Josh DG | Behind the Writing
Josh DG didn’t start as a brand or something I sat down and planned. It developed gradually from an interest I’d had for years in understanding myself, mental health, psychology and, eventually, the way other people think, feel and behave.
Looking back, there was probably a long period where I knew something didn’t always feel completely balanced internally, but I didn’t necessarily have the language to explain what I was experiencing. As I got older, certain things started making more sense, but another problem became apparent: knowing what something was didn’t mean I knew what to do about it.
One thing I did know was that I’d always been naturally resilient and independent, and my instinct when something needed dealing with was usually to work it out and get on with it myself. For a long time, that resilience helped me keep moving through periods where things might not have felt completely right. I could still enjoy life, get things done and carry on with whatever was in front of me, even while knowing there were things I hadn’t fully understood yet.
Then, around 2017, something in me seemed to pivot quite abruptly. Carrying on was no longer enough; I wanted to understand what I was actually dealing with and what was happening beneath the surface. I was prepared to face things head-on and uncover anything that might make me uncomfortable, because I was adamant that my mental health wasn’t going to dictate where my life went or ultimately defeat me.
I didn’t want to improve areas of my life blindly either. If I was going to work on myself, I needed to understand what I was working with, why certain things were happening and what could realistically be changed, managed or understood differently. The resilience had always been there, but now I wanted knowledge behind it as well.
That’s probably the closest way I can describe what happened around that time. Some people might call it an epiphany, while others might describe something similar as a spiritual awakening, but I’ve never felt the need to force a name onto it. Something simply clicked overnight, and I became much more curious about myself, my mind, my mental health and the way everyday life interacted with all of it.
That curiosity pushed me into researching mental health more deeply, which then led me into psychology, human behaviour and other areas that seemed to connect with one another. It became almost like a spiderweb, where understanding one thing created another question, and that question led somewhere else. I might start by looking into anxiety, then find myself reading about the way we think, why we interpret situations differently, how our experiences affect us or how childhood experiences can shape behavioural patterns. That exploration eventually extended into subjects such as the subconscious mind, philosophy and ideas around manifestation.
The more I learnt, the more I realised that psychology and human behaviour were subjects I naturally understood and enjoyed thinking about. I’d often come across psychologists explaining ideas similar to thoughts I’d already been turning over in my own mind, while philosophers had explored parts of the human experience in ways that also felt familiar to me before I’d formally looked into their work. During that period, my self-awareness developed as well, and I became more deliberate about the way I thought, felt and behaved, the words I used, the things that triggered certain reactions and the way I lived my life.
That growing interest also changed the way I looked at something I’d already been around for most of my adult life: social media. I remember MSN Messenger, MySpace and the earlier days of Instagram, before social media became what it is now. I’d watched the online world change over the years, and although people have always cared about status, appearance and what other people think, social media evolved and created new ways for those things to be displayed, measured and reinforced as parts of people’s lifestyles and identities.
By this point, psychology had given me another way of looking at behaviour I’d already been observing for years. I wasn’t only seeing what somebody posted online or how they presented themselves anymore; I was becoming interested in the difference between somebody’s social image and the reality of their everyday life. Someone could look confident, productive, socially active or as though everything was moving forward, while experiencing something completely different underneath it. That gap between appearance and internal experience became increasingly interesting to me, particularly when it came to validation, comparison, identity, perception and the psychological effects of constantly seeing what everybody else appeared to be doing.
Those observations eventually started feeding into ideas of my own. Surface Identity, for example, came from thinking about what happens when too much of who we are becomes connected to how we’re perceived on the outside. It connected social media with something much broader because the same thing can happen through work, relationships, fitness, success, productivity or almost anywhere that how we’re seen can gradually become more important than how we’re actually doing internally, particularly once the spotlight is off.
As psychology, mental health and human behaviour became genuine interests rather than subjects I occasionally researched, writing started becoming more important too. I’d accumulated years of observations, questions and ways of looking at things, and I wanted somewhere to explore them properly. Gradually, the subjects I’d been exploring stopped feeling like separate interests. Mental health connected with psychology, psychology connected with self-awareness, self-awareness connected with behaviour, behaviour connected with identity, and identity connected with the way we interact with other people and the modern world around us.
The spiderweb that had originally helped me understand myself had become a much wider way of looking at the human experience.
That’s really how Josh DG and the content I create developed. It wasn’t created because I decided one day that I wanted to become a self-help writer, nor did it come from believing I’d figured everything out. It came from wanting to understand what I was working with before trying to change it, then realising that the same curiosity could be applied much more widely to psychology, mental health, identity, social behaviour and modern life.
I now share what I’ve learnt to give other people the kind of understanding I once had to go looking for myself. The aim isn’t to give people a fixed set of answers, but to help them look beneath the surface, understand what they’re working with and find a clearer place to begin.
Josh DG.