This was a difficult piece to write but I hope if one person can resonate with the post and feel they too aren’t alone it was worth writing.
What does a full stress container look like for someone who seemingly has everything to be happy about?
Let me talk about it from my perspective, I have a good life, a lovely house, a loving family and good friends – so why do I frequently feel so sad?
Over the last couple of years I’ve started to explore this because I knew my life was a confusing juxtaposition – I love my work with the charity I created and I am very proud of what we are achieving, but when I manage to slow my over active mind, I realise that I am more unhappy than I should be but I struggle to understand why?
Some of you know how hard I can find things, my depression is seasonal and triggered by what some describe as non events. I sort of get a short pre warning of this and I have to try and implement some coping strategies quickly, walking, being outdoors, resting, but there’s still a lot I need to understand around this and why my mind really fights me to implement some of the coping strategies.
Since 2000 I’ve always worked for myself, the nature of my job has meant working all hours, travelling internationally, getting little sleep and probably partying far too much. I was good at my job, but over the years I’ve created a culture of not being able to slow down, I’ve always worked at a rapid pace, so taking breaks and holidays and time for myself has been a little alien. So in my mid 50s is there any wonder why I find myself struggling?
I think my story is probably like a whole bunch of men my age. You reach your goals, have the family, do the holidays and then you are left thinking what now? There comes a sense of emptiness because you’ve achieved your milestones and you selfishly think is this it? I think there comes at this stage a sense of your own mortality and the fact that you’re not getting any younger. I know why so many men suddenly start struggling at this stage because it’s something I feel.
One day you wake up and think ‘where has all the time gone?’ But in your mind you don’t feel any older – I still think I’m in my 30’s! At some point I really need to grow up, but my girls convince me that that will never happen, and what the nice thing about this is they then tell me they don’t want me to 🤣🤣.
When the depression looms large I know I just need to stop and switch off remove the pressure that life puts on you. This can be really hard to do, as your mind is telling you everything will implode if you do this. The tricks your mind plays on you can be very deceitful.
But what’s actually happening here is my stress container is filling up very quickly and it doesn’t take long before it flows over the top, out of control and this is not good. For me this is a dangerous place, the impostor syndrome kicks in, my reasoning is diminished and I’m left feeling vulnerable and very alone, my fuse is lit up and very short. I don’t think straight and no matter what I try to do and whatever support is around me it is really hard to get things under control. The Blacks Clouds are all consuming and not very nice. If anyone else has experienced this pre-warning you will know it is a real sense of impending doom, this is the time where you’ve got to open the tap on the stress container and get some coping strategies moving before things overflow. If you don’t do it quickly enough the claws hidden in the black clouds really sink in.
Simple things for me that work:
Getting a bath or an extra shower
Walking my nature trail and litter picking, when things are bad I can find myself doing this route twice which can be over 9 miles.
Trying to reduce any alcohol consumption.
Trying to drink more water
Managing the desire to consume lots of chocolate, comfort eating really is a big issue for me
Preparing a healthy meal
Resting
Taking some time out and letting people know why
Phoning a friend and just checking in with them.
Telling myself that my mind is playing tricks on me and my thoughts are not facts until they’ve actually happened
Getting out on my motorbike!
I have been very lucky in the sense I’ve had a stable family around me, so I know if I was dealing with this alone things wouldn’t be so pretty.
Through being around incredible people within the Charity have started to understand this situation better. I now know when my stress container is overflowing when I get over emotional at the slightest things. It’s very strange because of the last few years there are lots more tears. I’m not sure this is because I’ve given myself permission to allow this or it’s something more physiological.
So recently I took a week out and switched my phone off. The team agreed to cover my back and guess what things haven’t imploded, the world hasn’t stopped and things carry on as normal.
You will always have a huge amount of emails to pick up when you get back on Monday, but you will also have a little bit more energy to deal with them.
I hope if somebody can read this and realise that they are not alone if they’re feeling something similar depression is really cruel on you as a person and those loved ones around you. It is easy to hit the self-destruct button and cause permanent damage, because your mind encourages this.
I think it is normal to go through ups and downs, but sometimes the downs can be quite extreme.
Find your coping strategies and if things get really bad after implementing these go and see a doctor. This is the bit I’m really finding hard. I know I’m on a journey to become a little more self aware – talking about it can be a big part in understanding the cruel thing we call poor mental health.
But please try to find your tap in your own stress container
It feels like this event has come around really quickly but here we are at the start of the relay riders event.
This is a really big deal for us it’s not only is it a great fundraiser but it also creates great exposure and awareness of our Charity.
I think this is quite a big one as well for relay RIDERS as there are over 400 legs and RIDERS. A logistical nightmare for Jason, Mark and Tom, I don’t know how they do it but it is very well organised.
So we start the leg today at Mablethorpe. Michelle Gardner and her family will take a lead on starting the relay and this will be based around Kibi’s story. Kibby ended her life following excessive and undealt with bullying at school. Something we hear of a great deal of and sadly not been challenged or dealt with effectively by so many schools.
On the bike today we have Buzz Bear and a very special version of Kibi Bear, on the back of Kibi’s T-shirt we have a Mental Health first aid badge. And this is very important as it signifies the support we give to people going through the trauma of losing somebody to suicide.
The start of the day was meeting with Michelle’s family in Louth and riding into Mablethorpe together. It was really special
We arrived at the café on the seafront and there was a lot of bikers there already waiting. It was also a chance to meet with the relay RIDERS team Jason and Tom. We did a quick introduction before our group and everybody together and allowing Michelle to talk through Kiby’s story and giving her a chance to thank everybody for their support. Very emotional. After the short zoom interview for ITV calendar news we were off up to Caistor. This was even more moving because we met the fire crew that dealt with the aftermath of Kiby’s suicide. I had a chat with the station officer and some of the team about that day they told me how hard it was 
Next stop Lincoln Cathedral. Absolutely stunning place
And then the final stop of the day was over to Mansfield where we said goodbye and the relay continued on down south.
Thank you everybody for making the day so memorable.
Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that make you really happy, our new trustee Tom has enabled me to be able to blog from my phone! I’ve been wanting to do this for some while but I just couldn’t get it to work.
The awesome Dragon Back RIDERS Group 
It was really nice to be able to support our new Regional Coordinator Trevor Ward on his first official bike night at Darley Moor.
The weather was really kind to us as it can be quite hairy at Darley Moor and it’s given me and Trevor a few ideas of what we could do to build on this. The first thing we need to do is get Trevor some support to help him with local Derbyshire activities so if you’re wanting to volunteer and give him some support email him Trevor.ward@mhmotorbike.com
There is something very exciting knowing you’ve got a guarenteed 8 hours riding time on your motorbike. I was off to Kent to do a presentation with Mandy Stephens (one of our Trustees) and Bob Cannell (a MHMB volunteer) to the country’s best and most skilled police motorcycle bike instructors. These guys are some of the best and most highly skill instructors in the world and we had an hour in front of them presenting the charity. This was going to be special.
I travelled down the day before and experienced some of the wonderful locations in Kent (Leeds Castle etc.) the weather was wonderful and roads great for the bike. I was looked after by Mandy and Tim and had a great evening with them, thanks for the hospitality and awesome food!!
The following day the weather wasn’t so nice but we arrived earlier and was very lucky to sit in a presentation from BMW exploring the new bikes coming the police’s way – needless to say I can’t talk about this on here but things are getting very interesting with lots of new and very exciting developments.
We did our presentation and it was really well recieved by the instructors and probably 95% of them hadn’t come across us before so being to create an awareness which can then be passed onto their respective forces was invaluable. Over lunch we talked to a number of these officers and started to explore some follow on opportunities.
Partnerships like these are vital in building a positive and more joined up biker community. The police have an incredibly challenging job to do, I cannot ever imagine talking about how my bike is behaving at 120+ mph and they do this whilst frequently chasing people who want to harm them. I have the upmost repsect listening to some of what they do and the complexities of their jobs.
Thank you to Laura and PC Ian Clark for making this opportunity happen and we hope to do more together in the future. A fascinating insight to the crazy world of police biking.
The final part of the day was spent on the skid pan watching these very skilled operators handle a small Honda CRF when the front end went out of control! It was not very nice to watch never mind be on it!
The journey back home I got the inenvitable soaking all the way to Leicestershire and then the sun came out, but what a great couple of days, representing the charity with some awesome people.
We are midway through April 2025. Does anybody else think this year is going exceptionally quick?
I’m struggling to fit everything in to it, important stuff like contacting family, doing DIY jobs on the house, thinking of my own fitness. This blog post is about me recognising where my priorities lie and being proactive in doing something about it.
This week I’ve tried to really focus on doing more stuff around Home and family. And balancing this long days on building the charity.
Our Charity is going really well – this week we have brought on four new trustees, we’ve interviewed new area and Regional coordinators and of the last fortnight we have done over 20 face-to-face events across the whole UK. We’ve written funding applications and we are planning our 5 to 10 year strategy. But with all the positivity comes a sense of sadness losing Leanne from the board of trustees, she has been a very consistent rudder steering the ship through choppy waters, a real stabilising influence and will be greatly missed both professionally and as a friend, though I know she will still be with us whenever we need help.
But in all of this admin stuff what’s more important are the stories from people we are supporting. Our work is very long-term and if we do it right people won’t hear about the impact because we’re preventing something catastrophic. How do we measure what are doing this? How do we prove we’re making a difference?
Let’s look at this differently, if we get our approach wrong it could lead to somebody ending their life and this then has a tsunami effect on average on over 120 people – the impact of a single suicide is devastating.So hearing stories of people we have supported are a tangible way of showing the impact we are having.
Just under a year ago we started working with a family whose wife and daughter came to us at an event (Ride4Life) because dad/husband was too poorly to talk. He couldn’t even turn up at the event to talk to us. We started to hatch a plan with mum and daughter and that was to get dad to another event a few weeks later. This was Motorcycle Live. I remember sitting with the whole family in our welfare van at a very busy show and they just talked openly and honestly about Dad’s situation, he remained very quiet and to a certain degree embarrassed, sat there broken and hurting. When we asked Dad/husbandwhat was going on? for the first time he properly talked about how he felt and how poor mental health was affecting him. I think it surprised Mum and daughter because they weren’t expecting it to flood out in this way, but it did and we then knew what we was dealing with.
For over an hour our team sat in the welfare van and we created an action plan of support which would run over the next few months. This involved an eight week mindfulness course that we paid for, it also involved our peer support group and getting him talking on there with others. It also involved Mum and daughter checking in and being open up with him. This was a proper premiership team effort.
With this level of support he didn’t have a great deal of reason not to engage. The good news was he did the mindfulness training and he found it very useful, he worked with mum and daughter and he used the Support around him. Months on he is a different person and he has a lot to thank the people around him for, he wrote a series of beautiful messages talking about how important this support was. He’s now very open and says that things weren’t looking good for him 12 months ago and that he potentially might not have been with us without the support.
When you are depressed and feeling at rock bottom, experiencing poor Mental Health and all the challenges this throws at you, you don’trecognise the pain you cause the loved ones around you (I am talking from personal experience here). Like the person we supported I have been in this place, but through the love of friends and familyI’ve gotten through it (for now – it never goes away).
The person we supported is back, present as a friend as a father as a husband. And this was due to lots of people working together as a team to fight his poor Mental Health. I cannot stress how important this Charity has been to so many. This is what we do and this is what we do well.
I am very proud of the team that made this happen but this is just one story of many. One story of how an unfunded grassroots charity is making a difference. We need your support and we need your belief that everybody is important and poor mental health sometimes leads to poor judgement calls and bad decisions. Try to get underneath this, don’t be judgmental- recognise poor mental health doesn’t always bring out the nice side of a person and help us break the stigma around talking about it, then we can helpfix a few other families so that they can move forward and be more productive around their own family friends, neighbours and colleagues.
I suppose the point in sharing this is it helped me understand my own poor mental health and what I need to do to fix myself. I’m walking more, I’m engaging with the beautiful nature around me which I really enjoy, I’m choosing to spend time with people I like and not those that are toxic, I’m switching the news and social media off and try not to become angry by world situations that I cannot change. I’m thankful for each day that I have where I’m not suffering. I’m also trying to be a better father, husband, son and friend. Life is hard and it is flying by. Finding the balance can be challenging.
All I would say is enjoy the moment don’t take life for granted and don’t waste the opportunity you have to make a difference to others. I have found i am much happier doing this than I ever have beensearching for financial wealth and status and power.
Seize the moment and be the change maker. Be the person who makes a difference to yourself and others around you. With the right team we can change things.
It was dry and having followed the weather forecast at the start of the week believe me this was a bonus.
My journey started at 5am and I was very excited to be heading out on the bike. What I wasn’t prepared for was the temperature 4 degrees! Freezing!!! Fortunately my Keis heated jacket and bar grips were cranked up to full and the fun began! The first 45 mins I was alone on the roads as I went past Chatsworth, Sparrowpit and towards Manchester in record time. Eventually arriving in Bolton a pit stop at McDonalds for a cuppa tea.
Made good time at I arrived for the first time in Milnthorpe at the Lakland Wildlife Oasis. This is a little gold nugget hidden away in the south of the Lake District. please visit it is awesome.
I met Leon and Ruth who made me feel very much a home and I got a very nice coffee. The team started to arrive and the day had officially started and guess what it was still dry!!
I love meeting the MHMB gang, lots of laughs, hugs and stories they are very special! At 11am about 60 bikes left for an amazing ride out in the Lakes. I stayed behing with a few of the team and this was when Loz arrived looking very worried “where is everyone, has no one turned up?” he said… lol he had obviously come a different way in from the 60 bikes clogging up the roads in the other direction!
Loved the day – start of a very special relationship at this venue – I cant wait to come back!
Well done Janet and well done the the wider team supporting her. Watch this space for some more stories.
Click on the tour below to see a 360 view of this event…
