Keep moving.

I want to start with the part I'm least proud of, because everything else in this piece grew out of it.

There was a stretch at university when my life came apart quietly, one piece at a time. My sleep went first, then my diet. I was going through a breakup, I stopped feeling like myself, and somewhere in the middle of it my mental health reached the lowest point it has ever been. There were days, more than one in a row, when I didn't get out of bed. The laptop stayed closed. Messages went unanswered. For someone everyone thought of as driven, I was doing nothing at all, and I knew it.

Then my brother rang. He didn't ask how I was feeling or tell me it would be fine. He said six words, and I've never forgotten them.

I'll be honest: my first thought was that he had no idea what he was talking about. My second, about a minute later, was that he was completely right. I've spent my whole life becoming the person I am today. In the gym, in my academics, in building businesses, in learning the things I'm passionate about, in making people laugh, in holding on to the values I believe in. Everything I've done that's in any way impressive, every achievement I'm proud of, came from that. I'm not an average person. And I wasn't going to let one bad stretch, or anyone in it, have that much control over my life, not when I still had so much more to prove. I got out of bed that day, and I haven't let myself stay down like that since.

What follows is how I think now. It isn't clever, and none of it is new. It's just what actually worked when I needed it most.

If you're in a dark place right nowPlease don't try to carry it alone. Asking for help is not weakness. In the UK you can talk to Samaritans for free, any time, on 116 123, or find support through Mind at mind.org.uk. Your GP is a good place to start too.

01Keep moving

If you only take one thing from this, take the line from Finding Nemo: just keep swimming. I know how that sounds. It's a children's film, and I'm quoting a fish. But I genuinely believe it's the most important idea I've ever learnt, and I've watched it play out in my own life at every scale, from a wasted evening to the worst months I've had.

The smallest version

Think about the moment you get home from the gym. You've done the hard part, you're a bit tired, and your bed is right there. So you lie down, pick up your phone and start scrolling, and before you've noticed, it's eleven o'clock, your evening has disappeared, and you somehow feel worse than if you'd never trained at all.

Now picture the other version of that same evening. You walk in, go straight to the shower, cook something decent, and then sit down and get a bit more work done. Same person, same tiredness at the door, and yet you go to bed feeling completely different about yourself.

The biggest version

The same thing happens when life hits you properly. A breakup, a rejection, a job you lose, a result that doesn't go your way: each one gives you the option to stay exactly where you are and replay it. I know how tempting that is, because I've done it. But stillness after a blow never stays still for long. It turns into a spiral, and the spiral only goes one way.

What pulls you out isn't some huge, dramatic comeback. It's motion, however small. One application a day. One session at the gym. One thing ticked off. Some days that's all you'll manage, and that's fine, because one per cent forward is still forward, and a hundred of those days put you somewhere you couldn't have imagined from the bottom.

One bad day is allowed

Everyone has down days, and I'm not going to pretend I don't. The day itself isn't what hurts you. What hurts you is the second one, and then the third, until a bad day has quietly become a bad week and your momentum has gone with it.

So I have a simple rule now: if today goes badly, tomorrow is a recovery day. It doesn't need to be my best day. It just needs to put me back in motion, so that the bad day stays a bad day and never becomes something bigger.

Why I'm obsessed with self-improvement

People sometimes assume my obsession with getting better comes from ambition. If I'm honest, it started with something less flattering: a fear of missing out. For years that fear was mostly social. Then, at some point, it turned into something far more useful, a nagging sense that whenever I'm sitting still, someone else is moving ahead. Nobody uses every single hour they're given. There's always a bit more you could do, and I've stopped seeing that as pressure. I see it as possibility.

But the real reason I love it is how it makes me feel. In the gym I can feel myself getting stronger. When I push myself into social situations that make me uncomfortable, I can feel myself adapting. When I'm building something, I have a reason to wake up, something to work towards, and a quiet proof that I'm useful. It gives me purpose and it gives me direction.

And this is why it matters so much when things go wrong. I think of self-improvement as a rope stretched out in front of you. You will fall off it at some point; everyone does. But as long as the rope is there, you can reach out, grab hold, and pull yourself back up, slowly, hand over hand, until one day you realise you're standing on it again. Without a direction, there's nothing to grab. With one, falling is never the end of the story.

02Control what you can, let the rest go

When I was at my lowest, almost everything I was worrying about was something I couldn't change. What had already happened. What other people might be thinking. What might happen next. I gave hours to those thoughts, and every one of those hours was taken from the things that were actually in my hands: when I slept, what I ate, whether I trained, whether I did the work.

Once I saw that clearly, I couldn't unsee it. Your energy is limited, and you get to choose where it goes.

The exam is happening either way

Take an exam. It's going to happen whether you feel ready or not. You can't control which questions come up, how hard everyone else found it, or what your friends are saying about it in the group chat the night before. What you can control is when you started revising, how many hours you put in, and how well you slept that week.

Everything in the first list is where the stress lives. Everything in the second is where the results come from. The shift is simply to stop pouring yourself into the first and give all of it to the second.

Stress is only useful if it helps you perform

A little pressure can sharpen you, and that kind is worth having. Past that point, though, stress is a pointless thing. It costs you sleep, it costs you focus, and it gives you nothing back.

When I was honest with myself, most of the stress I felt before a deadline was really the feeling of being underprepared, and no amount of worrying on the night ever fixed that. Starting earlier did. And on the occasions when I hadn't prepared, that was on me, and stressing about it wasn't going to change the outcome. All that was left was to do the most I could with the time I had and do it differently next time.

03Realistic, not blindly positive

This is the part of my mindset I care about most, and the part people get most wrong.

When something goes badly, most people reach for one of two reactions. The first is blind positivity: everything happens for a reason, better days are coming, I'm fine. That's a mask, and a mask never holds for long. The second is pessimism: this always happens to me, so what's the point? That one feels honest, but it quietly talks you out of trying again before you've even started.

They look like opposites, but they make the same mistake. Neither one actually looks at what happened. One paints over it and the other gives up on it. What I do is neither. I look straight at what's in front of me, exactly as it is, and then I decide what it's going to become. That's reframing. It doesn't change what happened. It changes what happens next.

First, call it what it is

Something has happened to you. You've been rejected. You've lost someone you love. Your business plan isn't working, something you thought would last has ended, or you've trained for months and you still aren't getting any better. Before anything else, see it clearly and say it plainly. This is a bad part of my life. This is pain. It's a human feeling, and you're allowed to feel every bit of it.

But it's temporary. Not because someone promised you better days, but because no pain, however heavy it feels right now, stays the same forever. So don't bury it, and don't pretend it isn't there; it always finds its way back. Feel it fully, and then make it work for you.

Then get clinical

Once you've let yourself feel it, treat it like a problem to solve. What isn't going well? Why did this happen? How do I move through it, and how do I make sure I never end up here again? That's the one thing pain gives you that nothing else can. You've lived it now, so you know exactly what to look out for next time.

Then choose where the energy goes

Now you've got two options, and only two. You can dwell on it. Or you can take the energy it's left you with and point it somewhere.

Take a rejection. It's easy to tell yourself it wasn't meant to be. I think that's one of the worst things you can say to yourself, because it could have been, and it hands your life over to fate, which you'll never control. The honest version is much simpler, and much more useful: I didn't get that one. So my energy goes somewhere else now. There will be something else, maybe something better, and I'm free to work harder for it than I could have before.

That's exactly what happened to me. That whole rough period, as painful as it was, left me with a huge amount of emotional energy and nowhere to put it. So I put it into a personal training business and into making honest content about discipline, because I wanted other people to feel what five years of training had given me. The hardest months of my life turned into one of the most useful things I've ever done.

An equivalent exchange

The way I see it, everything you lose is an exchange. Every rejection, every ending, every loss is the universe taking something off you so that you can put your energy into something else.

Sometimes it's a better exchange. And sometimes, honestly, it's worse, and I won't pretend otherwise. You might be pushed in a direction that, right now, looks like a step down. But it's still a direction, and a direction is something you can move in. Never take that for granted.

Then you've got nothing to lose

This is the part I wish someone had told me years ago.

Every setback you come through becomes proof that you can come through the next one. Once you've been genuinely knocked down and got back up, the smaller rejections lose their grip. A business that turns down your product, a university that says no, a role that goes to someone else: it still stings, but you already know that feeling, and you know you'll get through it. The second time never hurts as much as the first.

Be proud of that. Once you're no longer afraid of falling, nothing is stopping you from putting your whole heart into everything you do. And every time you come back, you come back a little stronger, until the knocks that used to floor you barely move you at all.

04Earn it, then own it

Confidence is something you build. You can't talk yourself into it, and you can't borrow it from other people's opinions of you.

You can't fake the identity

For a long time, I had a reputation I hadn't fully earned. People knew me as busy, as the one with a new idea every week, as productive, and I let that become who I thought I was. But a label isn't evidence, and deep down I knew the difference. On the days when nothing got done, that reputation felt less like a compliment and more like a costume.

Telling yourself you're capable only gets you so far, because some part of you is always keeping score. What actually builds belief is doing the thing, over and over, until the record speaks for itself. You have to achieve first to prove to yourself that you can achieve; it isn't an identity you can fake into existence. The gym taught me that. I knew I could commit to something difficult because I had, for five years, not because I'd ever said it out loud.

And once you've earned it, never play it down

The other half of this matters just as much, and it's the half most people get wrong. When you've done the work and got the result, own it.

So many people do the opposite. They hit something they've worked towards for months and immediately move the goalposts, or put it down to luck, or wave it away before anyone else can. Don't. If you've got the credentials, you've earned the right to believe in yourself, and nobody, however confident they sound, gets to tell you otherwise.

Do it for yourself

There's a quieter trap in all of this. It's easy to spend years chasing things because of how they'll look to other people: the grades, the offers, the right names on a CV. None of that is bad. But when life gets hard, and it will, what keeps you going is a purpose that is genuinely yours. Do things for your own growth, your own health and your own happiness, not so that other people can see that you did them.

And please, stop comparing yourself to everyone around you. You never see the whole of someone else's life. They might look like they're flying from the outside while dealing with things you'll never know about. Everyone started from a different line, and everyone moves at a different pace. In the end, the only thing that matters is how much ground you make in the life you've been given, and how you choose to live it.

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