Osher Günsberg: ‘The worst thing is that you are told that the pain is only in your head. But holy moly, was it empowering!’

OSher Günsberg keeps stopping to smell the flowers. As we walk along Sydney’s east coast, he interrupts himself mid-sentence to point out war greens (“cook them like kale or spinach, they’re really tasty”) and ginger (someone will soon squeeze them, he says, given ” those things cost $20 a kilo”). We pause to touch the soft leaves of a woolly shrub, which he uses in place of a Christmas tree at home, and admire the seed pods and bottle brushes growing wild.

The TV presenter isn’t launching a new career as a botanist, but is trying to teach a lesson on the value of mindfulness – and how it only slows us down to notice the things around us.

“Mindfulness ain’t like buying a linen shirt and putting your crystals under the damn moon, man. Too many people are put off by that nonsense,” he groans. “Mindfulness is simply noticing that all we have is this moment. This is it – you and me, here today.”

It’s a tool that has helped him immensely over the years. You may know Günsberg best for his high-profile hosting gigs on network TV, where he was the shiny blonde face of primetime shows like The Bachelor, The Masked Singer and Australian Idol (the latter of which was when he was still Andrew G.). But behind the scenes, things were much less glossy.

Günsberg was in New York at Channel V on September 11, an experience that left him with PTSD. His early years as a partying music TV identity escalated into alcohol addiction. Along the way, he has struggled with debilitating anxiety and suicidal thoughts – included ‘crippling’ climate fear which manifested as paranoid delusions – and experienced a psychotic break while living in Los Angeles.

There was a time in 2010, he says, when “the phone stopped ringing” because his behavior made him so difficult to work with.

And he came out the other side. Today, the 50-year-old is a doting wife, a loving father and stepfather, 14 years sober and living the quiet kind of life that would once have been unrecognizable to himself. He has much of the hard-won wisdom of an addict to share, plus the powerful charisma of a TV veteran – a combination that makes him great at speaking persuasively about the big things in life.

I come to meet Günsberg on a sunny Wednesday morning in the parking lot of Clovelly Surf Life Saving Club. I expected him to be brought here by a publicist, but instead he arrives alone on a bright blue bicycle, long enough for his wife and child to sit on the back. As he sees it, why drive when you can drive? Exercise is another tool that Günsberg has also come to see as essential to managing his mental health – although his relationship with it has become more complicated recently. That’s what we’re here to talk about.

“I have been really lucky in my life. I’ve been really lucky with my career. “I was really lucky with my wife, who said, ‘Yes, OK,’ and brought me into the life that she built with (her daughter) Georgia,” he says. “And I also developed osteoarthritis in my thirties.”

Günsberg ran ten kilometers ‘every day’ and often came here to walk the trail from Bondi to Coogee and back. Then he started having pain in his hip. When he could no longer stretch, he went to a doctor who diagnosed him with osteoarthritis and told him unequivocally that he should stop running. But it was such a “huge part of my identity that I couldn’t accept what he said,” Günsberg says, so he ignored the advice and continued to run — for years.

In 2019, when his hip was “getting worse and worse,” he finally accepted that he had to address the problem. After seeking the opinions of four different orthopedic surgeons (“because I’m a stubborn Australian man”), Günsberg bit the bullet and had a hip replacement. It was supposed to solve the problem, but instead his pain increased.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” he says about the first dark months after the operation. “It started to hurt more and more. It was to the point where I couldn’t catch my breath… I was in so much pain.’

The pain isolated him socially, affected his relationships – and brought back the flickers of those intrusive suicidal thoughts. At a breaking point, he decided he wanted a nerve block – a drug injection that would essentially eliminate all sensation in his lateral femoral cutaneous nerve, which runs through the pelvis, groin and into the thighs. He called his GP for a referral, who gave him one, but on the condition that he also first see a specialist for a second opinion. Günsberg agreed and found himself in a radiologist’s office, where he was shown an ultrasound showing that his hip was mostly “fine.” It came as a shock.

“I had clear evidence in front of me that some of the pain didn’t exist all of pain, but some of the pain I experienced – was invented by my brain,” he says. It’s a common phenomenon: “When you’ve been in pain for a long time, your brain starts to become sensitive to signals and can start to view benign signals as dangerous and catastrophic.”

He decided against the nerve block and instead saw a pain psychologist, where he learned more about how the brain processes pain — including that the drugs can only do so much.

“When you’re in pain, the worst thing you’ll hear is that it’s all in your head,” he says. “But once I started accepting it…holy moly, it was empowering!”

Now Günsberg shares what he’s learned in a new documentary, Osher Günsberg: A World of Pain, which explores the science, medicine, technology and emerging alternative therapies being used to treat and manage chronic pain – including psychological approaches. Determined to get this story out, he pitched and produced the documentary. He knows how desperate pain can make you and he wanted to give the one in five Australians living with chronic pain “hope that there is a way out”.

It is not the first time that Günsberg has investigated a difficult subject. He wrote about the dark years of his life in his 2018 warts and all memoir, and continues to chew on mental health and self-improvement on his bi-weekly podcast. But while it’s unusual for a presenter to be able to straddle the big commercial gigs and these much raunchier conversations, he’s found that the two can co-exist quite happily.

“My job is to help people feel less alone,” he says. Some days that means opening up about his own battles on the podcast. Other days it’s ‘being part of telling a love story on television’ or ‘screaming ‘take it off!’ at a gigantic popcorn machine”.

As we walk back to the car park at Clovelly, Günsberg reflects on the journey he has made. He still shudders when he thinks about the man he was during his years of active addiction, but is comforted by the knowledge that he will live the rest of his life “not being that man.” And while he’s glad he found pain psychology, it’s been a great tool, not a panacea.

‘It hurts to talk and walk with you now, it really does. But I think it’s fine,” he says. “It’s not nearly as bad as it was. I’m generally about two to three (out of 10 on the pain scale) most days.

He will never run again, but he does weightlifting, pilates and rides his bright blue bicycle. And he is very aware of how far he has come in life in general – take his climate anxiety, for example, where mindfulness has helped enormously.

“Ten years ago, there’s no way I would have done this to you,” he says, gesturing around us. “Before, because I was next to the ocean and my mind flashed with ‘tsunamis’ and ‘forest fires’… I saw visions of it. It was gruesome. I couldn’t be near the water.

“Because I did all the work – and I could never have believed this to be true – here I am with you, looking at the birds, looking at the trees, looking at sandstone. Those thoughts are still there… But I’m like, you know what? It’s okay because there’s enough space in my brain to enjoy the breeze on my skin and the feeling in my body when I go for a walk.”