The Mirror's newsletter brings you the latest news, exciting showbiz and TV stories, sport updates and essential political information. I am still very much a work in progress. I still overdo it sometimes. I still say yes to things I shouldn’t. I sometimes fill dead evenings with chocolate and make myself an espresso at 8 p.m. at night because . . . I don’t know why – it’s just something to do, innit? A nationwide network of men’s groups that meet every Monday night at 7pm to chat about how they’re getting on. In the 90s, the lads mag ruled supreme – with Loaded the daddy of them all. They were publications aimed at hedonistic young men. Sam left university and set foot in that world: Although Sam did not originally like the idea of getting support and starting therapy, ‘beggars can’t be choosers. Only through desperation did I go and talk to someone’.

Honest, expert, down-to-earth support via the Campaign Against Living Miserably helpline (0800 585858) is open 365 days per year, 5pm-midnight. Rapper Professor Green, football player Declan Rice and comedian Romesh Ranganathan are just some of the ambassadors working with CALM. Keeping it all inside was what nearly dragged Sam under. Then he began to open up and share his story with others. Soon his life started to get better and better. Now, he's written this book to help you do the same.

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Then I did something that was pretty alien to me. I started to own up to the fact that I was struggling. I went to a group called Andy’s Man Club where blokes meet every Monday night for a chinwag about life, all the shit it can throw at you and all the beauty that’s to be found in it too. It helped. I started chatting to mates about what I was going through and the things I was worried about. I was stunned by their empathy. Next, I started writing about this sort of stuff. A couple of articles in the newspaper about my own little struggles: the drinking, the anxiety, the childhood stuff I’d never quite shaken off. I’d been writing for years but never with much honesty about myself. I like making people laugh and found it was easy to use humour as a means of distracting from self-reflection. When I landed my first job in journalism I told myself that the best way to succeed was to never stop. When I finished at the office I would go home and write down ideas, do bits of research, read other newspapers and magazines obsessively. I was a product of Thatcherism – totally in thrall to my own productivity. I didn’t just want a steady job that paid the bills. I wanted to create great things constantly and be defined by them. And I also wanted to get totally shitfaced every weekend (plus sometimes on a Thursday). The book is very episodic and comes across slightly repetitive. I imagine a lot of the text may have started off life as a blog. It has a very bloggy feel about it. Chapter 18 is typical starting; I mean, like a lot less than a picture that looked like it was taken on a long lens and was slightly blurred through a bush of a celebrity being caught kissing the wrong person on holiday by the pool. That shifts a million copies, but having the same celebrity with makeup on in a photo shoot in a studio might sell less than half a million copies.

Every month, we talk to people with something to say about being a man or being a dad on the Dad La Soul Sessions. Journalist and broadcaster Sam Delaney joined us to talk about his drinking, drug taking, spiralling and then his mental health recovery. I have had to train myself not to fear idleness but to embrace it. I have had to discover beauty and fun in the day-to-day. It is all there in front of us. Nora Ephron, the famous Hollywood screenwriter, once said: “Interesting stories happen to people who know how to tell them.” Nowadays, I spend most of my time telling people stories. Sometimes they ask me how come so many interesting things happen to me. They don’t. The same amount of remarkable, funny or stimulating things happen to me as to the next person. It’s just that, these days, I am clear-eyed enough to see them. He advises dads going through the same that, although people will tell them that there are ‘worse problems’, feeling this way is legitimate and not a sign of failure: I wanted to write and talk about it in exactly the same way that I’d written about football or music in the lad mags, or that I’d talked about football on TalkSport for years. I wanted to apply the same tone, the same humour to sort of normalise it and disarm blokes who would ordinarily feel very awkward around that kind of chat.” The Lad Mag YearsWe can all make a change by being more open with our mates: honest conversations show us all we are not alone in our feelings, and we don’t need to feel so ashamed. He recently qualified at Level 2 in counselling skills and became an ambassador for the mental health charity, CALM.