"I was keeping all my worries to myself"

Covid seriously affected Chris Waller’s mental health. Five years on he’s using his experiences to help other men.

“I remember saying to my manager that I really wasn’t feeling well. I asked him to listen to the recording of the Financial Health Check I’d just done and he said ‘Yeah, you’ve repeated a whole part of the conversation you were having.’ I was stunned. I had no idea.”

When a similar situation happened at home, Chris realised he needed to get help. “I was on the floor of the shed at home fixing a bench, when my other half came in. I remember her asking me, ‘Can you get up?’ She said: ‘I’ve been trying to talk to you and you just keep repeating yourself. You look like you’re having a heart attack, let’s get you inside.’

“I had no real recollection of what was going on,” says Chris. “It seemed bizarre at the time, but it makes more sense to me now. I was actually having a massive anxiety attack.”

It was during lockdown in 2020 that Chris began to struggle. “It felt like it came out of nowhere,” he says. “Looking back, I can see I was worrying about working in the branch during the pandemic, when we were meant to be staying away from people. There was a lot of change at work, and I was worried about my job and my financial situation. We had bills and a mortgage to pay, and I was keeping all those worries to myself. It got to the point that I was feeling suicidal.”

Chris finally reached crisis point while he was at work on a Monday morning. “I called the GP, and I couldn’t even get the words out of my mouth. I just broke down on the phone. She was brilliant. She sent me a message with a sick note and told me I needed to go home immediately and call her back. So that’s what I did.”

Chris’ GP arranged for him to have six sessions of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) but one of the things Chris found most beneficial, was something he stumbled upon almost by accident.

“Around the same time, I also reconnected with an old friend from college,” he explains. “When I told him what was going on, he became really upset. He told me he’d tried to take his own life a couple of months earlier.

“He was living in a different town and it was lockdown, so we couldn’t meet up, but we arranged to video call while we both went out for a walk the next day.”

It was to be the start of a daily routine that would see the pair walking and talking for hours. “We called each other every day for a month,” says Chris. “We must have covered so many miles just walking and talking. It really helped. And that was the beginning of ‘We Power On’ really.”

A conversation with his partner got Chris thinking about how many other men might be going through a similar situation. “I decided I wanted to do something to help other people, so my partner designed a little flyer with an invite for people to join me to ‘walk and talk’ on Sunday mornings. We got them printed and I went round all the libraries, business parks and shops – anywhere I could think of really – and told them what I was doing and why. Everyone agreed to display it.”

For the next two months Chris went to the same meeting point, at the same time every Sunday before starting his walk. But no-one turned up.

“I thought, ‘I’m not going to give up.’ I stuck with it, turning up every single Sunday in the same spot,” says Chris.

“Then one person turned up and I thought, ‘Oh my days, I’ve done it!’ The next week two more people joined us. And as the weeks went on, more and more and more people turned up. People were messaging me on Instagram and we even got a website up and running explaining what we were doing.”

“It became part of my own therapy, turning up every single Sunday at 10am and meeting people just like myself who wanted to talk and get something off their chest. A lot of guys were struggling. They were lonely, worried about their finances or grieving.

“A lot of them couldn’t talk to their family because although they knew something was wrong, they just couldn’t put their finger on what it was. A lot of the time they just wanted to talk rubbish – it was more about feeling a sense of connection with someone else. That’s when they’d then start talking about the deeper issues.”

Keen to be able to offer more support. Chris completed a Mental Health First Aider course and even gained a counselling qualification.

“Doing that training really helped me to process what was going on with myself too. And I realised that what I was doing at work during a Financial Health Check was exactly the same. You’d have people coming in worried about their finances, and you’d be supporting them through active listening, and discussing goals to work towards. It’s exactly the same with counselling, so the skills are transferable.”

Recently, Chris’s work with the ‘We Power On’ walking group received external recognition when he won the Bravery Award at the BBC Make a Difference Awards.

“What an amazing thing that was!” he says. “I was almost embarrassed. You don’t really put any value into what you’re doing until someone says ‘you saved my life.’ It’s incredible to be able to make a difference for other people who are feeling so low and hopeless.”

“It’s helped me too. I’m feeling really good now. I’m in a much better position both mentally and physically. I’m in a really good place, and I’m just glad I’ve been able to help give other people a bit of hope too.”

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