Not only does flicking through the beads help Jock with his mental health, but he soon found out that actually making them helped a whole lot too.
"I started making them in lockdown," the chef explained. "I was like I also find it relaxing making them. I found it helped me."
It came as a pleasant, albeit shocking, surprise to his wife Lauren especially, where she walked in on Jock in his "man-cave" and found him surrounded by hundreds of worry beads.
"We call it a Scottish room... And Loz, my wife, hadn’t been in that room for quite some time and came in looking for me one day," he recalled. "There were close to 300 hundred different sets of worry beads pinned onto the wall."
After discovering just how much he enjoyed making them, Jock decided to make his signature worry beads available to the public with the launch of the hand-crafted label, Caim.
The bespoke collection of beads, designed and handmade by Jock himself, will be available in three styles, with each set of limited-edition worry beads made from gemstones and semi-precious stones.
"I'll go in mad searches to find very unique, semi-precious beads and then make really beautiful worry beads and work out how to string them so they don’t break," Jock said.
By raising more awareness of the worry beads, Jock hopes to also start more conversations about mental health.
"I think it's so important for people to talk about mental health and be comfortable talking about it and not feel as though they’re a leper," he said.
"I’ve always felt a bit like a leper when I’ve thought about the way I felt with the anxiety," he added.
In line with Jock’s transparency of his own mental health struggles, Caim will be donating $5 from every set of worry beads to Beyond Blue.
