Wayne Schwass: 5 things I’ve learned about better mental wellbeing

To celebrate the launch of PukaUp season three – a podcast focusing on authentic conversations around mental health – PukaUp founder and AFL legend, Wayne Schwass, shares some of the mental wellbeing lessons he’s learned along the way.

I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs in my life. Having played some 282 AFL games over close to 15 years, I had it all: wins, losses, joy and failures.

Physically, I was elite. And you need to be physically elite to play a game like footy. But mentally, I was far from it. I lived with depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder for two thirds of my career. And regrettably, I hid these conditions for twelve years. That decision had a huge negative impact on my wellbeing.

You never know what someone else is going through, and success in the professional world – whatever your profession is – is not indicative of feeling like a good, valuable or valued person. It’s so much more complicated than that. Unfortunately, we don’t talk about wellbeing enough as a society – which is why we started PukaUp. We wanted to create a social enterprise that promotes safe spaces for having authentic and genuine conversations about mental health and emotional wellbeing. 

Fortunately, I’ve been able to work through my challenges, develop the confidence, language and toolbox that has allowed me to reclaim my mental health and emotional wellbeing. It’s been an incredible journey of self-discovery and over the past 26 years, I’ve learned the importance and value of looking after wellbeing.

About five years ago, while working in the telecommunications industry as a corporate sales specialist, it dawned on me that the work I was doing wasn’t having a positive impact on other people’s lives. It became apparent that there needed to be a reason, a greater purpose behind what I was doing.

This led to creating PukaUp, which is committed to having that positive impact.

The aim of the podcast is to normalise mental health by having authentic and genuine conversations about wellbeing. At the same time, we want to educate our listeners about wellbeing, and help them develop strategies and techniques that allow them to invest in their mental health and wellbeing.

If we want to help people preventatively, then it’s imperative we do the work upstream. So often we wait until we have an issue before we begin looking for solutions. We believe that if people start investing in their mental health – just like invest in their physical health – then we increase the potential of preventing a mental health condition from developing in the first place. Why wait until we become unwell before we start looking after our wellbeing?

Think about a car: anyone who owns a vehicle knows that they need to take care of it to avoid breakdowns, so they get it serviced regularly. It’s a preventative strategy to maintain the health of our vehicles and to prevent them from breaking down.

The point is, if we see the value and importance in servicing our cars, why do so many of us not see the value and importance in servicing and taking better care of our minds? Looking after our wellbeing needs to be more of a preventative strategy, rather than something we do when we’re already in a crisis.

Our vision at PukaUp is to eliminate suicide. We are committed to educating all Australians about wellbeing and about the tools they can develop to look after their mental health and emotional wellbeing proactively. If we can do that really well and at scale, we believe that we give ourselves the best opportunity of achieving our vision: zero suicides.

Zero suicides might seem like a big goal, but it’s about taking those little steps, every day, to help us get there. To achieve anything big, you need to start small. And this goal is our why, it’s the reason why we exist and it’s what we strive for every single day.

It’s important to develop your own toolbox with techniques and strategies that work for you. What works for one person may not work for another, and that’s OK. Be prepared to experiment, trial, and play around with different strategies to find the ones that work best for you and your personal situation.

The most important and valuable tool I have in my toolbox is my ability to be emotionally connected. In real terms, that means I give myself permission to feel all of the emotions: happiness, joy, love, sadness, vulnerability and despair (and the rest!).

I think for a lot of us, men in particular, crying is associated with weakness. But that’s a fundamentally flawed way of thinking, and it’s causing a lot of stress in people’s lives. Crying is a completely natural response to a stressful experience.

We listen to our body when it tells us we’re hungry, or thirsty, or even scared – and we should listen to it when it tells us that we need to release our emotions, too. That’s what crying is, a release, and the notion of being soft of weak for crying is flawed. Ignoring or supressing emotions risks increasing the amount of stress we’re feeling and, to be blunt, it’s just not worth it.

We need to give ourselves permission to experience and express all of our emotions. Being vulnerable is part of who we are, and there’s strength in accepting that.

Wayne Schwass is an AFL legend and the founder of PukaUp, a social enterprise and podcast that promotes more genuine and honest conversations around mental health and wellbeing.