I'm a million times more confident than I was in my 20s'

'Happy Place' podcaster Fearne Cotton chats about being an introvert, OCD and midlife happiness

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Fearne Cotton is redefining what happiness looks like in her 40s.

‘It’s just maybe a level of average contentment that I’m aiming for — I don’t even know if I’m needing to land on happiness,’ says the podcaster and author.

‘I’m pretty happy these days when I just feel even and average. I’m not looking for euphoria.

‘It’s about those moments where there’s a bit of mental peace and I just feel kind of balanced,’ the 43-year-old explains. ‘It’s not circumstantial. Before I’d think, [happiness is] being on a holiday with a beautiful beach and no laptop and having a nice cocktail. But actually I could do that and be going mad in my head.’

The former BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 presenter, who rose to fame first on children’s TV and later Top Of The Pops in the early Noughties, says her old TV and radio life ‘hugely’ affected her mental health.

‘I wasn’t doing so well mentally in my old career,’ says Cotton, who announced her split from husband Jesse Wood last December after 10 years of marriage. The pair share two children, Rex and Honey, and Cotton is stepmother to Wood’s two children from a previous relationship, Arthur and Lola.

She’s largely left the TV and radio world behind, and says live broadcasting is not a position she wants to put herself in at the moment. ‘I think it’s so exposing, people are incredibly judgemental.

‘There’s no room in traditional media, certainly not when I was growing up as a teenager in the early Noughties, in my 20s, to be thoroughly yourself.

‘There was no space to fade up the microphone on Radio 1 and say, “I’m feeling like death today.” You've got to be jolly and play music — so people probably only saw that side of me, and I was terrified to show the other side of me.’