Episode 133: Welcome back to Real Health Radio. Today’s guest interview is with Ollie Aplin.
Ollie is designer with over 10 years experience, working for clients like Jamie Oliver, the BBC and Channel 4 amongst others. He’s also an ambassador for men’s mental health. He spent the first 18 years of his life dealing with his mother’s mental health issues. And this was followed by his own mental breakdown in his early 20s. But it was this breakdown that lead Ollie into therapy and exposed him to the power of journaling. And 10 years on he created MindJournal, the world’s first guided journal created just for men.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 133 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/133.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey, all. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Real Health Radio. This week, once again, it’s another guest episode, and this time on the show I’m chatting with Ollie Aplin.
Ollie is a designer with over 10 years’ experience working with clients like Jamie Oliver, the BBC, and Channel 4, amongst others. He’s also an ambassador for men’s mental health, and he spent the first 18 years of his life dealing with his mother’s mental health issues. This was then followed by his own mental breakdown in his early twenties. But it was this breakdown that led Ollie into therapy and exposed him to the power of journaling. 10 years on, he created Mind Journal, which is the world’s first guided journal created just for men.
I first became aware of Ollie a while ago, when he appeared on Laura Thomas’s podcast. I listened to that episode and was really floored by his story. This episode is ostensibly about the power of journaling, but there’s a whole lot of backstory to get to that point. Ollie talks about his childhood, growing up with little money and a mother who suffered from bipolar.
Ollie is very open about the struggles as part of this – and I should give some warnings up front: we talk about suicide attempts, death, grieving the loss of a loved one, drug-taking, mental breakdowns. So this is by no means a light episode. But it’s through all this that Ollie is led to journaling and sees the real transformation in his life as part of this. This is something that completely resonated with me because while Ollie’s book is targeted at men and most of my clients are women, I use journaling with nearly all of them. Journaling is probably the single best tool that I have for helping clients to explore their feelings and belief and to help them deal with the psychological side of what’s going on in their life.
I’m typically pretty good at following my own advice, although I’d say that the two areas that this isn’t true is meditating and journaling. These are suggestions that I make with nearly all clients but then regularly fail to do myself. I’m changing this, though. I’ve been using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app for meditation, and this has been really, really helpful. Previously, my recommendation was always Headspace, but Waking Up for me is even better. This has been helping me, and even though I am far from a daily meditator, I am doing it much more frequently than I was.
The second area is journaling. This is down to Ollie. I got a copy of Mind Journal in what I thought would be useful preparation for the interview, to see what was included as part of the book, to help when I’m putting together questions, etc. But I’ve started using the book, and I’m finding it really useful. I’m definitely okay with writing down what’s in my head and getting my emotions out on paper, so I don’t have that fear of the blank page that Ollie talks about and that many people do. But having the journal with all its prompts does make it much easier to get started and to be consistent. So Ollie has definitely helped me to start journaling.
As part of the show, we dive into journaling and some of the benefits that Ollie has got from it and some of the benefits more generally, and also touching on why Ollie created something that was specifically for men.
This is one of my favourite guest episodes, and it’s one that I would love you to share. I really do believe that what Ollie is doing is something that’s needed and is hugely important. If you know anyone that would benefit, please either share this episode or share his site, mindjournals.com, where you can get the journal and find out a lot more about him as well.
Without further preamble, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Ollie Aplin.
Hey, Ollie. Thanks for joining me today on the podcast.
Ollie Aplin: Hi, Chris. Thank you very much for inviting me on.
Chris Sandel: You are the creator of Mind Journal, a journal that is aimed at men, which helps men to get into journal writing, and probably from a bigger picture perspective helping to support men’s mental health. Part of the conversation today, I want to go through journal writing and your book, which I have a copy of and I’ve been using. But I think where would be a good place to start is with your story, because it’s really through your life and your experiences that led you to find journaling yourself. To start with, do you want to just explain who you are and what you do? We can start with the present and then we can move our discussion back to your earlier life.
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Ollie Aplin: Yeah, that’s fine. I’m actually the co-creator of Mind Journal. It’s something that me and my other half have been working on since 2015. I think that’s when the idea popped into my head of creating a journal that was a guided journal to help people that’d never written in a journal before.
On the side of running Mind Journal, we also have a design agency that we run. We’re both designers. It was kind of born out of a need and a necessity to do something that felt a little bit more wholesome, that had a bit more purpose to it other than just doing the day-to-day freelance, corporate design work that we’d been doing.
And it’s just taken over, essentially. It’s consumed our lives and opened up conversations that we never thought we were ever going to have, and opportunities. It’s just really grabbed people. So now it’s just been a case of keeping the movement that we’ve created alive, and how we keep the conversation going and how we keep helping more and more guys get into journaling.
Chris Sandel: Let’s then start with how you got into journaling. If we go back to the start, where did you grow up?
Ollie Aplin: I’m from Hastings, which is along the south coast. It’s quite a rough town. It gets a bit of bad press, if you like, with the drug issues there and the crime rate and stuff like that.
Chris Sandel: Has that changed? I know there’s places like Margate that have had a change in the demographic or the people living there. Has Hastings had that gentrification come through?
Ollie Aplin: It’s trying to. I think it’s one of those seaside towns that’s always been trying to shake the stigma that it’s got about itself. Anyone who’s lived in their hometown will tell you that it’s not a nice place to live or “I’m glad I got out of there” whereas people from the outside go “Oh, it looks really nice. It looks really picturesque. I went there for the day and it was really amazing.” But you have a different experience from growing up there as a kid and hanging around on the streets and also having the kind of childhood that I had there, which was quite intense. It just gives a lot of heaviness for me in terms of my view on the town.
But no, I think it is a lovely town and there are amazing people there, and it is trying to do good things. It’s just another one of those seaside towns that’s trying to do its thing as best it can.
Chris Sandel: Sure. Then tell us about your childhood. What do you remember from growing up and being young in Hastings?
Ollie Aplin: I grew up with just my mum and my older sister. She’s about seven years older than me. I think when I was about five, my parents – we were living in Margate at the time, another seaside town that’s had some issues; I seem to like going on tour of all the seaside towns. They split up in Margate, and my mum had family in Hastings, so it made sense for her to come back to Hastings and bring us with her.
Growing up, it was very much Mum’s back was up against the wall. We didn’t have any money, and things ere just hard. Things were hard for her and they were hard for us, and it was hard to see her struggling to find jobs and work and get money and feed us and keep us going.
Chris Sandel: I think sometimes when you’re a kid, you’re just “This is all I know so this feels normal.” Did it feel normal, or was there a realisation of “This is really difficult; Mum is really struggling here or we are really struggling here”?
Ollie Aplin: I was so young. I was only five or six or something like that, so I think there was an element where I was a bit more robust to it. As a child, you can adapt a bit more easily because you don’t know things in that much detail, and also your parents are shielding you from the truth as much as possible. So I think there was a sense in me which was this is maybe a little bit more of an adventure. I don’t ever remember feeling scared or confused. But these are real early stages of my life, so I don’t have that much memory of my emotional state at that time.
I just remember these snapshots of times when, looking back now, I can see it and go, God, that was extreme. That was crazy. There was a time when me and my sister were dancing to Top of the Pops, I think it was – just a normal thing you do as a kid – and there was a biker gang who lived in the flat downstairs, and they came up and started shouting through the window at us to stop dancing. These really aggressive, big guys. I remember screaming at my mum, “There’s someone shouting through the window!”
This probably signifies the kind of woman my mum was. She, without hesitation, just ran out into the street to confront this biker gang and told them that if they ever shouted at us again, she would effing kill them. From that point on, they completely respected her and we could dance as much as we liked. She was 5’2”, this tiny woman, and she’s shouting at a group of biker gangs. I think that was probably my memory of thinking, “My mum is actually quite scary.” [laughs] “I don’t want to mess with her.”
But that’s who she was. That was her personality, which was “Don’t touch my kids.” She was just very feisty and very – yeah, scary. [laughs]
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Chris Sandel: Then how did things progress from there? I know as part of your story, your mum was diagnosed with bipolar. At what stage did that actually happen?
Ollie Aplin: That was years later. There were plenty of episodes in the house that were, looking back, not normal – behaviour that was extreme and very upsetting at the time. Lots of different scenarios of drinking and lots of shouting and moments of depression in her and paranoia. There was a kind of court battle going on through the divorce and who we were going to live with, me and my sister, so that was taking a strain on her.
But it was only until I think my sister left home, so it was just me and my mum – and obviously, at that age – I was probably about 12 or 13, I think, when my sister left home, maybe a bit younger. So I was starting to become my own person at that age. I was heading towards becoming a teenager, and I was in the last years of my primary school heading towards secondary school. Because of the way life was, I was quite independent. I was quite a confident kid. I had to be. I had to be able to stand on my own two feet and look after myself.
I think there was a shift that I can see now, which was my mum’s role was changing, essentially. She was no longer having to fight the world to protect us. My sister had left home, and it wouldn’t be long before I was going to be thinking about leaving home or making plans of my own. I think that’s when the depression and the drinking got more intense. As the years went on, through my early teens until my mid-teens around 15-ish, was when I was like, “I don’t think Mum is quite well.”
I think around that time she got diagnosed with manic depression. That’s what they called it then. She was on various medication to try and balance the highs with the lows. I almost took on the role of a carer to either try to keep her balanced and keep her not too depressed and not slip into a really dark place, and also if she was on a high, try to manage that and ride that wave.
They were probably the tough years where I think her mental health significantly went downhill. We struggled for a bit.
Chris Sandel: How was it when your sister moved out? Do you remember that being a real struggle and thinking “Oh my God, I’m now being left to deal with this on my own”? Or were you more oblivious to it? What are your thoughts around that?
Ollie Aplin: My whole growing up from when my parents split up, to my sister leaving home, to my dad moving to Tenerife at pretty much the same time – so he stopped being a weekend dad to a some holidays only kind of dad – I think the way I’d learnt to survive these things that were happening around me was to just become a rock, essentially. Not allow it to get into me, to not affect me, to just accept it and keep moving forwards.
“I can’t change it, I can’t do anything about it; there’s no point in me getting into a state about it. I’m not going to get emotional about it. I’m not going to tell Mum that I’m upset because that’ll upset her, which could trigger an episode. I just have to remain neutral and come across that I’m okay with everything, I’m okay with Dad leaving, I’m okay with my sister leaving home, I’m okay with Mum drinking and having an outburst. This is normal.” I would just tell myself that this is how life is.
It didn’t ever go any deeper, and I think that was just a natural, instinctive coping mechanism that evolved from maybe that first early moment, which was them splitting up. I naturally just clicked into survival mode, which was lockdown – emotional lockdown and communication lockdown. Don’t talk about it to anyone, don’t share this information with anyone, don’t show any emotion, remain calm. That was the coping strategy.
Chris Sandel: Did your sister adopt a similar strategy, or did you guys chat about it or did she want to be chatting about it with you?
Ollie Aplin: No, not really. Again, I think we had both created this coping strategy which was to not talk about it.
But we were also trained by our mum to not talk about it. Through the court battle and the divorce, she didn’t want any information of what was going on at home, the realities of how we were struggling to be fed, to my dad as ammunition, if you like, as information that he could use against her. That meant that you couldn’t talk about it to your friends, you can’t talk about it to the teachers, you can’t talk about it to anyone. You can’t share this information with anyone. And that was from pretty much Day 1.
From that first moment that we left Margate and we were in Hastings, it was very much a case of you don’t talk about this stuff. You don’t talk about what’s going on at home. And if you can’t talk about anything, you can’t really relate to it on an emotional level. You can’t allow yourself to feel it because you’ve denied yourself the ability to talk about it to anyone else. Which meant we also couldn’t talk about it to her. We couldn’t share with her how not talking was making us feel or how the biker gang downstairs made us feel or how any of the other situations that were going on at any point were making us feel.
When my dad decided to leave for Tenerife and he asked me, “Are you okay with this?”, I was like “Yeah, I’m fine.” That was my instinctive – I’d been trained to not tell him that I wasn’t fine with him going to Tenerife because, again, I’d been trained, if you like, and taught not to. That all seemed normal. “Dad’s going to Tenerife and sister’s leaving home and Mum’s drinking. Okay, cool. I’m going to start secondary school and things are tough there, but this is just the way it is. Just accept it.”
Chris Sandel: Sure. How did your teenage years pan out as part of that?
Ollie Aplin: [laughs] Not brilliantly, I don’t think. I was lucky enough to find an amazing group of friends that all had other things going on at home that were similar to what I was experiencing, and we had all also been trained not to talk about it. So there was this kind of agreement between us that we all knew what we were experiencing even though none of us actually knew what we were all experiencing.
That kind of connection allowed us to have an outlet. We could just have fun. We could have banter and crack jokes and party and drink and smoke and take drugs, knowing that we were all in this together. We were all trying to survive as best we could, and we were all just looking for that escape. That was the outlet.
Through the really tough years with Mum when she was trying to take her own life quite a lot and she was really slipping into quite a dark place, I didn’t have a system around me to know how to deal with that, how to care for someone like that, what to do. My friends and the drug-taking really ramped up and became my support zone, if you like.
Chris Sandel: When your mum got that diagnosis for bipolar or manic depression and there was finally an explanation around it, were there any support groups, or was there anything that could help her? I don’t know what was available in the NHS, etc., but could she get some outside help?
Ollie Aplin: She did. I think there was a couple of suicide attempts where they flagged her as a risk, where she had to be sectioned for about a week. That meant she then had to have a weekly check-in to a support group, and if she didn’t check in, they knew there was a problem. So that made her have to become a bit accountable for her actions, a bit more than just me. She had to make sure she was at this place at this time and there for the day. I think it was a day centre thing she was part of.
But it also meant that if she didn’t go, they would stop her benefits. So there was an element of “In order to keep us fed and the rent paid, I have to go to this place and tell them.” She was very paranoid in that she didn’t really think there was much of a problem with her and that actually the danger was all these other people. She kind of saw it as “To keep them happy, I have to go to this place, and if I keep them happy they continue the support for us.”
I think there was an element where she didn’t entirely believe that she was as severely ill as she was. Again, it wasn’t something that we could talk about together and that I could share with her and go, “No, I think you really are” because I didn’t know. I wasn’t supported in any way through the system in terms of 16-, 17-year-old living with a bipolar mum. No one was helping me to understand her condition. I was just seeing it first-hand. I didn’t have any training to know how to deal with a mentally ill person.
So I think because I was in the household and was sometimes agreeing with her, it didn’t help her think that she did have a problem, because I didn’t know how to communicate with her and I also didn’t know how to deal with the situation.
This was back in the early 2000s, and things have come a long way, but back then, again, in a small seaside town, small budgets and everything else, there just wasn’t the right understanding, the right knowledge, the right funding and everything else to help people in that situation – help us, essentially. It was just a case of everyone doing the best they thought they could, and that wasn’t good enough, for me or for my mum.
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Chris Sandel: This all came to a pretty sad ending, which I would love for you to be able to talk about and explain.
Ollie Aplin: I always look back at it and think – I’d just got with my first girlfriend, so I was probably 18, something like that, and I’d just started my third year at college, which was almost like my first year at uni, part of a Higher National Diploma course. I’d got accepted into the university system. I had money in my pocket, which meant that she didn’t have to worry about me financially, because once you turn 18, the money stops and some tax credit stuff stops. She was always worried about money. That was just her thing forever. She’d always been worried about money.
So there was this element where she could see that I was okay. I had a good group of friends, I had this girlfriend, I was on my own mission of becoming a designer, which I’d been wanting to do since I was like 14. She knew I was fine. She didn’t have to worry about me. She didn’t have to look after me. I think in her eyes, she looked at that situation and thought, “My job is done. What am I doing here? I don’t need to fight for him anymore.” My sister had her own son and her own life going on and everything else. We were both independent of her.
There was a row we had where she knew that I would never leave her, because I wouldn’t, and I would never leave the home and buy my own place because I’d always be worrying about her. So she threw me out. She was like, “The only way you’re going to leave is if I throw you out.” I came back from my work and all my stuff was on the street. She’s like, “You’re not coming in. I’ve changed the locks. Go out and find your own place to live. Get out.”
That was my mum’s way of dealing with things. It was almost like ripping the plaster off. Make a decision, it’s final, that’s it. There’s no conversation to be had. There’s no discussion. I was like, “Right, okay. Deal with this moment.” Found my own place because I had the money to do so and everything else.
Then she came round – it was quite a big argument that we’d had because I was really annoyed about being thrown out, obviously. She went on a trip with this day care place that she had to check into. They did a trip to Cornwall or they did something or other. She came back from this trip, and I’d finally found a place and I said, “You should come round and have a look, have a cup of tea and let’s have a hug and make up.” So she came round and checked the place out.
I think it was about a week after that, she took her own life. And because I wasn’t home, because I wasn’t there, I couldn’t save her. Usually I would’ve come back and found her in half-dead state and phoned the emergency services, and she would’ve got saved and everything else, and we would’ve continued to the next episode. I feel like that was her plan all along – to let me be free and to free herself, if you like. Just to go, “My work here is done. There’s no more that I can do. I’m just holding him back. Let him get a place and I’ll make sure he’s safe and well, and then I’m going to call it a day.”
I just found out through – one of the guys at this day centre place knew where I worked. He came in and said, “Your mum hasn’t turned up.” That’s when all the system flags up and goes, “There’s an issue here. She hasn’t checked in.” I didn’t have keys to get in because she’d changed the locks, obviously, so I couldn’t get in there. The police had to break down the door, and that’s when they found her and told me the news.
Chris Sandel: How did that affect you? What did the next little while look like, and what did the next couple of years look like after that?
Ollie Aplin: There was that initial shock, obviously, and devastation and complete meltdown. I was in a state of “I don’t know what I’m going to do in this situation.” I always knew it was going to come. It was never an ‘if’ in my head about it; it was always a ‘when’. I was always prepared mentally for this situation. Or at least I thought I was prepared. But when reality actually happens, you realise how unprepared you actually are.
I remember I thought I needed to phone my dad. I phoned my sister and told my sister, and she reacted the same way as I did – that initial shock and then very matter of fact, like “What do we do next? What’s the procedure here? Where’s the book that tells you the steps you need to take?” kind of thing. Because I didn’t know what to do, in that moment, it just made sense to ring my dad. He didn’t know anything. Ever since we’d left Margate, he had no idea of anything that was going on at home.
So I rang him and told him in this very frank, blunt way of what had just happened. He was in Herne Bay at the time. He was back from Tenerife, and he jumped in his car and drove straight down.
From that point, literally from that day when he turned up and the news was out, “this is what life has been like for the last 10 years” or whatever, I just went into a little black hole of nothingness. I remember snippets of things, but I completely switched off. I have no memory of things around that time. I have snippets of scattering her ashes, a snippet of the funeral. I have no idea what I did for the month afterwards. Apparently I wasn’t at work. I don’t know what I would’ve done.
I remember when I was chatting to people about it, they kept saying to me, “But you seem so okay. You seem so fine.” I think it was because I didn’t know how to be in this situation. I’d always known how to remain neutral, so I was neutral. I was emotionless about the situation. I think I was lost in the sense of I didn’t know what you’re meant to do. I think that was what I kept thinking. “What am I meant to do?”
I was like, “Well, I need to carry on. I need to get back to uni, I need to get back to college and stick to the mission.” The mission was to become a designer. The mission was to become super successful. “I’m not going to let this stop me. Mum wouldn’t. So let’s crack on.” I told everyone, “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. We’re going to move forwards.” And I did. I blocked it all out and went back and cracked on for two years until I graduated.
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Chris Sandel: And then at some point that stopped working.
Ollie Aplin: Yeah. That plan didn’t – I mean, it worked in the sense that I graduated and got a really good job and I could afford things, and I bought myself a car and all the things I’d had in my head as goals. That was the point to it all.
When I finally reached the top of that mountain, if you like, I just went pop. I had this breakdown. I had this panic attack one night where I woke up in this sense of fear, like no amount of fear I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s almost like I was on a treadmill that was at full speed and I’m trying to find the reason I’m afraid. It wasn’t like I was running away from something on the treadmill; it was like I’m scrambling through my mind to find the fear. What the hell am I so afraid of? Where’s this fear?
Chris Sandel: You can swear if you want to. [laughs]
Ollie Aplin: Can I? Yeah, okay. That was like I was out of control. That was this out-of-control moment where I couldn’t latch onto a thought, I couldn’t latch onto a feeling. I couldn’t ground myself in anything. I was just free-falling through every emotion you could ever imagine. Every thought and memory was racing at a million miles an hour. I literally thought I’d gone insane. I thought I’d lost the plot. I thought, “That’s it. I’ve broken. It’s all got too much and I’ve finally gone pop.”
This went on for months. I think it was three months or something like that that this went on for, when I didn’t really sleep, I didn’t eat, I didn’t go in to work, I didn’t really socialise. I don’t even think I left the house. I was having mild hallucinations of things, like I’d be in the shower and the water would be blood, so I’d think I had blood on my hands. Then I thought I’d cut myself and I thought I was trying to kill myself. It would only be like three or four seconds, but it would feel so long. It was just agonising.
Chris Sandel: Given your mum’s history with bipolar, was there a fear, “This is now happening to me”?
Ollie Aplin: Yeah, that’s what I thought. “Oh, this is how Mum must’ve felt. This is what it was like for her. I’m her son, and I’ve inherited it. She must’ve got to this age in her life and that’s maybe when she started feeling like this, and she managed to get used to it. Maybe you just have to get used to this feeling.”
It never calmed. That was the thing. It never calmed and it never really made sense, apart from I thought – and not once did I think about taking my own life. That never entered my head. It was just complete lostness. It was “They’re going to take me away, they’re going to put me in a hospital, they’re probably going to drug me. I’ll be like this forever.”
Chris Sandel: Did that feeling then make you think, “I don’t want to reach out to people, I don’t want to tell them” because of the fear of what comes next?
Ollie Aplin: No, I just didn’t know what to do. There was no plan. My girlfriend at the time didn’t know how to deal with that situation. She’d never been around anyone who’d gone through anything like what I’d been through, and then was experiencing. I don’t know how she found it, I don’t know where she found it, but she came home and she had this leaflet. It was like a suicide bereavement pamphlet group therapy thing. I was like, “I’m not going to that. I can’t talk about this stuff. I can’t talk about what’s going on.”
But I don’t think it was that that she was trying to show me. It was when I turned the leaflet over, and on the back it had this list of symptoms of what someone who has lost someone to suicide could feel, what they could experience. I read this list and it’s like a checklist of symptoms for me, and I’m hitting every single one. I was like, “This is what I’ve got. This is my condition. This is what’s happened.” It was like a reality moment.
It’s the first point in those months of despair that it all quietened a bit and I was a bit grounded in that I could connect what I was feeling to a factual thing. Everything else before that, I didn’t have any sense of reality to what I was experiencing. I didn’t know why or what or anything, whereas this leaflet, this list of what you feel, made complete sense. It said at the bottom, “Come to the group, and if you can’t make it to the group, there are other supports that you can do. There’s private counselling, go to your doctor.”
So I was like, yeah, I’m going to go and find a counsellor and get some help. That’s when the next chapter all made sense, which was “Here’s a list that has a list of symptoms of what I feel, and here’s a solution to fix them. You ring this person, you go in, and they help you get out of this state.” I just saw it as that’s what I’m meant to do.
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Chris Sandel: Did you get lucky in terms of the first counsellor you sat down with, you really gelled with and it really worked? Or you had to go through a number of different people to find someone that worked for you?
Ollie Aplin: I remember seeing this woman – she got recommended to us from someone I can’t remember. But she got recommended to me and my sister when we first lost Mum. I think it must’ve been about a month later. We went in and we told her what happened, we were very factual. I remember we were laughing a lot because I think it was the first time me and my sister had been in a room together and described to someone else, who had no idea what we’d gone through, and together we had described our childhood, like how fucking mental it was.
Because we were saying it out loud, we were laughing. We must’ve looked like complete maniacs. We were laughing about all these insane things that had happened, and because it sounded so strange, it sounded so weird to say them out loud, we thought it was hilarious. Like, “Did this really happen?” It just felt comical.
Then Penny, the counsellor, was like, “I think you guys could really benefit from having a chat. Do you want to book another appointment?” We were like, “No. What are you, nuts? I don’t want to talk about this stuff again. We thought we had to come along and just tell you, and then you would say something else. But no, we don’t want to pay for this. We don’t want to come and talk about it again. It’s fine.”
Then two years later, I still had the number, and I rung her and I was like, “Yeah, I think I really could do with coming to see you.” She said, “Yeah, I thought at some point you would be. I was always expecting your call.” That’s what she said. “I was always expecting your call.”
Chris Sandel: Probably earlier than two years, I would imagine.
Ollie Aplin: [laughs] She was probably thinking that. I was lucky in the sense that I gelled with her from that first session because she didn’t say anything. She had no reaction to what we were talking about. I remember thinking, that’s weird. She’s not reacting like we’re reacting. She’s not laughing, but she’s also not shocked. She’s nothing. She’s just listening.
There was one person I think I tried to see when I was at my final year of uni. I kept getting these really bad headaches, like really severe, so painful. I went to doctors and said, “I’ve got these headaches.” They said, “Try all these drugs.” I tried all these drugs. Didn’t work. Then they went, “It sounds like it’s more psychological. Have you thought about seeing a therapist?” I was like, “Not really, but if that’s what’s going to make the headaches go away, let’s go for it.”
I had to wait months to see this guy. Sat down in the doctor’s surgery, essentially, but just another room that had a counsellor in it, and he wanted to know everything. This was before the breakdown, and obviously I wasn’t ready then. I was still in this protective, ‘I’m fine’ script that I was still autopiloting and running through. I just kept saying, “I just want you to take the headaches away.” He was like, “Let’s do some breathing exercises.” I was like, “Breathing’s not going to help. Do something, do whatever you do.”
I was so arrogant and ignorant. I just wanted it to be quick. I didn’t want to put the work in. I just wanted a result there and then. He was trying to do breathing exercises and all this kind of stuff and I was like, “That’s not working” and didn’t go back. Then another year later I had the breakdown and I’m in Penny’s room, having my first counselling session. I was like, okay, she’s not getting me to do breathing exercises. She’s not getting me to do some weird thing. She just wants to know what’s happened.
I gave her the facts. I remember the session was I just gave her the facts and she wrote them down like a snapshot, like milestones of events. Then she asked me this bizarre question, which was “How does that all make you feel?” I said, “I don’t know what you’re on about. I just told you what happened.”
We had this block moment where she was like, “You must feel something,” and I literally couldn’t – I thought she was speaking Russian or something. I couldn’t understand what she meant. That was the point where she was like, “Okay, we need to go right back to the beginning of teaching you how to connect with your emotions and how to essentially list how you feel, describe how you feel, and then share those feelings verbally in a conversation.”
00:45:48
Chris Sandel: Was that then the start of journaling?
Ollie Aplin: Yeah, that was that moment. I couldn’t talk. I literally couldn’t talk. I couldn’t talk because of fear. I was never afraid of Mum hearing the facts because I knew Mum would know the facts. What Mum would never know was how those facts were making me feel. That was what I was most afraid about talking about, because I was afraid of Mum hearing how I felt and that upsetting her.
Me and Mum could talk about the facts all the time. “Mum, you cut yourself last night” or “Yesterday you tried hanging yourself.” They were facts. I didn’t have to describe to her how her doing that made me feel. I was very good at talking about the facts.
So then having to talk about those feelings, there was a sense of betraying Mum, which was quite a big thing. Also, I just didn’t have the vocabulary. I didn’t know how to say the words.
So she said, “I think you could really benefit from writing them down instead.” She gave me this list on an A4 paper of loads of feelings and emotions, and she said, “Go away, get a blank notebook, and circle the ones that you think you feel at any point that you go to write. Then if you can, at the end of listing them – all you’ve got to do is list them. Rewrite them down in a list on a blank page and then ask yourself, ‘Why do I think I feel this way?’ Anything at all. Just one word, one sentence, doesn’t matter. That’s a start. If you can bring that back to our next session, we can use that as a starting point to begin the journey of you being able to just feel an emotion and describe it.”
That was the beginning. The journaling and the counselling at the same time was my way of learning to communicate, to be able to talk about not just the facts, but how those facts made me feel.
Chris Sandel: I get the impression it probably was quite slow to start with in terms of the journaling, but did you have a moment where the floodgates opened and it poured out? Or it never really happened like that for you?
Ollie Aplin: It didn’t take long at all. I’m a quick learner, and I think there was an element of me where I had 15 years’ worth of emotions and thoughts and feelings and everything else to get out.
I think for me, as well, writing worked perfectly because I’ve always been good at writing. At school, I was pretty poor at everything else, but English I naturally excelled in. I always liked writing and reading. I grew up listening to rap music, which is a lot of writing in the sense of they’re poets and they’re saying a lot of words and describing how they feel and everything else. Funny enough, I used to write little rhymes and poems when I was in my mid-teens, which ironically worked like my first journal entries without me really realising it. I never kept them; I would just burn them or bin them in case Mum would find them and saw that I was rhyming about something a bit personal.
But I never connected the dots at that point. I never realised that was actually a bit of therapeutic writing for me. So when it came to actually doing it in a journal and Penny taught me how to use this feelings list and connect on an emotional level, then I was going through pages and pages and pages. I’d be there in my bedroom for hours, till my hand got numb.
That taught me – well, it didn’t necessarily teach me; it gave me the confidence to then go and talk. It was like a training ground. It was like I was going to the gym and I was learning how to do this thing so that I could do it in the real world. When someone would ask me how I was feeling, I wouldn’t just say to them, “Yeah, I’m okay.” I could say, “No, I’m feeling crap because…” and then describe the feelings and why.
It meant that I had the confidence then to go into our counselling sessions and talk even more honestly about what I was feeling and what I wanted and what happened, what I could do with that experience and everything else. I could have conversations with my dad and tell him everything that had happened and how it made me feel, how him leaving to go to Tenerife actually made me feel, what that did to me.
From that, it was like a tap had opened, but it also was like everything got a bit calmer. I could breath and I could sleep. I was having better relationships with people because I was able to connect with them better. I’d always had an amazing relationship with my dad, but I was able to share with him what had happened at home with Mum and how it made me feel, but also what he was doing and his actions and how they made me feel. It meant he could understand himself better and he could start to learn how to connect his emotions and share those with me, which he had never done before. So our relationship got even stronger and better.
It was from that initial piece of paper, teaching me how to connect with the most basic of human emotions, and then learning how to translate that and relate it to another human being was an incredible moment for me.
Chris Sandel: Since then, is journaling a constant for you? Or is it something you go through in fits and bursts and you forget about it, and then life gets on top of you again and you pick it up again? What’s it like for you?
Ollie Aplin: Journaling for me now – and predominantly has been since that time in counselling in 2008 – has been one of many things I do to look after myself. From that moment, I knew there were things I needed to do that helped with my anxiety, helped with my panic attacks, helped with my stress, helped with me sleeping better. I started exercising more. I would start running. I would keep journaling. I stopped taking drugs.
All these different things I started to move towards and have been practicing up until today to find a system of things that helped me stay happy and anxiety-free and everything else. Journaling is not something I do habitually every day; it’s just one of those things that might be part of my routine for the week. I’ll meditate at one point, I’ll definitely hit the gym two or three times, I’ll definitely journal once. I might go and see my counsellor. There’s probably about seven things I have.
In my head, I say to myself if I do at least one of these seven things a day, that means I’ve done seven things in that week to look after myself. They’re just all in my toolkit of things I do to keep myself grounded and balanced and healthy – and stable, I suppose. [laughs]
00:54:15
Chris Sandel: When did the idea come for creating what now is Mind Journal? Obviously journaling has helped you, so when did that translate into “maybe I need to be getting other people into this”? Was there a particular incident that sparked it?
Ollie Aplin: It was a chat with a friend of mine who was going through a bad spell. I said to him, “You should try to keep a journal. Just write down how you feel, see what happens. If you don’t like it or if you’re worried about someone reading it, bin it, burn it, get rid of it. Doesn’t matter, it’s gone.”
He came back to me a couple of days later and he said, “No, I just can’t get my head round it. Where do you start? I’ve got a blank notebook. Went to Paperchase, got a really nice pen. Sat down and just could not think about where you start. There’s a million things in your head. Where do you start with that?” I can completely relate to that feeling of there’s so much. Everything in our heads and in our lives is a mixture of thoughts and feelings, and it’s hard to dissect the two sometimes and go, “I’m going to list down everything I’m thinking or I’m just going to list down everything I’m feeling.”
Being a creative person and a designer and always coming up with ideas – I’m always trying to think of a new way to do this or a new way to do that or a new idea for a product or a new idea for that – I had this light bulb moment, like “I know what that feels like. I even to this day struggle to know where to start. Why don’t I create a system that helps people to start?”
Every time you come to write, even if you’re a pro journaler and you’ve been in it for years, every one of us still has that freeze moment where we see the blank page. What if there was a little thing in there that was like a little Penny from my counselling, her guidance, that just said “How do you feel? Let’s start there and tap into some feelings and tick them off and just get the ball rolling and warm yourself up a little bit.”
That was the light bulb moment of thinking, why don’t I try a guided journal system for my mate and also for myself? If I can create something that I would use, even after journaling for 10 years, then other people would use it too.
Then it evolved through lots of testing and lots of research. I’m a designer, so there was a lot of design challenges we were facing in terms of who we are as a brand, who we’re talking to, who’s our audience, who I feel comfortable actually sharing my journaling experience with. We were working with this amazing psychology professor called Karen Pine. I knew of her and her work; I got in touch with her and explained to her what I was doing, and she became a bit of a mentor and a consultant for us.
She asked me this amazing question. She said, “Who do you feel comfortable talking to most in your life?” I’d never really thought about that much before, but I’d always felt more comfortable talking to guys than I have talking to women. I think that comes from me not wanting to share stuff with my mum in case it would upset her and she would do something. I’ve never had a relationship with my sister – not until more recently, probably – where we can both talk more emotionally about things that have happened. And in my relationships, I’ve always wanted to be the strong man who’s fine and who can look after everyone and is okay and resilient.
Whereas with my mates, growing up, we all knew we were all struggling and we were all trying to survive in our own ways. There was no shame in not being okay one day. I remember one mate of mine, when my mum was hospitalised for the first time on her first suicide attempt, I told him. I said, “Mate, can I stay t your house tonight? Mum’s in hospital. She’s just tried taking her life. I need a place to stay. I can’t stay at home.” He was like “Mate, it’s cool. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Crash at mine.” There was no judging from when I told this to him. There was no shock. It was just, “Yeah, totally.” He understood that that was normal, almost. It wasn’t extreme for him to hear that because he had also experienced extreme things.
From that point on, I think I’ve always felt comfortable talking to guys about my vulnerabilities or my fears or my anxieties because I’ve had that group of friends. Then when I learned to talk about it to my dad and he was cool about being more emotional with me, that’s when Mind Journal became a real clear guy-focused brand, because I could see it and go, I want to talk to guys; I feel comfortable talking to guys, and I want guys to know that whatever they’re going through is just as okay as what I’ve experienced myself. There’s no shame about it. There’s no anything about it. It’s just okay with what you’re experiencing.
That’s when we thought, okay, why don’t we do it for guys and see if guys like the idea of keeping a journal?
Chris Sandel: It’s not that you’re saying that men and women don’t suffer with mental health issues or that life’s hard, but it’s obviously just picking something that is specifically aimed at a target audience so that you can create something that is more appealing, but also does more work for that one niche.
Ollie Aplin: Yeah. It was something I felt more comfortable doing. If I had created it and presented it as a neutral thing for both men and women, I felt that I would have to reflect that in the brand. I would have to change the way I spoke. I’m probably wrong, but it was just how I felt. For the first time, I was going to go out into the world and not just share it with my friends and my family about what had happened; I was going to speak about this to complete random people. I was going to put a video up on Kickstarter and I was going to share this with everyone who’s ever worked with me, ever known me, or doesn’t know me, and I was going to tell them about everything that’s ever happened to me.
That sense of vulnerability and pure fear – I mean, I was terrified about doing it – I just felt more comfortable knowing that the people that were going to be listening to it predominantly were going to be guys. I felt safer, I suppose, in that room that I felt I was presenting it to. I don’t know why. It just was the way that I felt like I had to do it. It felt like the natural way of doing it for me.
01:02:10
Chris Sandel: How was the Kickstarter process? What were your expectations going into it? Were you confident you’d meet the targets?
Ollie Aplin: No. [laughs] My mission at the beginning – me and my partner Natasha, sat down and were like, what’s the goal here? What’s the mission objective? We were like, our friend had this issue. We recommended journaling. It wasn’t for him. If we can create something that helps someone like him to keep a journal – so mission objective is help one guy. Change one guy’s life through being able to keep a journal who’s never kept a journal before, or who’s wanted to but has struggled to or whatever. It was the power of one. That was our thinking.
We didn’t really think we were going to get funded. We were asking for quite a lot of money. I think we were asking something like 17,500 pounds in funding because I wanted it to be a premium product. I wanted it to be of good quality. At that point in time we didn’t really know what we were doing in terms of manufacturing. We still had a lot to learn in that sense.
So no, we went into it with very low expectations, and no real sense of reality of what this was going to be perceived to be like or any of its potential, really.
When it launched, for me it turned everything a bit upside down in my head. I wasn’t expecting so many guys to need it so badly. And from me sharing what happened to me, for that to inspire other guys that I had no idea who they were to share their darkest days and their toughest experiences, it was like a moment of – I was never really alone growing up with everything that I was going through. I knew that with my close group of friends, and I just thought I was lucky. I think from having my story go out there and for other guys to see it, it was almost like they were included in my group of mates and we were all groups of mates from all over the place that were all connected, and we all knew each other and understood each other.
It was very emotional. It was a very emotional moment for me to go, I was never alone, and I’ll never feel alone in that way again, and so none of these guys, because now I’ve done something where we can all feel connected. It was amazing. It was incredible.
Chris Sandel: Was it like three or four days that you met the target?
Ollie Aplin: Yeah, we managed to get some amazing press from some really cool blogs in the States and in the UK. In three days we got our funding target met, which was a strange feeling. Then it just kept going, and I was like, when does this stop? What do we do now? [laughs] This wasn’t meant to happen. It got to the end of the 25 days and we did something like 45,000 pounds in funding. It was something like 1,500 backers or something ridiculous. We were originally going to print 500 copies, and it meant that we could print 1,500 copies. We knew we were going to help 1,500 guys, and the target was one. [laughs] It was like, we only wanted to help one and we helped 1,500. How does this work?
All the comments kept pouring in, and all the appreciation for what we were doing. That then led to us getting a book deal. We went through this whole mad – again, it was another moment of just “What is happening?” We had a book agent get in touch who wanted to help us to then get a book deal. I hadn’t really thought about it, but thought, yeah, if that reaches more guys, if that gets us into the hands of more guys and helps them to keep a journal, let’s do it.
Then we secured a deal with Random House and got a book out last May – which was even more messed up because the publishers announced to me about a month before the published date when it was going to be available – I had no control over it; I didn’t know when it was going to be released – they phoned me and said, “We’ve finally found a date that we’re going to launch the book. It’s going to be on the 4th of May.”
I froze, because the 4th of May is my mum’s birthday. It was like everything that had ever happened to me, everything I’d ever experienced, the whole story, if you like, has been for this reason. It’s almost like giving it more purpose. There was a reason behind it all, and the reason was I was meant to do this. I was meant to experience everything I’ve experienced because I was meant to create this thing, because I was meant to help people.
I’ve always felt like that. I’ve always enjoyed helping people and I’ve always wanted to help people, and I’ve never known how to. I feel like finally I’ve found my thing. I’ve found the thing that I’m meant to give to the world, if you like, to help just one guy. If it helps one guy like me that’s out there that doesn’t know how to talk about whatever he’s going through, then job done. That’s amazing.
01:09:07
Chris Sandel: As I said at the beginning, I’ve got the journal and I started using it. I’ve read through the whole thing even though I haven’t done all of the exercises. I think there’s like 30 exercises throughout it. Reading through them, it seems to shed light on all the potential highlights that someone can be having in their life or the struggles someone can have. It almost feels like all the areas that a therapist would explore, but in journal form. Is that how you think about it? That if someone doesn’t want to go to therapy or isn’t ready at that stage, they can be doing it in written form with the help of this book?
Ollie Aplin: Yeah, totally. That was the hope. That was the objective, to say, if we’re going to have a framework and it’s going to be a guided system that’s going to help someone journal, why do they want to journal in the first place? Where are they at in their lives? What do they want to achieve or accomplish or what are they not entirely happy with?
I looked at myself in the sense of all the different things I’ve experienced and have tried to resolve. I’ve probably seen three or four different counsellors over the years, so I have had a lot of experience of different practices of how therapy works and different styles, from CBT to person-centred therapy. So I took that and we took the work that Professor Karen Pine has done and her research.
I always wanted to create it for any guy in any situation, whether they were top of the world, loving life, but just wanted to feel a bit more grounded, or they had a new goal or new objective that they wanted to hit, or for a guy who was rock bottom, really vulnerable, really struggling and needed to help himself get out of the hole he felt that he was in. So it’s always been designed to be open and accessible to all guys.
It’s blown my mind in terms of what guys have used it. We’ve had straight guys, gay guys, top execs to guys that are struggling with income and everything else that were like, “I need to get this thing to help me in my situation.” We’ve had guys in the LGBT community. We had a transgender guy that was using it to work out what kind of man he wanted to become post-operation.
I think that one is the one that touched me the most, because as a designer you always have a brief, if you like. You’re creating this like “This thing’s going to solve this problem for this person.” I would never have imagined the Mind Journal to be accepted so widely, by such a variety of different guys. That for me was the one that I was like, yeah, that’s the really amazing one.
And it continues that. We still get messages now from all these different guys that are using the 30-day – we call it 30-day, but you can use it how quickly or slowly you like. But the idea is you at first use the programme one response every day to build up the habit. But they’ve been using the programme and getting amazing results from it.
Chris Sandel: Ollie, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your story and for also creating Mind Journal. It is an incredible book, and what you’re doing and helping men getting into journaling – I think it’s such a benefit.
Ollie Aplin: Thank you very much.
Chris Sandel: Thanks for coming on. Before I let you go, where should people head to find out either more about you or more about the book?
Ollie Aplin: The best place is probably the website, because the story is up there on the blog, how it all started in more detail. You can actually see the product for real, the journal itself. Our video is up there from our Kickstarter, which is quite interesting. Just head to mindjournals.com. There’s tons of links up there and all the information that you need.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put those links in the show notes. Thank you once again for coming on the show. This is great, and I know that it’s going to help a lot of people.
Ollie Aplin: Brilliant. Thank you very much for the time and for the opportunity.
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