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

Osher Günsberg keeps stopping to smell the flowers. As we walk along Sydney’s eastern coastline, he cuts himself off mid-sentence to point out warrigal greens (“cook them like kale or spinach, they’re really good”) and ginger (someone will pinch it soon, he says, given “those things are $20 a kilo”). We pause to touch the soft fronds of a woolly bush, which he uses at home in place of a Christmas tree, and admire the seed pods and bottle brushes growing wild.

The TV host is not launching a new career as a botanist but trying to impart a lesson about the value of mindfulness – and how all it takes is slowing down to notice the things around us.

“Mindfulness isn’t buying a linen shirt and putting your crystals under the fucking moon, man. Too many people get turned off by that shit,” he groans. “Mindfulness is just 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’s been the shiny blond face of primetime shows such as The Bachelor, The Masked Singer and Australian Idol (the latter of which was back when he went by Andrew G). But behind the scenes things have been much less glossy.

Günsberg was in New York with Channel V on September 11, an experience which left him with PTSD. His early years as a hard-partying music TV identity escalated into alcohol addiction. Along the way he’s battled debilitating anxiety and suicidal ideation – including “paralysing” climate anxiety that manifested as paranoid delusions – and experienced a psychotic break when living in Los Angeles.

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

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And he’s come out the other side. Today, the 50-year-old is a besotted wife guy, doting dad and stepdad, 14 years sober and living the calm sort of life that once would have been unrecognisable to himself. He has plenty of the hard-won wisdom of an addict to share, plus the high wattage charisma of a TV veteran – a combination that makes him great at speaking convincingly about the big stuff of life.

I’ve come to meet Günsberg on a sunny Wednesday morning in the car park of Clovelly Surf Life Saving Club. I’d expected him to be ferried here by a publicist, but instead he arrives solo on a bright blue bike, the kind long enough to fit his wife and kid on the back. As he sees it, why drive when you can ride? Exercise is another tool Günsberg has also come to regard as essential for managing his mental health – though his relationship with it has become more complicated lately. Which is what we’ve come here to talk about.

“I got really lucky in my life. I got really lucky with my career. I got really lucky with my wife, who said, ‘Yeah, all right’, and brought me into the life that she built with [her daughter] Georgia,” he says. “And I also got osteoarthritis in my 30s.”

Günsberg used to run 10km “every single day”, often coming here to pound the pathway from Bondi to Coogee and back. Then he started experiencing pain in his hip. When he could no longer stretch it out, he went to a doctor who diagnosed him with osteoarthritis and told him unequivocally to stop running. But it was such an “enormous part of my identity that I couldn’t accept what he said,” Günsberg says, so he disregarded the advice and kept running – for many years.

In 2019, as his hip continued to get “worse and worse”, he eventually accepted that he needed to address the problem. After getting the opinion of four different orthopaedic surgeons (“because I’m a stubborn Australian male”), Günsberg bit the bullet and got a hip replacement. It was meant to solve the problem – but instead his pain increased.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” he says of those first dark months after the surgery. “It started to hurt more and more and more. It was at the point where I could no longer catch my breath … I was in so much agony.”

The pain was isolating him socially, affecting his relationship – and bringing back the flickering of those intrusive suicidal thoughts. At a breaking point, he decided he wanted a nerve block – an injection of medicine that would essentially shut off all feeling 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 proviso that he also go to a specialist first for a second opinion. Günsberg agreed and found himself in a radiologist’s office, being shown an ultrasound that revealed his hip was, mostly, “fine”. It came as a shock.

“I had clear evidence in front of me that some of the pain – not all of the pain, but some of the pain that I was experiencing – was being 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 get sensitised to signals, and it can start reading benign signals as dangerous, catastrophic.”

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

“If you’re in pain, the worst thing is being told that’s all in your head,” he reflects. “But once I started to accept it … holy moly, was it empowering!”

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

It’s not the first time Günsberg has explored a tough topic. He wrote about the dark years of his life in his warts-and-all 2018 memoir, and continues to chew over mental health and self-improvement on his twice-weekly podcast. But while it’s unusual for a presenter to be able to straddle the big commercial gigs and these much more raw conversations, he’s found the two can happily coexist.

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“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 is “being a part of telling a love story on the telly” or “screaming ‘take it off!’ at a giant popcorn machine”.

As we loop back towards the car park at Clovelly, Günsberg reflects on the journey he’s been on. He still winces thinking about the man he was in his years in active addiction, but is comforted by the knowledge he gets to live the rest of his life “not being that guy”. And while he’s thrilled to have found pain psychology, it’s been a great tool, not a magic bullet.

“It hurts now, talking to you and walking, really. But I’m OK with it,” he says. “It’s not anywhere near as bad as it was. I’m generally about a two to three [out of 10 on the pain scale] most days.”

He’ll never run again, but he does weights, pilates and rides his bright blue bike. And he is very aware of how far he’s come in life in general – take, for instance, his climate anxiety, which mindfulness has helped immensely with.

“Ten years ago, there’s no fucking way I would have done this with you,” he says, gesturing around us. “Before, because I’m next to the ocean and my head would have been flashing ‘tsunamis’ and ‘bush fire’ … I was seeing visions of it. It was horrifying. I could not be near the water.

“Because I’ve done all the work – and I could once never have believed this is 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 OK, because there’s enough space in my brain to enjoy the breeze on my skin, and the feeling in my body of going for a walk.”

• Osher Günsberg: A World of Pain premieres on Thursday 21 November on SBS and SBS On Demand