CHEF: Mental Health is a Priority

We all go through career turbulence, difficulty, challenges, or periods of time that might just suck. It feels never ending. For whatever the reason, sometimes everything seems chaotic and there may not be anything you can do about it but endure it. For chefs who already live a fast-paced life, career difficulty can feel like status quo and lead to strains on your mental health.

The important thing to remember is that you can get through the difficult moments. Challenges can be the catalyst for improvement and advancement, raising your value as a leader, making you a better, stronger person.

Even though it’s important to be committed when the chips are down and dedicate yourself to sticking with it during the hard times, it needs to be acknowledged that it takes a lot out of you physically, mentally and emotionally. You need to take care of your mind and body along the way.

Mental health might be an uncomfortable conversation, but we must remember that continually experiencing the negatives of poor health is far worse than the solution. But talk is just talk. To achieve this means you’ve got to take action.

If nothing changes, then nothing changes

Mental health is a common and unfortunately trendy conversation, especially on social media, in that it’s a deeply important subject often discussed at length, passively, with no action to truly make a difference.

It’s easy to identify with a feeling as you scroll onto something real for you, then the next distraction takes you off onto another thought, and alas, nothing was changed. The pain signal to stop, evaluate and improve, was ignored.

We’ve got to be honest, if you don’t act, then nothing changes. The thought of “I hate this feeling” needs to spark more than a fleeting “that would be nice”. You’ve got to do something for yourself knowing that you deserve it. It must be “I’m going to do this!”

Furthermore, we live in a time where endless resources are available at your fingertips, literally, on your phone. Need a good supplement to give you natural energy instead of guzzling C4? Maybe you need a gym to go to so you can make yourself stronger and decompress the right way? Or maybe you need to talk to a professional therapist? Whatever it is, you can find one down the street, and if it’s farther away, someone will bubble wrap it and drop it off on your doorstep.

Avoid What Makes It Worse

The hospitality industry is full of distractions you’d be better of avoiding most of the time, and sometimes we just need to consider making better choices. Alcohol, drugs, late night bars, and a bunch of other bullshit which actively deteriorates your physical and mental health, the goal here is to remove the bad inputs, because you can’t create positive outputs from them. Below are a few examples:

1)        Alcohol (and other drugs)

You might not want to hear this, but alcohol is a depressant. Meaning, while it makes for a good time in the temporary moment, it destroys your mental and physical health in the long game. It literally scrambles your neurotransmitters, negatively effecting your thoughts, behavior and brain health. If you’re depressed, perhaps not consuming a depressant would be a good idea. Ditto for the physical toll, it hurts your liver, is dehydrating and a poison to your entire body.

2)        Poor Sleep

Alcohol, staying up too late, being overworked and substances that chefs use to unwind or perform also prevent a good night’s sleep, you don’t fall into REM sleep or maintain good sleep consistency, so your body doesn’t recover, and your brain isn’t properly reset. With no rest, you walk back into a high-octane kitchen thinking you’ll be fine, while experiencing compounded aches, pains, fatigue and exhaustion that accelerates your speed to burnout.

3)        Negative environments and people

To be clear, along with mental health, in 2025, unqualified influencers and internet personalities want to classify anything or anyone they don’t like as toxic or a narcissist. Although true in diagnosable cases, this is largely far from reality, and not a healthy way to view people. Sometimes personalities don’t mix, someone’s having a bad day or maybe they’re just an asshole. However, all things considered, you absolutely don’t want to waste your life spending it working with people who do bad things, don’t respect you, or stay in environments where this is accepted, that break you down. The emotional cost is too high, and you’ll pay for it later. The most crucial thing you can do for your mental health is to get away from negative people and places as soon as possible. The future you will be grateful.

Find Better Habits

Everyone is on a different journey, and only you can know how you feel, so only you know what you need to do. But the truth is that many chefs feel and experience the same things for the same reasons. Being burnt out, overworked, overstressed, unsupported, and various other things that demoralize you and grind you down.

These are all results that we experience because of specific reasons directly related to the quality of our thoughts and actions. This by no means implies that anything is your fault, but the only person who can change it is you.

The great thing is that there are solutions to help you, again, at your fingertips. The hard part is that you’ll need to evaluate what you’re doing that’s not working, so that you can change the habit that creates the result.

Maybe the problem is booze, your work life, you’re struggling with operations, stressed about your restaurants P&L, you’re malnourished (yes, many chefs are malnourished), or you need to find a professional therapist to help you through a tough emotional time. Whatever it is, it takes courage to do it, but the only way to make change is to change what you’re doing and refuse to return to where you were.

Mental health is created by action. You decide what those inputs are. Just like anything else, you get exactly what you put into it. Find and embrace the solution and commit to following through with it every day and understand that you can change everything for the better. It might take time, courage and commitment, but it can be done. Focus on what you can control and make the best it can be. If the bad inputs have a compounding effect, then it makes logical sense that the good inputs do too.

You might be surprised that small changes make big differences. What would happen if you focused on getting 7-8 hours of sleep each night, eating a proper diet, hydrating properly with water, exercising, and choosing a winning mindset? In a few weeks or months, you might be a different person living a far better life.

The Responsibility to Accept and Reject

Mental health is not a unicorn or white whale. Mental health, by and large with few exceptions, is a result of how you treat your body and mind over a long period of time, how and what you choose to think, who you choose to be and be with, and the environment that you choose to be in. You’ve got to commit to positive action in the long game. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Crucially, understand that you have a very real power to accept and reject people, places and things that have a negative impact on you. Not only that, but you also have the ability (and responsibility to yourself) to find better people, options and environments that build you up.

This is really a black and white deal, because whatever you don’t reject, you accept, and vice versa. Don’t settle for less than you deserve. Keep going and be the best that you can be, you just need to think and decide what you want to look like.