"Don't be ashamed of your emotions.They are all part of being human"

Special Forces operative turned SAS: Who Dares Wins mainstay Jason Fox's guide to building mental and physical resilience

- By Dominic Bliss

Brought up in a military family in the Bedfordshire town of Luton, Jason Fox joined the Royal Marines at the age of 16, first becoming a Commando and then joining the Special Boat Service.

‘In the Special Forces I learned to manage fear, emotional breakdown, pain in hostile environments and the horrors of war,’ he wrote in his biography Life Under Fire. ‘I thrived in events that would have crushed most people, and work was a ten-year rollercoaster of physical and mental extremes.’

Fox operated at the military’s sharpest point’ in some of the world’s most perilous war zones. His missions included hostage rescue, counter-terrorism, counternarcotics, and counter-insurgencies.

But years of intense battle and the witnessing of the horrors of conflict took its toll on his mental health. Diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he was eventually discharged from the army.

Which is when things took a turn for the worse. Cast adrift from his former life, he fell into depression and very nearly ended it all. Fortunately, therapy saved him. "If you want to talk about hitting rock bottom and surviving, I've got all the experience in the world," he says.

Fox managed to build a new career for himself, writing books and working on TV shows such as SAS: Who Dares Wins and Inside the Real Narcos. Now 47-years-old and living in London, his latest venture [at time of writing] is a live tour called Life At The Limit, which visits 25 venues across the UK in January and February 2024. Here he discusses some of the key issues from the show.