TV star Matt: Why I quit

‘It was killing me’

For most people, New Year’s Eve is a time for both celebration and making resolutions. But as the year clicked over to 2018, CelebrityTreasure

Island host Matt Chisholm set himself just one goal: survive.

“It wasn’t to have as much fun in life as I could, which would have been my resolution 10 years ago,” he tells. “It was to survive. That’s how I felt going into that year.”

Already unhappy, he had no idea that the events in the months ahead would create a perfect black storm that would see him spiral downwards. Nor did he know that by December he would hit rock bottom.

“I got to the end, met my last work deadline and I just collapsed,” Matt recalls. “And I allowed myself to feel and be honest and just go ‘F***ing hell, I’ve got to get off this train.’ It was killing me.”

The busy journalist had kicked off 2018 with a sevenweek stint in Thailand to host

SurvivorNZ, before returning to Auckland, where he started a new role on TVNZ’s Sunday. Meanwhile, he was living in a small rental, had a one-yearold son, Bede, and his wife Ellen, 35, was pregnant with their second child.

“Someone in HR said I probably shouldn’t do Sunday,

Survivor and have another baby all in the one year, but I thought, it’s better to burn out than fade away,” the 42-year-old says. “That was always my attitude to life.”

Determined, Matt threw himself into his job, but it began to take its toll. Previously, as a presenter on FairGo and SevenSharp, he was used to balancing the heavy stories with the fun, but this wasn’t the case on Sunday, where all of his work was serious and he found himself increasingly tired and stressed.

In April, Ellen and Matt welcomed baby Finn to the world, and the sleepless nights and exhaustion known by every parent of a newborn only amplified his feelings.

But through it all there was one colleague who he could connect and talk to – Greg Boyed. A fellow TVNZ journalist, Greg was set to travel to Switzerland for a family holiday in August, but noticed something was amiss with a tweet Matt sent, so reached out to his mate to ask if he was OK.

“I told him I was doing it pretty rough,” Matt recalls. “And he said he was doing it really rough too and that we should catch up.”

Two days before Greg was due to fly out, they did just that. Sharing their struggles, they reassured each other that they weren’t going to do “anything silly”.

But the following week, while Matt and his family were in the South Island having what should have been a restorative holiday, news of 48-year-old Greg’s sudden death broke.

“I picked up my phone and saw it,” Matt says, breaking into sobs. “It was a news alert just popping up on my phone.”

Heartbroken, he was grateful to be with his family at the time, including his in-laws and mum. Knowing he was friends with Greg, TVNZ colleagues were also supporting him with texts and phone calls.

“The main thing we actually connected on, the thing we had in common, was that we were country kids who felt we didn’t really belong in the newsroom,” Matt tells. “We both felt that one day someone was going to tap us on the shoulder and say that we’d had a good run but it’s time to go. That we didn’t deserve to be there.”

Devastated, Matt returned to Auckland. But things only got worse.

“I was really, really buggered by this stage – not sleeping, not exercising, not doing anything for me. I was just surviving,” he admits.

“I had everything I ever wanted in my life, but I’d never been so unhappy,” he says. “I’d done so many stories on this stuff. I knew I needed to connect with people, I knew I needed to get fit, but I was just in a hole and couldn’t