Davina McCall has admitted having uneasy feelings after being forced to step back from full-time work. The star announced that she will now be working a four-day week after two health scares showed her she needed to "de-stress".
Davina, 58, opened up on the latest Miss Me? podcast about being "frightened" as she reflected on her learnings following treatment for a brain tumour in 2024 and then breast cancer in 2025. She admitted that both experiences have made her confront her tendency to overwork.
"Change is something that all my life, I spent running away from," she told hosts Miquita Oliver and Jordan Stephens. "I absolutely hated it. Change was something that really frightened me. I always loved the status quo, knowing what I was doing and feeling safe in that."
Davina, who has three children with her ex-husband Matthew Robertson, has been almost continually in the spotlight since 1992 when she hosted programmes on MTV Europe. In the past three decades, she has appeared on some of the UK's biggest TV shows, including Big Brother and The Masked Singer.
© Getty"What has happened, actually, is that I have realised that all my really big growth has come from change - and often quite painful change," said Davina, who married third husband Michael Douglas, 49, in December. "I had an amazing breakthrough when I got clean in the early nineties," she said, touching upon her heroin and alcohol addiction in her twenties.
Both the brain tumour and breast cancer triggered her to rethink her stress levels. "I had another huge breakthrough after I had my brain tumour removed," shared Davina. "I realised that I needed to de-stress my life.
"Interestingly, I realised that - but then the breast cancer, which I thought was a very, very frightening thing, made me realise that I really, really had to put that into place. And I have now."
© ITVShe added: "I'm going to work a four-day week. I feel so much better now about my life and trying to get it more balanced. So now, really, as I hit this stage of my life, I want to take more care of myself. That is my latest project: me, because I can't take care of anyone else if I'm not okay."
Davina - who is mother to Holly, 24, Tilly, 22, and 19-year-old Chester - had a six-hour operation to remove the 14mm growth in her brain. After finding a breast lump in November, she then had a successful lumpectomy and preventative radiotherapy.
How can we de-stress our lives?
"In the UK, around one in six women aged 35 to 54 reported feeling stressed every single day, and much of that stress is work-related," says life coach Mhairi Todd. "When stress becomes constant, the nervous system never fully switches off. Prioritising balance isn't indulgent; it’s a way of interrupting that chronic 'always on' state, allowing the body and mind to come out of survival mode and into something far more sustainable."
Hattie MacAndrews, also a life coach, agrees. "Feeling 'out of balance' can be a huge contributing factor to our internal stress levels, and will subconsciously creep into and affect multiple areas of our life," she explains. "So focusing on small yet sustainable steps towards a more balanced lifestyle will have a huge impact on de-stressing your life. It's so easy to get wrapped up in an 'all or nothing' approach, which is ultimately not sustainable, hard to maintain and more often than not leads to failure."
What benefits might we get from working four days a week on our bodies?
"Working four days a week can have a powerful impact on both mental and physical health," insists Todd. "Mentally, it reduces burnout and decision fatigue, and physically it gives the body time to recover from chronic stress, which shows up in everything from better sleep to improved energy and immunity. Interestingly, many people find they're actually more focused and productive, because rest isn’t the opposite of work, it's what makes productive work possible."
That being said, MacAndrews stresses the importance of using your time wisely. "If you are realistically able to get your work done in four working days, and you use your extra fifth day wisely, then it's a brilliant idea," she says. "However, you have to weigh up how the extra pressure to get everything done during those four days will impact you.
"Will it mean longer working days and therefore less time to exercise, cook healthy food or sleep? Will it put you under too much pressure to achieve a lot in a small space of time and therefore be counterproductive?
"Changing up a traditional work schedule and moving away from the typical Monday to Friday, nine to five can work wonders for people's stress and health levels – as long as you have firm boundaries and are disciplined with times you are meant to be working, and can switch off when you’re meant to."
