I was born to be an entrepreneur, but somehow ended up in the NHS. For 14 years I progressed well and by 2010 I was a Turnaround Director, responsible for making significant financial savings.

I loved the NHS – the people that you worked with, the vibe of the hospitals, the feeling you were making a difference. However, making cutbacks in an environment which is already stretched can be really challenging. Plus it was very bureaucratic. Everything needs a meeting, everything needs a business case. It all takes time, which can be frustrating.

I used to wake up at 4am to get on with my work, to take the pressure off when I got to the office. But when I had a baby in 2008, that all changed. I came back from maternity leave earlier than I should have done, after 7 months. At 4am I was now breastfeeding. That time I had  used to sort myself out had gone. That’s when you get into this all-consuming stress. 

I was bringing up a young child, working long hours and having sleepless nights. It can get on top of you. I was crying all the time. I was driving to work with chest pains and I thought, ‘oh my goodness, am I going to have a heart attack aged 40?’ I had no idea at the time that these were symptoms of stress.

Over the next three months it gradually got worse. At work, I was kind of drowning under all these figures, and projects were piling up. You start blaming yourself and thinking, ‘What is wrong with me? Why am I not as good, returning back to work, as I was before?’ It becomes all-consuming. You can’t see the wood for the trees. 

Then, one day in 2010, I was in a project management meeting and they asked for the figures. I got overwhelmed, burst into tears and walked out. It was not like me to do that. And it wasn’t the role – I’ve had high-powered jobs and led all sorts of big projects before. It was just the mixture of having a baby, not sleeping and getting worked up about work. After that meeting, my colleague, a former nurse, suggested I see a doctor. 

In those days, it was almost embarrassing to admit you were stressed. Nobody wanted to talk about it. The last thing you wanted was stress on your medical records. You’d worry, are you going to be branded some kind of mental case or somebody who can’t handle the stress of the job? I felt ashamed. 

But I went to the GP and the first thing he said was: ‘you’ve got to stop’. I was like, ‘what, stop for a couple of days?’ And he said: ‘stop for two weeks – otherwise you’re going to be very ill.’  

I took the time off and saw a counsellor and that helped. But when you suddenly stop, you start reflecting on everything that’s happened. I felt embarrassed and like it was a massive blow to my ego. I didn’t want to go back, so I resigned from my role. 

I enrolled on an online diploma in stress management. I needed to figure out what on earth was this condition that made you go from almost a high-flying career woman to a crumbling wreck. For one of the modules, I designed the perfect business environment that would help individuals to be as stress-free as possible. It was just a piece of coursework but I didn’t want to give it up when it finished.

Within 8 weeks of resigning from my job, I had the idea to turn my partner’s run-down family farm in Edgeworth into a wellbeing farm. Companies would bring their employees for ‘away days’ and for individuals could do wellbeing courses. It took two years to get the planning permission to completely knock the farm down and rebuild it.

We opened in 2013. We had a cookery school, we did corporate events, we had a cafe, we did different courses like stress management, wellbeing, meditation, all sorts of art courses. We had llama trekking – because llamas are a source of stress management. And we did educational visits to schools. To be quite honest, we ended up with a complete jumbled mess.