Sam Frost: Taking Responsibility for my Mental Health

In this extract from her new memoir Believe, former Bachelorette and Home and Away star Sam Frost discusses her commitment to mental wellbeing, and the importance of taking responsibility for your own healing.

I have taken responsibility for my mental health. Part of the reason for me talking about it in this book is that I want to encourage others to take care of their mental health too. It’s no different to taking responsibility for your physical health. No one else can go to the gym for you to maintain your fitness (even if you wish they could!) and no one else can do the work to keep you mentally fit. Yes, you can engage professionals to give you guidance but you can’t look to anyone outside of yourself to do that maintenance work.

Maintaining my mental fitness has always been something I’m conscious of and that is because my beautiful mum struggles with mental illness. I’ll be honest and say that looking after my mental health started off as an obsession with the idea that I didn’t want to have the same struggles as she does. Now that I’ve worked with my psychologist and healed that deep fear, I know that one of the most important things you can do as a human being is look after your mental health.

I look after my physical health – I eat well, I’m active. I think we need to look after our minds just as much, if not more. Also I want to be mentally fit when I’m older.

The days that I waste feeling down and out – I don’t want to live my entire life like that. Instead, I want to maintain this commitment to myself to constantly learn, grow and evolve, which primarily is looking after my mental health and healing the things that need to heal.

Of course, there are always people who don’t take responsibility for their physical and mental health and if you are not one of those people, you probably get very annoyed with them, like I do. That’s not to say that I don’t understand that there are reasons why someone may not be able to – or want to, at that point in their life – take responsibility for themselves. Sometimes it’s because they think they don’t deserve to have better physical or mental health, or for reasons that are beyond their control. I can relate to that.

I once worked with someone who was constantly miserable and grumpy and angry. I said to him, ‘Mate, you are a miserable person.’ His response was, ‘Sam, this is who I am.’ And that drove me mad because that attitude affected the entire workplace. My take was ‘you’re deciding this is who you are, so your whole schtick is this miserable, grumpy person who’s angry about everything.’ How exhausting this must be!

But by then I was in a space where other people’s negative energies didn’t affect me, which was very freeing. I felt so liberated and empowered. You can feel the negativity when people like that enter a room. They bring the energy down. Similarly, you can feel when someone enters a room with beautiful energy and lifts the energy of others. That’s the type of person I want to be and I like to think it’s the type of person I am. And that’s because I’m self-aware and I’m conscious of how I’m feeling and how it impacts other people.