Fearne Cotton: ‘How To Find Resilience In Lockdown? Get Quiet’

I’m wary of the celebrity mental health scene. On one hand: good on them, for destigmatising mental health issues, tearing down the myth that a glossy-seeming existence guarantees happiness. On the other: are they the best entrée to a deeper consideration of our own mental health?

There have been times over the last – what? Five? – years, when mental health has become a hot topic, when the ‘opening up’ by this or that celebrity began to seem as predictable and unconvincing a manoeuvre as the ‘showmances’ of the early noughties. Were they really doing it for the greater good – or as an exercise in brand curation?

I’d probably have dismissed the whole lot of them, if it weren’t for Fearne Cotton (oh, and also ex Little Mix’s Jesy Nelson, but that’s another interview). When Fearne ‘does’ mental health, I believe her. After walking, in 2015, from the gig of a lifetime on Radio 1 because she realised her mind couldn’t take it, the 39-year-old broadcaster devoted the intervening years to sorting out her own troubled mental health; and used it as the basis for Happy Place, a website and podcast dedicated to further exploring it. It’s hard to doubt Fearne really means it.

It also makes sense I interview her now, at a time when my own mental health is ropier than it’s ever been. Pre-Covid, I’d had no idea I was capable of feeling things I routinely feel now: the constant anxiety, the waves of self-doubt, the pointless, poisonous self-criticism. But here I am: as f**ked up as the next woman.

I Zoom Fearne on Blue Monday – 18 January, officially the grimmest day of the year, even when we’re not second-waving it through darkest midwinter. The context for our interview is not merely my shaky mental state; it’s that of the whole of Britain in lockdown three in general. Restriction fatigue, ennui, fear, economic challenges, ever-changing parameters on when – if ! – this will ever end... A recent Ipsos Mori poll concluded that six in 10 Britons are finding it far harder to stay positive during this lockdown, rates of depression are doubling, Zoom has perpetuated both social anxiety and our physical insecurities, and no one really knows what to do with themselves.

‘It’s just a constant, undulating roller- coaster ride,’ Fearne says, ‘feeling all right and then not feeling all right, and then feeling really good, and then feeling really awful, and that could all happen within an hour!’ I tell her that’s one of the things that’s surprising me most, the rapid changes in feelings, and the sheer quantity of them.

‘It’s mad! It’s bonkers! The main thing I’m looking at: well, why am I feeling like that? Like with home-schooling. Every time I come up to my stepson’s bedroom – that I’m in now, which I’ve turned into an office and a studio – there’s a slight panic that I’m not down there with them [her son Rex, seven, and daughter Honey, five] controlling everything, and not quite managing it all. Why? Why can I not just let go, and let my perfectly capable husband [musician Jesse Wood; Fearne is stepmum to his son Arthur, 19, and daughter Lola, 15] take charge?’

She looks great, regardless of inner turmoil, shiny and sensibly, terribly pretty; there’s something about her that’s always reminded me of the fairy at the top of the Christmas tree. I ask her how she’s feeling. ‘Good!’ she says, which I assume is because her new book, Speak Your Truth, entered The Sunday Times’ best-sellers list at number three the day before – but apparently not.

‘I did this game-changing podcast last week with Rhonda Byrne, who wrote The Secret, which I read a thousand years ago, like I’m sure everybody has, but, like a flick of a switch after that podcast, I just felt better.’

I actually haven’t read The Secret – the 2006 publishing phenomenon about manifesting your destiny – and, I ain’t gonna lie, it’s the sort of concept that turned me off the self-help movement. It seems too easy and nebulous. At the same time, Fearne is lit up with excitement – and hell! I’d like a bit of that. ‘She said so many potent things.’

Top three? ‘OK. So the headlines are, Polly, every single negative thought in your head is a lie. You can’t argue that one. The second would be, we are not human beings, being aware: we are awareness, having the experience of being a human being. That for me is a good perspective shifter of: oh yeah! I think all of this...’ she indicates her body, ‘...and my brain, is everything; no! This is just the vessel I’m wobbling around in. And the other really cool one was that our base emotion, the home we come back to, is happiness.’

I find myself caught in that idea of happiness as an emotional base – because it’s lovely and because, at my saddest, I feel the opposite: that misery is my inevitable point of return. But what if, as Fearne says, that negative thought is a lie?

She interrupts my contemplations by saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about anger quite a lot. It can be a default emotion for me,’ which amazes me. I can accept that such a sunny-seeming, professionally upbeat broadcaster hid eating disorders, panic attacks and depressive episodes from the wider world – all of which Fearne did, until recently – but anger? ‘Oh, I can be ferociously angry about things,’ she tells me.

Fearne’s history with mental health issues is long and historic. ‘Depression runs on my mother’s side.’ Her grandmother was evacuated during the Second World War. ‘She lost her sister at seven and had my mum at 18, when she was [still] a child, and mentally so scarred. And my mum still deals with depression. Dips in and out of it. She and I talk about it a lot more since I had my own big, big dip’ (in her late-twenties, early-thirties: ‘I’m never too specific about circumstantially what was going on, but I had a really shit time and felt utterly bleak.’)

Fearne’s ‘big, big dip’ happened at the point her career – which had taken her from children’s TV presenter, aged 15, up to a primetime Radio 1 slot – was peaking. This might seem counter-intuitive but, I dunno. I’ve always suspected fame is incredibly hard on mental health. It plays to so many unhelpful impulses: the need for external validation, the appearance of happiness to the detriment of the experience of it, transactional relationships.

Fearne wholeheartedly agrees. ‘I’m not sat here complaining. I love my job, this is merely one downside to it that, you know, I can deal with, I have dealt with... But what I do want to do is articulate that [fame] equals nothing.’ Nothing good, anyway.

It left her overwhelmed by the negative comments, consumed by the idea she was about to be sacked, rejected, replaced, and: ‘Pretty, pretty low. Just bleakness. I’m not gonna be able to work, I’m not gonna feel joy again, I’m never gonna have the feeling of just peace, without there being panic that something awful’s gonna happen. And shame! I don’t want to feel shame ever again.’

So, she quit, ‘got some medication’, started ‘looking at how I wanted to live’. And now? ‘It’s been 10 years of digging around really deeply, and... I hate it when the story is linear, and: oh and now I’m better! Who knows what’s going to happen in the future? But in this moment, right now, I’m feeling pretty excited and optimistic and useful! Feeling useful is such an underestimated thing to lust after. But: I feel useful! I would rather feel useful than be famous, or useful than successful.’

Is that the key for circumnavigating the lockdown blues, I wonder... ‘You’ve got to get really quiet. When we’re feeling really, really strong, that strength isn’t coming from other people

cheerleading us, it isn’t coming from other people saying, “You’re great, you’re on the right path.” Real, real inner resilience comes from us knowing that we’re gonna be OK no matter what. And the only way you can tap into that is by getting really quiet and shutting out a lot of the outside noise. You can cultivate that quiet in the bespoke way that suits you, whether it’s meditating, walking, waking up and just, you know, tapping into what you know is true.

‘Wellness, or whatever you want to call it, can feel very prescribed,’ she reflects, ‘it’s been commodified and it’s been regurgitated, and actually it’s just doing something that makes you feel good, it’s no more complicated than that. You don’t have to buy a yoga mat, you don’t have to buy some sort of vagina-misting machine...’ You don’t? ‘Unless it makes you feel good! But no. Go for a walk, sit under a tree, paint a picture. Just get really quiet.’
We say goodbye, and who knows if it’s just the (now, so rare) experience of talking to someone new, but I feel a little chirpier than I have in a while. Which is nice.

‘Speak Your Truth’ (£16.99, Orion) is out now. The Happy Place returns in February.

If you or someone you know is struggling with a mental health concern, find support near you, via wheresyourheadat.org

Photographer: Rosaline Shahnavaz

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