Prince Harry has been heavily praised this week after opening up about his mental health struggles over the years, stemming from the grief of losing his mother 20 years ago. He was candid in his admission that he sought help only in recent years after gentle pressure from his family and friends.

Prince Harry at the Invictus GamesPrince Harry at the Invictus Games

Just because he is one of the most priveleged and high-status men possible in the UK doesn't mean that Prince Harry has had it easy. A combination of losing his mother at the age of 12, the media attention that came with that, travelling to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and meeting people whose lives have been torn about by war have had a profound effect on his emotional wellbeing.

Over the course of his younger years, he came across as quite the rogue royal; getting snapped drinking and smoking underage, getting aggressive with paparazzi and even photographed playing strip billiards at a Vegas party. But all that irresponsible behaviour came from his desire to block out the emotional turmoil that was bubbling under the surface.

'I buried my head in the sand for many, many years', he confessed in an interview with the Telegraph's Bryony Gordon on her podcast. 'I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but also my work as well. It was only three years ago, funnily enough, from the support around and my brother and other people saying: 'Look, you really need to deal with this. It is not normal to think that nothing's affected you'.'

It took some time before Harry was able to confront his issues head on with a professional, but he just never knew how to go about it - nor did he believe that talking about it would help. 'I was a typical 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going 'life is great', or 'life is fine' and that was exactly it', he said. 'And then I started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with.'

More: Meghan Markle to move in with Prince Harry

He described the 20 years of unprocessed grief as 'total chaos' where he was unable to work out what was wrong with him, and now he can't advocate enough the benefits of speaking to a professional no matter who you are or what issues you have. 'I know that there's huge merit in talking about your issues and the only thing about keeping it quiet is that it's only ever going to make it worse', he insisted. 'Not just for you, everybody else around you as well because you become a problem. I, through a lot of my 20s, was a problem and I didn't know how to deal with it.'

He adds that he was 'very close to a complete breakdown' on many occasions, and encourages anyone going through a similar situation to take up some form of exercise like he did. 'I took up boxing, because everyone was saying boxing is good for you and it's a really good way of letting out aggression', he reveals. 'And that really saved me because I was on the verge of punching someone, so being able to punch someone who had pads was certainly easier.'