tell you the area you to work on, but also can highlight some of the barriers and things that are in the way from that. But yeah, you've got to pick one thing.

The answer is they're all important. But the most important thing is you do something and start somewhere. So when I was three years ago, I was over 20 stone, overweight, I was drinking. loads of alcohol to deal with grief after losing my brother to suicide. I'd work myself to the ground over the of years previously in kind of an avoidance as well as trying to, trying to do something half helpful. And, you know, I was like, well, I'm in a mess. Like, what am I going to do? Like, I need to fix everything. And that's why I said, well, I'll go for a walk every day and I'll stop drinking. So I walked every day. I'd stop the drinking. And then after a while, after walking

for kind of four or five weeks, I was like, oh, do you know what? This is good. Like, I'm enjoying, like, getting off walk every day. Like, I used to exercise loads. Like, kind of fancy getting back in the gym. So I say, okay, well, after work each day, I'll go do half an hour in the gym, a couple nights of the week, four nights, five nights a week. So I started doing that. Then that became a habit. And I was like, well, I'm walking in the morning.

I'm working hours, but I'm still eating rubbish. Let's start eating a bit better. Nothing crazy. I think like a huge overhaul, but I'm just going to start being a little bit like mindful of what I eat. My diet got better. And as my diet got better, and I started losing weight and felt better, I had more energy to go, well, actually, you know, I probably need to have some therapy to deal with the things that I've happened.

So I started having therapy. You can see where this is going. It's a knock-on effect, but the answer is, I'm not standing here, you know, having run a London Marathon this year, fits and healthy, having drunk three years, and all these different changes, like overnight, it has taken a period of time and it only started with one step. You could only have to take the first step. No mountain has climbed in one go.

It's a consecutive number of steps that gets you to the top. Now, you have been very open about losing your brother to suicide and how that experience has shaped you. And many parents really worry about saying the wrong thing if a child brings up loss or grief. What do you think is a good way to handle that kind of tricky conversation? Well, the most important thing is to have the conversation. I think the shame is a lot of the time when we, you know, slightly different kind of question to answer. that, you know, when we worry about losing people losing their lives or how do you ask questions or someone struggling, ask the question.

I mean, the biggest thing is asking it. You know, someone walks into the office and they're limping. You just go, oh, how's your life? What's happened? You know, but people feel so awkward just saying, like, you don't seem yourself, how are you doing? Like, what's going on? Are you all right? You seem very low.

Do you feel, how low do you feel? How low do you feel of harming yourself? Like, what we're talking here? You know, people are so afraid of asking what they're actually thinking and worrying about. you're worrying about them, potentially harming themselves. So ask them. I'm not saying that do it in the queue for Tesco's,

but you don't have to, you know, you don't have to be terrified of asking what is a very reasonable and basic question. And people don't bite your head off. They go, well, actually, you know, if by chance you were wrong,

then you've made someone know that you value them and you care about them. I mean, we're overly afraid of this issue. And it comes back from like the stigma stuff and awkwardness. We just need to let that all go. If you're worried about someone, and just ask them, say, look, Wendy, I've known you for a couple of years. You've not been yourself the last couple of months.

Come on, let's have a chat. What's going on and how dark are we talking? Get out. You know, talk about it. When it comes to children and things, you know, the children are affected by grief and loss and hard times and difficult things that happen in their lives. And I think it's really important with them as well to have like the openness of conversation. And the bit of advice that I was given, I thought was really good,

was from a consultant psychiatrist who has had a daughter, or has a daughter, sorry, who struggles with anxiety. And she said, when I go home and I'm supporting her, I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a mother, I'm a friend. And I thought that was really powerful because she said the other two will create a chasm between us because I'm not the right person to treat what she's facing. But being a friend will bring us closer. And I think that was a really powerful way of putting it,

that you don't, as parents, you feel that you need to fix problems. But when, with emotional issues, fixing makes it worse. On the whole, the best thing you can do is allow space and just validate and acknowledge. So, for example, someone might be struggling early signs of an eating disorder on saying, look, you're beautiful and don't be silly and whatever. And, you know, trying to basically, like, make and feel better, which is understandable, it's saying, like, oh, that's really rubbish you feel that way. I'm sorry to hear that.

Like, that must be, to feel that way must be really sad. like how does that actually make you feel and let them emotionally share so it was about grief or lost and it's kind of like oh how do you feel about that? You don't have to tell them it's okay or it'll pass just just leave space for emotion to be and then eventually like when that person has kind of shared

and they're kind of okay like we've talked about this and the emotions are shared then you could say well look what do you want to do about this would you like me to continue just kind of supporting you and just listening or do you want to talk about what we can do to try and fix this. I mean, what would getting better look like to you? Or what would you like to do about the situation?

Like, I would always pose it to the child or the person. Like, what do you want to do to get better? Or what do you want to do about the situation? When they kind of share that, then you can step and go, well, have you thought about this? Maybe we could try this. But always leaving the child in control is very important. Obviously, to a degree, we've got to sit there as like the safe watchers, but it's kind of like allowing them to come to the conclusion that you hope they'll come to in time.

And that must be very difficult as a parent. It must be very difficult. But it feels very important because otherwise it's kind of like the situation or you go home, you tell your parents, you're getting bullied. The mum storms into the school, right, here we go, you know, sleeves rolled up. And what happens, kid will never, ever tell you ever again when there's a problem ever. Like, it happened to me, you know, is I would never ever, then I would never tell them anything because it's the fear that you don't have control of this, that it will be taken out of your hands.

And I think that it's very hard. and I'd be very tempted to storm into school as well but you have to kind of resist that and think right my job here is to be a friend don't fix so on the line of that topic of conversation you talk a lot about mental fitness and obviously we all think about fitness

as being something to do with our body not to do with our brain so should we be applying that same thinking you know going for a walk every morning or going to a gym class to mental fitness as well should it be the same way that we look after of fitness. Yeah, so it's quite interesting. So I guess we, a lot of people kind of understand

this kind of idea of physical fitness. You think of like Joe Wicks exercise and going out for a run, you know, building up, you know, your muscles and in your strength, eating well. All of that kind of, all those connotations are there. But when you talk about things like mental health, it's often the negative side. But mental fitness, of course, is something that we can work on. You know, the word mental health just is a descriptor for your emotional and psychological state well-being. That's all it is. It doesn't tell you whether it's good or bad. We then need to have a further understanding to dig into that. But physical, sorry, mental fitness is the idea that no matter where you are in that spectrum of experience with your mental health, that we can get

you better. And the important thing is here is that if you're struggling with mental illness, yes, of course it's really important to build your mental fitness. And that might include treatment. It might include psychological sport, but it also will include all the kind of holistic parts of your well-being, which are really important. And any good psychiatrist will say that those things are just as important as any intervention that you might include. But also, it's really important for people that are in a good mental space at the moment. So, well, actually, my mental health is fine.

I'm anxious, got no worries. Because you've never known what will happen in life. Like the phone call I got got, you know, saying, my brother died, that's not something you expect, but it's going to plummet you. And just like having physical fitness, a good physical fitness will help you with recovery from an injury, having good mental fitness will help you overcome the inevitable life challenges. No one goes through life, you know, scot-free. You might have, you know, 20 years of your life where it's like get a perfect upbringing, perfect parents, no challenges, great school

life, you will have challenges. It's inevitable. And so having mental fitness allows you to have that capacity for resilience. But it's also about having capacity for joy. I think often in this country we focus on, right, our job is to reduce illness and the health is through the lens illness reduction. But shouldn't we be thinking of health in the way of building prosperity and happiness and joy and capability and opportunity? Like that would be the way I think we should be moving. And the byproduct of doing that is reducing illness. So the more physically fit you are, the more able you are to run around with their kids, to climb a mountain, to live longer, to have fun, to be energetic, but also you're less like to have heart disease, cancer and all these other

problems. In the same way as if you build every child's mental fitness and adults' mental fitness, they'll be happier and more joyous and all these different things, but they'll also be less likely to suffer from depression, for example. So for my view is that you've got to do it hand in hand. And in reality, a lot of the things that are good for your body are good for your mind and vice versa. So you're not going, right, I'm doing this for my physical fitness and this for my brain. In reality, you're doing it for your whole body because your brain's not detached from your body. But we do have to think about mental health when we think about why we're doing things because often otherwise you can end up going to go to the gym to lose weight to look a

certain way rather than thinking I'm going to the gym to feel good, to be energized and improve my mental health. So the why does matter. But in reality, most of those things will help both will help both aspects of your health. That makes so much sense. And you have another book, don't you, coming out in January, am I normal? Which is about how life-changing it was to receive an ADHD Diagnosis, and you've also just mentioned that you had a recent OCD diagnosis, what understanding of past events have those diagnoses brought you? Well, the reason I wrote, Am I Normal, is that I wanted to use the lens of how I was assessed to look at what normality means, and although it's written from perspective of being

diagnosed at ADHD, it's not really an ADHD book in the sense that it's, I think actually it's for everyone, because normality is a crazy thing, and so many things that are normal in this society are not good for us. Often when we think of normal, we think of healthy or normal is good. Normal is how we should be. But so many normal things are really bad for us. The way that we're automatically enrolled into drinking alcohol is normal. The way that we advertise gambling and alcohol during sports matches is seen as normal. You know, it would see some of the highest rates of domestic violence spikes during like European football finals, you know, when everyone's encouraged to drink and all that. You know, there's so many things, and that's just one ass

of what I look into, but there's so many things that are seen as normal that aren't, like the ways of being, like, what is a normal attention? What is a normal way to learn? What is a normal way to live your life in terms of relationships and aspirations? You know, so many things that we do, we do because we're told, not because it's best for us. So I try to kind of use that lens of like, well, what was childhood like? Like, how were you parented? Like, what's your relationship with alcohol and drugs? What's your relationship with friends and family and your health? Like when you look at all these lenses, I found it really, really helpful to kind of question like, yeah, some of these things fine are the outside of the bell curve of normal and these are creating friction points. And when people say, like, when, well, why does it matter?

Well, being outside the normal, quote unquote, doesn't matter if it doesn't cause friction. So, you know, if no friction was caused by my experience with ADHD or the things that are associated with it, I would never get a diagnosis. because it wouldn't I would met why would anyone go and see anyone about it because it's not a problem so it's about the areas in your life that cause kind of friction so yeah I guess you know since being diagnosed three years ago it has been learning and unlearning things that have not been helpful with ADHD so for example alcohol you know managing things like impulsivity working on kind of emotional regulation um all of these things have been kind of important and beneficial and and I guess a lot of that has been trying to work out like yeah how much is me and how much is

the world. And the OCD side of things, you know, I've had a very sensitive person and I've always been very, I always worry about things. And in my children's book, about a day, the first one I said I was a world-class warrior. But it's further that. It's like I can be really obsessive about the things I worry about. And so, you know, again, what's normal? It's normal to reflect, to be conscientious, to think about things and then move on. What isn't normal is, say, thinking about something that you're worried about or a mistake you've made or whatever it is and been stuck with it for seven years

and constantly in this kind of compulsive loop of thinking and thinking and thinking, that isn't normal. So it's actually useful in that lens. You know, one thing, a certain dose and amount is normal, but doing to an extreme isn't. So, yeah, it's been fascinating doing it. It's been really hard book to write, actually. That was by far the most difficult

because it's the most introspective and you touch upon stuff that's quite difficult actually in your own life. Like when you actually look back and you kind of look and you pull the rug and you just lift up everything and go right, what is going on here, you realize like there's so much stuff that it's quite hard and difficult to look at, I guess. I guess it's much more personal, isn't it? You've won lots of hats so far over the years, A&E doctor, Love Islander, the children's mental health advocate, which has been the one where you felt most at home? Definitely not the Love Island one. I think probably being an A&E doctor, I think it's, it's, I, my whole kind of, certainly my kind of early teenage years and onwards on what does it be a doctor?

I got there. I loved being a doctor and I enjoyed working in A&E and like it felt very at home. And there's an ADHD or it was actually heaven really for, for me. It was like, you know, things I can have hyperattention on left, right and center. And I was good at it. I think I was good at that job. And I think that I became the role that I stepped into, everything else has been kind of never being felt inside the comfort zone. I don't have a problem pushing myself outside my comfort zone.

But there is an element where it is nice sometimes to have a bit more kind of sense of comfort within what you're doing. But, you know, I'm very lucky. I enjoy what I do broadly. There's lots of challenges to it. It's not perfect. I think what I've learned is that there's no perfect job. There's nothing that is, you know, Scott-free. There's some negative with anything you do.

be pressures and pros and cons and I'm kind of accepting of that. But I do miss A&E in some ways. I haven't worked in A&E for a couple of years now. Sometimes I do miss it and think, oh, it would be fun to kind of go back and do it again. But equally, I do believe it's quite good. Well, I think it's important in life to move forward. And that chapter's closed and often revisiting a chapter, you just read the same story. So it's time to kind of move forward for me. And I think I'll continue what I'm doing. I'm working on some like kind of business ventures. I'm excited about as well. Like I've done a lot of work in the kind of mental health space the last few years. It's been amazing, but it's extremely exhausting. Four years of like volunteering that role was

really hard and really stressful. And I don't think you can do that forever. You know, so I'm kind of, I'm doing this bit right now, but I also want to make sure that I kind of fulfill my own personal kind of goals and enjoy life along the way, I guess. Finally, Alex, you've said that you didn't necessarily feel at home on Love Island, but will we ever see you on some form of reality TV again? Do you fancy doing something like Strictly or perhaps something a bit more cerebral, celebrity traitors perhaps? Don't, my God.

I don't know. And certainly no dancing. I think that's pretty certain. But I don't know. I kind of like reality TV is its own thing and beast. And, you know, it's, yeah. I think when you do a show like Love Island, I don't think you really feel you need to kind of go back into that again. And yeah, I guess it doesn't really align at the moment with my

goals and the things that I want to do. So I probably, I can't see it happening, but you can't say never. It's impossible to say never, but I doubt it. I think it's the answer. Oh, well, thank you, Alex, for coming to check to us on the Netman's podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure to meet you and lovely to hear what you had to say. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I've enjoyed your company. Don't forget you can get in touch with us on all social channels Instagram, Facebook, TikTok

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