Before Jessica Rowe quit her co-hosting gig at Studio 10 to focus on her family last year, the journalist admitted she was “just keeping it together.”

The 48-year-old has opened up about her mental health difficulties during her last year on the Channel Ten morning show, admitting she was “close to tears” by the time the show was over every day.

After co-hosting the show for over five years, since the first episode back in 2013, the TV presenter told viewers she was leaving to spend more time with her two daughters and husband and Channel Nine news presenter, Peter Overton.  

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jessica Rowe (@jessjrowe) on Jan 4, 2019 at 1:17pm PST

“I’ve got some news I want to share with all of you because you’ve been so incredible to me over so many years. I’ve decided to leave Studio 10,” she said on air last year. “I want to be a more present mother for my girls, Allegra and Giselle.

“They need their mum. I want to be there in the mornings for them, to take them to school. It is something that I need to do, it is as simple as that.”

Jessica, who filmed her last episode in late March of 2018, admitted to the Australian Women’s Weekly that her fierce and bubbly on-screen persona was hiding her struggles with anxiety and depression.

“I could feel at the end of each show, not every day, but most days I would be close to tears,” she explained.

“I’d feel that behind my eyes and was just about keeping it together. And I thought, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’”

Rowe has always been open and honest about her struggles with mental health, however confessed that despite loving her role on Studio 10, she was not in a good place.

“I knew that I was heading down, I knew that my anxiety was there, that I was getting depressed and that if I didn’t make a change I’d start to falter,” she said.

Rowe experienced post-natal depression following the birth of her two daughters, Allegra, 12, and Giselle, 10.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jessica Rowe (@jessjrowe) on Dec 19, 2018 at 4:55pm PST

 

Rowe’s husband, Nine News host Peter Overton took to social media to share his admiration for his wife and her decision to leave Studio 10.

“My admiration for Jessica knows no bounds,” he wrote on Twitter.

“This morning when I asked 11-year-old Allegra how she felt that Mum was going to be home in the mornings… she said ‘I am a billion times happy’ … and that says it all.”