In brief: A Jersey woman has spoken about how exercise and therapy helped her break free from a cycle of excessive drinking and partying that took hold during the Covid-19 pandemic. Meg Hamon, who decided to make a change as she approached her 30th birthday, says gym workouts, running and professional therapy have transformed her confidence and wellbeing. She is now sharing her story on social media in the hope of inspiring others.
From lockdowns to lifting weights
For Meg Hamon, the pandemic was more than just a public health crisis. It was, she tells the BBC, the point at which a difficult period in her personal life spiralled into something harder to shake. A bad breakup compounded the isolation of Covid-19, and Hamon found herself leaning on partying and drinking as a way of coping, without fully realising how much damage was being done.
“I think my lowest was Covid,” she told the BBC. “I think that was like a struggle for everyone and I just had gone through quite a bad breakup. I was struggling with that and I just think I’d never really processed my emotion. I really neglected myself mentally and physically… but I just never really noticed how unhappy I was until I started to make a change.”
That change came at the start of this year, prompted in part by the milestone of turning 30. Hamon resolved to swap late nights out for early mornings at the gym, taking up running alongside regular gym workouts and committing to professional therapy.
The double benefit of body and mind
Hamon has been working with therapist Sally Agathangelou as part of her recovery. Agathangelou offered a broader perspective on the patterns she sees in her practice, telling the BBC: “It could be various issues, it can be drinking, it can be gambling, it can be drugs, it can be self-harm, but it’s all bridges for coping.”
The therapist was also notably optimistic about the generation she is working with. “I’m really quite proud of this generation because they are very open to therapy,” she said. “I’m very, very proud of them because I can support, but it’s down to them at the end of the day to make that change.”
Hamon herself is clear about the impact that combining physical and mental health work has had. “Exercise has helped me massively with my confidence,” she said. “If I’m ever feeling low, a good gym session will always help.” She added that therapy alone would have been “incredible,” but that the exercise component gave her confidence an extra dimension she had not anticipated.
Sharing the message
Rather than keeping her experience private, Hamon has taken to social media to document her journey, a decision rooted in a straightforward motivation. “If it inspires one person to make a change, then I think it’s really important to do that as well,” she told the BBC.
Her message to anyone stuck in a similar cycle is direct: “If you get stuck in the same cycle… I just think you can find so many other things to do than going out and just drinking excessively.”
It is a sentiment that will resonate with many in Jersey, where a small, close-knit social scene can make it all too easy to fall into repetitive patterns, and where the pandemic years were, for a significant number of young people, a period of real personal difficulty.
Source: BBC News
