‘Men are under pressure like never before’ – Bear Grylls on the male mental health crisis

“The last time I cried? Last night watching the movie Maestro,” he said. “I cry a lot and I cry more as I’ve gotten older.”

In fact, Grylls (49) says crying is cathartic and every man should do it.

“If men weren’t designed to cry, we wouldn’t have tear ducts. Nature and the Good Lord don’t give us many things that don’t have a purpose. We have tear ducts, so we are meant to cry,” he said.

Grylls, it turns out, is a big advocate of letting it all out.

“You’ve got to let emotions flow. If you don’t, they build up. Nature tells us this. If you dam a river the water builds up, it gets stagnant and eventually it bursts its banks and causes damage and destruction,” said Grylls.

He recounts that on the first date with his wife Shara, they went to watch Titanic, which left him a blubbering wreck.

Grylls is talking about emotions because he is a man on a mission. Having conquered the world’s highest peak, trekked Antarctica, rowed the Atlantic and paddled down the Thames naked in a bathtub, he is tackling his biggest challenge yet, the male mental health crisis.

The English adventurer, author and motivational speaker is co-founder of Mettle, a mental fitness app developed especially for men. Mettle is backed with £2.5m seed funding by angel investors and aims to address a significant gap in the market for wellness apps for men. It provides a mental health toolkit, giving users assistance with meditation, mind-hacking breath-work and hypnosis.

The app and Grylls’s involvement is timely. Men are not doing so well, especially middle-aged men. According to a 2019 report by mental health charity MIND, 43 pc of men surveyed admitted to regularly feeling low or worried and 10pc said they have had suicidal thoughts.

Men were more likely than women to drink alone or take recreational drugs to relax when feeling worried or down. The male rate of suicide in Ireland is almost three times that of women, according to the Samaritans.

“We are under pressure like never before,” said Grylls. “Men are still often the breadwinners, they are trying to do their best as husbands, partners and fathers. There is the cost-of-living crisis, there is concern about the climate, there is more anxiety and more change and more pressure. Social media adds to that, because now you must be perfect.”

Grylls has three sons aged 14, 17 and 20. He worries about the pressures they face, particularly as social media plays such an important role in lives nowadays.

“We never had any of this stuff growing up, we had room to make mistakes and room to fail. Kids today don’t have that luxury. We try to keep open comms with our boys and set examples. That doesn’t mean being perfect, it means talking to them and being honest.”

Born Edward Michael Grylls (Bear was a nickname given to him as a baby by his sister which stuck), he spent three years as an SAS reservist where he became a survival skills expert. His SAS career was cut short after a free-fall parachuting accident in Africa left him with three shattered vertebrae.

After months of military rehabilitation, he went on to become one of the youngest climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest at 23. In the following years he completed several daredevil expeditions − rowing across the North Atlantic in a rigid inflatable boat and set a world record for the highest open-air formal dinner party, held in a hot air balloon at 24,262ft.

His TV series include Emmy-nominated Man vs. Wild and Running Wild with Bear Grylls, in which he took public figures on extreme adventures. His guests included Barack Obama, Julia Roberts, Roger Federer, Kate Winslet and Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister.

One of Grylls’s strongest influences was his father, Conservative MP Michael Grylls, who died of a heart attack when Bear was 26. Within the same year, Shara, whom he had just married, also lost her father.

At that low point of his life, Grylls sought help and had counselling. “I had a few sessions,” he said. “I’m not sure how good it was. I just got my head down and got on with it.”​

And when it comes to an ideal male support network, Grylls reveals that one of the most emotionally tuned-in and open environments he has experienced was the SAS, where, perhaps counter to expectations, toxic masculinity and emotional repression were not significant factors.

“Everyone was much more emotionally switched on there, there was less ego and machismo. They were much more honest. I had genuine, real friendships. People showed much more vulnerability. That’s why I loved it and felt it was much more my bag. They shared struggles and shared each other’s burdens.

“If we don’t get a handle on this and start to address mental fitness, this epidemic will never end,” said Grylls.