“I work really well when there’s lots of plates [spinning] and I’ve got loads to do and loads to think about,” she said. Andrea went on to add: “It excites me, invigorates me, all those things – until it didn’t. Until I literally crashed and burned.”
“I reframed it that way – so my job is to get eight hours sleep, my job is to eat well, rather than it being something that we try to squeeze in around everything else, and that massively helped.”
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McLean says moving to Spain last year helped her recovery: “Coming here and slowing down has been a massive part of it. It sounds very ‘woo woo’ – but [it’s been] a part of healing.”
Elsewhere, the star, who first found fame in 1997 as a weather presenter for GMTV, opened up about her spiralling debt problems. After leaving Loose Women, Andrea launched her brand This Girl Is On Fire – but when the enterprise collapsed, she and her husband, Nick Feeney, encountered severe financial difficulties.
“It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever endured – and I’m a menopausal woman,” McLean said, describing the sense of “powerlessness” as like “nothing on Earth”.
She continues: “For me, it was a whirling feeling of hopelessness and helplessness, which mainly came at night. Because in the day, you’re trying to stay upbeat for the kids and do all the practical things – being a mum, a parent, a wife, all of these things. You keep busy with that, plus the firefighting.
“But at night, when you’re laying there, everything was just overwhelming – in terms of, I don’t know how to get out of this hole. I know I found it mentally a lot harder than my husband.”
Each evening the pair would identify three things they felt grateful for, which Glasgow-born McLean, 56, notes is “really easy to do when things are good” – but considerably more challenging during tough times.
The complex emotions surrounding her financial difficulties are explored in McLean’s latest book, Shameless: Finding Freedom and Resilience Through Failure. She chronicles the challenging period following the closure of her business – from having to borrow cash from relatives to cover expenses to frantically submitting a CV to Starbucks, and ultimately selling her UK home and relocating to Spain.
McLean concludes Shameless with a poignant moment where she settles her final debt over the phone to the credit card company. While she acknowledges she wasn’t “now somehow flush with money”, it nonetheless represented a significant milestone and fresh start in her journey.
Today, she reveals her book’s purpose is to ensure others don’t feel isolated. “Shame is such an isolator – it makes us feel less than, we feel hideous, we feel like we’re the only people that are going through whatever it is we’re going through,” she says. “So that’s why I thought, right: I’ll go first.”
Shameless: Finding Freedom And Resilience Through Failure by Andrea McLean is published by DK Red, priced £16.99. Available now.
