A Man's Guide To: Mental Health

All right, guys, welcome back to the Mantalk Show. I am Connor Beaton. Today we're going to be talking about a man's guide, your guide to mental health. And I'm going to be sharing not just how do you get from a bad place to a decent place to a mediocre place, which is what most social media content is talking about. It's like, how do you stop feeling sort of anxious? How do you stop feeling depressed? And get back to a baseline of just like, neutral? I'm going to talk about how do you move from wherever you are, right? If mental health is you've got a negative 10 being really bad to a zero, which is neutral, to a plus 10 being absolutely exceptional, how do you move from wherever you are on that spectrum, upwards in the scale? Right. We want to move up and to the right. And what I want to say is this is an amalgamation of everything that I've learned in the past decade, everything that I've implemented in my own life and what I try and implement with clients. And I want you to know that when I started off on my work, I was probably like a negative 8 or 9. You know, there was moments where my mental health was abusive towards myself. The way that I talked to myself was absolutely brutal. The way I treated myself was not good. And I was constantly sabotaging myself. And today, I'm consistently again on that scale, on that spectrum, probably a plus seven, a plus eight. You know, it fluctuates. Sometimes I'm a plus nine, sometimes I'm a plus five. But it fluctuates. But it's in a place where, if you had Talked to me 10 or 12 years ago, I'd have been like, man. And I don't think I've ever experienced real mental health. And so what I'm gonna share with you today is how to move from one place to the other. Where we're gonna start is defining mental health. What actually is mental health? Well, I love this notion that mental health equals mental flexibility, right? Mental health equals mental flexibility. And if you look at anybody that's suffering from poor mental health, it is usually because there is a high level of rig and that person is psychologically or mentally or even within their identity. They're very rigid, they're very fixed. Things are very stationary and stagnant. They don't move. Things need to be a certain way. There's a high level of control, there's a high level of needing to know the outcome. There's a high level of putting energy and effort towards Things that you can't control the outcome of. You know, this is why you see a lot of people who look at some of the world's problems today and they have from the outside, at the very least, it looks like very poor mental health because they are trying to impact and influence these things that are so big, that are so large, that are so out of their control and they're missing the small details that they could actually influence in their day to day lives while trying to shift these very, very large systems that are on a global scale that produces a tremendous amount of suffering internally, which we're gonna talk about in a minute. So, but I want you to stay with this idea. What does it look like for you to be mentally flexible? One of the biggest pieces that creates mental flexibility is again reigning in the nets on what you can influence, what you can control, what you can affect and what you can't. And that simple act of letting go of like, well, that was out of my control and then that I can't do anything about and I can't change that thing. But what can I influence to today? What can, what decision can I make, what choice can I make? And actually pulling back in on the things that you can influence and letting go of the things that you can't is going to produce a tremendous amount of pliability and flexibility within your mind because your mind will stop cycling and thinking about how to solve things that it can't control. Really important caveat and asterisks that I want to put in here. When you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about things that you can't control, thinking about things that you can't change, fixated on them, that is a definite form of suffering and that is going to produce in turn very poor mental health because you are going to be hurting and frustrated and depressed or anxious about something that you actually have zero control over. So we have to rein the nets in. So get again, mental health equals mental flexibility. There's great work on this by Carol Dweck in a book called Mindset where she talks about fixed versus growth. Mindset. I just like fixed versus flexible. How mentally flexible can you be? So with that definition said, let's get into the seven things that you can start to do and implement today. Some of them are frameworks, some of them are tactical, but all of them are incredibly, incredibly helpful. So number one, I want to set the tone now that we have mental health equals mental flexibility. I want to set the tone for what produces suffering. Because this framework is something that I've created. And I find it to be incredibly helpful for understanding how to work with ourselves, but also how to support other people in our life. So the framework is as follows. For me, when I look at every form of psychological, emotional, mental suffering, any type of suffering, if you scroll through the DSM 5, which is a diagnostic tool, whether it's bipolar disorder or, you know, multiple personality or narcissistic traits or psychopathy, or, you know, anxiety disorder or depression disorder, all of those are some form of fracturing. All of those are some form of fracturing. So suffering happens when we have fractured off from something that is true, something that we need, something that we haven't developed, or something that we innately are. So those core pieces. And I'll give you some examples, right? If you grew up in a household where your dad's anger was super loud and volatile, you may have responded from that environment by fracturing off from your own anger and actually saying, I'm going to separate from my anger to disconnect from it. And because of that, you lack boundaries. You're not assertive, you're not direct. You don't say what you want or need. That's a type of psychological fracturing. You fractured off from your anger, you've tried to push it away, you've tried to disconnect or disassociate from it. And that produces a tremendous amount of suffering because everybody experiences some form of anger. And so the aim isn't to fracture off from the things that we think are unhealthy or not useful. That the aim is to integrate and create a sense of wholeness with the aspects and elements of ourselves that are true. And again, if you look at any disorder, fracturing is at the epicenter of it. And you know, for a lot of you guys that I've worked with or talked to or you know, that that message me, part of that fracturing might be around your sense of self worth, right? It's like, I don't have any value, I don't have any sense of worth. And so you fractured off from a sense of like, I have mean, I have value, I have worth in life. And the aim is then to say, okay, that isn't. That is suffering. That's not true. So how do I reclaim my worth? How do I reclaim my value? How do I allow myself to see that? What do I need to do? What do I need to build? What do I need to create? How do I need to operate in the world to actually reclaim or reintegrate or allow that part of me, my worth and my value to exist within me. And it might be, you know, allowing your anger to be honest and true. It might be that you need a sense of self compassion, right? Maybe you fractured off from your sense of self compassion. And so I mean, this is what I did, right? Maybe you're berating yourself constantly and you know, just shitting on yourself and the way you talk to yourself is terrible. You're constantly criticizing yourself. Well, that's likely because you have over indexed on self criticalness and shame based motivation. And what you need is to reclaim that level of self compassion. So that's where we're starting. Any type of fracturing will create suffering when you fraction off from what is biologically true. When you fracture off from what is true about your identity. When you fracture off from an emotion. That is true. Right. This is what a lot of guys get into trouble for in their life. They try and disconnect from their grief or their sadness or their anger or whatever it is. And that produces a net negative effect in the long term, right? And in the short term, because in the short term it can have very, very big negative impact. So that's number one. Number two is about anxiety. Anxiety is less of an emotion than it is an excess of energy trapped in your body. And I say it again, anxiety is less of an emotion and it is more of an excess of energy trapped in your body. So really cool scientific research. I mean I love this part, this is kind of geeky for me. But when you look at the brain on anxiety, it looks very, very similar, almost identical to when you are excited. Now when you're excited, what's happening? Right? There's a tremendous amount of energy moving in your body. A lot of the neurons in your brain are activated. And what's cool at least, I mean if you suffer from severe anxiety, you probably don't find this cool. But what's cool is that the same parts of your brain light up when you're really exc. When you're like in this sort of peak excited state that light up when you are experiencing pretty severe anxiety. Now what does that mean? It means that anxiety is an energetic response. And for many of the men that I've worked with, anxiety happens because of two things. Number one, anxiety is happening, you know, sorry. Three things. Anxiety is happening because real circumstances in your life are, are causing some strain and stress, right? Maybe you're worried about how you can pay your rent, things aren't going well in your relationship and you're worried about your Girlfriend breaking up with you, like, those types of things where it's like this just genuine stress in my life. Because anxiety and stress are, again, those. There's not a lot of differentiation between those two things. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that the alarm system in your body is falsely going off. So anxiousness happens when a man has either never really developed a deep sense of safety within his own body, or something has happened to him that has fractured that sense of safety within his own being. Now, maybe you were in a motorcycle accident or a car accident, you know, maybe you were in a past relationship where you're, you know, the girl that you were dating, you were in love, and, you know, you just like, thought this was the one, and then boom, out of nowhere, she breaks up with you, moves her out of your house, and you're just like, what happened? And then you get into another relationship and you start to catch feelings, and all of a sudden this anxiousness starts to rise up in the body and you're like, oh, man, what's going on? Like, I feel safe in this relationship. Why do I feel this anxiety? Well, it's. Your body's alarm system is falsely going off, right? So it's detecting a threat that isn't there. That's another way of describing anxiety. Sometimes anxiety is that your body is detecting a threat that isn't actually there. And this can happen because of a number of reasons, right? You can have trauma in the past and have some PTSD where that anxiety gets very activated and you have a lot of energy in the body. So those are some of the main reasons. The last piece that can cause anxiety is that you actually just have a lot of energy. You are a very high energy person, and nobody has actually taught you how to ground that energy and how to direct that energy in a healthy way. And so a lot of that energy just gets pent up and pent up and pent up in your body with no real outlet, with no real direction, with no tools to ground it down, and it starts to spin out of control until eventually you either reach for an external object or substance, right? Weed, booze, porn, et cetera, to try and offset that bone, you know, tremendous amount of energy in the body, or you learn how to ground it. So anxiety is less of an emotion than it is an access of energy in the body. And one of the things that can be very helpful for you is to determine which one of those categories do you fall into, right? Is your body just setting off an alarm because of a Past trauma or a past betrayal, Is it setting off a false alarm? Because you have a tremendous amount of. Of emotion coming up in your body? This is another common one. Men that I've worked with that have a deep amount of grief that they haven't let out will sometimes have a big anxious response. And that anxious response is happening because there's some other emotion underneath. Helplessness, powerlessness, sadness, deep grief, sorrow that's trying to come out, but he's not allowing himself to do that. So, you know, oftentimes guys that have gone through a tough divorce, lost their kids, but they haven't let themselves properly grieve, they'll start to have the manifestation of big anxiety. And again, it's just an access of emotion or energy in the body that's saying, hey, I actually need out. So that's number two. Number three, working out and meditation are two key tools you absolutely need to prioritize and use above everything else. Okay, Meditation and working out. Studies have shown time and time and time and time and time and time again that meditation and working out. Working out is specifically good for reducing anxiety and depression, to the point where it's actually been proven in multiple studies that working out can be better than a lot of the SSRIs and a lot of the medications and the drugs that are out there for depression. And something like meditation, depending on what you're dealing with, again, still, with depression, can be incredibly helpful for offsetting what you are experiencing now. You have to find a decent teacher. You have to have a routine. But these two tools, right, have been proven over and over again to be two of the most effective tools in our arsenal in terms of dealing with mental health issues. And to the point where in the uk doctors are actually allowed to prescribe meditation for people that are dealing with anxiety and depression. Sometimes if you're dealing with, like, existential anxiety, which is where you're like, is the world gonna end because of, you know, whatever impending disaster is in the news or on the social media that I've been watching, or, you know, some existential anxiety about your own life that might be a little bit different. You might actually want to work with somebody to move through that existential anxiety. But for the most part, working out and meditation need to be a foundation that you build everything else on. What I tell most guys is if you don't have a, like, rigorous workout routine where you're working out, like, probably five to six days a week. If you're like me, because I have a ton of energy in my body, I need to work out five or six days a week, otherwise I start to get squirrely. Like, things just start to come off the rails. And then I need to meditate or do breath work every single day. I'm going to talk about breath work more in a minute. So those things will help reduce your anxiety and depression. They are going to help you raise your baseline, right? If you're in a minus five, those things are going to help raise your baseline because you are going to produce the right neurochemicals in the brain, in the body. You are going to move your body and use your body. You're going to have to quiet the mind. You're going to have to do all of the things right? That's the training ground for your mental health. Number four, limit eating so much damn sugar, gluten and caffeine. You know, it's. I'm not saying don't do those things ever. I drink coffee every day, or mostly every day. But I remember growing up as a kid, my breakfast consisted of, like, Rice Krispies and spoonfuls of white sugar, you know, or like a double chocolate chip muffin from Costco that was like the size of my damn face. And so the amount of sugar and calories that I took in as a kid first thing in the morning would get me super jacked up, and then I would have a spike later on in the day. And I just never ate healthy. And it wasn't until the last sort of like five or six years where I really got my nutrition in order. And I don't count macros. I'm not, I'm not, like, so extreme. I know for some of you, that's going to work really well. We're going to count macros, and you are, you're going to count your calories and that's going to work for you. For me, that feels very restrictive. And I don't enjoy doing it. I might do it when I actually, like, need to cut weight. And I'm, you know, I have a specific goal in mind, but for the most part, I've just changed my diet. So I have like two or three go to breakfast meals. I have two or three go to lunch meals. And I have, you know, a combination of things for dinner. But usually, like, my dinners consist of protein and some type of vegetable, and that's pretty much it. And so Monday to Friday, and my wife's on board and my son's on board. What we do Monday to Friday, we eat protein and some type of vegetable, and that's what we eat for dinner during the week period, whether it's, you know, a fish or chicken or a steak or something along those lines. So really start to limit how much sugar and caffeine and gluten you are eating, because that shit's in everything and too much of it is not good for your system. Number five, I just wrote down sleep. Like.

I know this one is simple. I know this might sound stupid, but dear God, prioritize your sleep. Cut off the usage of your cell phone before bed, even if it's just 20, 30 minutes. A lot of you are probably sitting on your phone, doom scrolling or checking emails or looking at whatever it is that you're looking at right before bed. And that's not supporting your mental health and it's not supporting your sleep. One of the best things that I have that I can recommend to you is do something that lowers your heart rate before bed. Now, what I do personally is I just call it legs up the wall. I'll lay down on the floor, back on the floor with my butt right against the wall, and then my legs straight up the wall so that my feet are facing the ceiling. The soles of my feet are facing the ceiling. What this does is it draws the blood. Gravity draws your blood down through your legs and into your torso, into your core, and it forces circulation, which actually forces your heart rate to slow down. So if you are somebody that struggles to go to sleep, spend the last five minutes of every single day just get into the habit. You know, sometimes my wife will come into the bathroom and I'm like, laying on the floor with my legs up the wall. She's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm prepping for bed. And she knows, she knows the routine now, right? Like, she knows the routine. So practice this or find your own method of slowing down your heart rate. It could be a breathwork practice. It can be a yoga pose. Try and avoid any, like, spine twists at night. If you're doing yoga late at night, Yin yoga can be very good. If you're going to do like, hip openers, that can be helpful. But you want to find something where it's going to actively slow down and not speed up your heart rate. Where a lot of guys go awry is that they're watching some intense TV show before bed, they're playing some intense video game before bed. They're watching, you know, porn or scrolling through some social media channel, and it's spiking their heart rate, right? Their breath rate is shallow. So when your Breath rate is shallow and you're not getting nice deep breaths in. That's going to push your heart rate up. And in order to go to sleep, your heart rate actually needs to come down as much as possible. So you could do box breathing, four minutes box breathing before bed. That's inhaling for four, pause for four, exhale for four, pause for four. There's lots of resources of that on YouTube that you can check out. You can do box breathing or some type of stretch like the one that I laid out, legs out the wall. That is going to help you get to sleep and then obviously prioritize getting a good amount of sleep. Right? Sleep is great for. And again, there's so much science and data on this, I'm not even going to get into it. But sleep is super important for emotional regulation. Sleep actually helps your brain to process emotional info. So less sleep equals less ability to process emotional info, which over time leads to a higher risk of depression, anxiety and all of these things that we've been talking about in terms of not having very good mental health. Now you don't need to get, get 8 to 9 to 10 hours of sleep every single night. I don't personally, I get like seven to seven and a half on really good nights. Otherwise it's like six and a half and that feels pretty damn good for me. I try and get eight whenever I can. But realistically, I've got a three year old, I got another kid on the way, I have a business, you know, my downtime is basically from 8 until 10:30 at night. So I try and get 8 hours of sleep whenever I can. But the quality of my sleep is very, very good. And that's what I'm after. Number six. I only have two more. Number six, social connection. Lots of research on this. The quality of your life and your health and your mindset is determined by the quality of your relationships. One of the longest studies done in the world was by Harvard over the course of 75 years and it was predominantly men. And what they found was that the quality of your friendships at 50 determined your health at 80. And so we really have to prioritize positive, healthy, challenging, accountable relationships, specifically with other men. If you don't have good men in your life, prioritize that because everything else that I'm talking about will be supported by really great men in your lives. And last but not least is body and breath practices or embodiment practices, getting into the body. This is going to be essential for you to ground your nervous system, for you to Be regulated. A lot of the times, the reason why people have poor mental health is that they are so disconnected from their body and their brain is being constantly inundated and overrun by too much somatic information or body information. So I'm going to give you two phrases that I found to be super helpful. Number one.

The body is your emotional brain, right? The body is the emotional brain. It's the place where a lot of your emotions are going to be coming from. So just like your mind, your brain is the center for your thoughts or is the place where the language of your thoughts emerges. Your body is the center for where your emotional information or your emotional language or emotional information and data actually comes from. And so if you're a man who is disconnected from his emotions, is numbed out all the time, doesn't really knows, like, what he feels, or you're a man that is reactive all the time and angry and volatile, that's likely because you're very disconnected from your body. And it hits a trip wire when you feel too much, and it just sort of takes over. So getting into your body, having breath practices that you do every day, yoga, tai chi, these types of things, just even stretching can be incredibly helpful. I try and stretch for 15 to 20 minutes every single night. Sometimes I'll do it, you know, if my wife and I are going to, like, watch a TV show together or, you know, watch a sporting event. Like last night, we were watching the NBA finals. And, you know, I'm sitting on the ground, like, doing some yoga, stretching, opening up my hips. And that can be incredibly helpful. So that's the one phrase. The other one that I think is incredibly helpful is that your body is the mind of your unconscious, or your unconscious mind is stored in the body. So this is a little bit more esoteric and a little bit more entering into the psychoanalytical space. But in my frame of work, your body is where your unconscious mind is stored. And so if you want to get into the real depths of why you sabotage or to stop sabotaging or to start directing yourself in a more authentic, more just kind of way, you actually need to get into your body, because that's where your unconscious mind lives. A lot of you are sabotaging in a very unconscious way, right? It's like, you know, I hear guys asking this question all the time, like, why can't I stop texting her? Why can't I just quit this? Or, I don't know why I keep going back to this behavior or this, you know, this habit, like I just want to get rid of it. And I don't understand why this is happening. Well, that's not happening in a conscious way. Right? You're not in this super logical conscious choice of like, let me possibly blow up my relationship, let me possibly blow up my health or my finances. That's not how it's working. There is an unconscious response internally that's driving that behavior. And that unconscious response is not happening here. It's happening beneath the neck. It's happening in your body. And your body is calling the shots for you to go and do that behavior. So having breath practices, having body practices, you might want to do some somatic work with somebody. This is a lot of the work that I lead with men is helping to get them out of their head and into their body, into their direct felt experience. But having those types of practices will lead to more mental health because you will actually be decluttering your mind from a lot of the emotional details and volume of information that's receiving. One last fun fact I'll give you that will hopefully land the plane on this. The vagus nerve. The. You know, you've probably heard of polyvagal theory, but the vagus nerve running the length of your body on your spine, is basically the information highway between your body and your brain. What we have discovered is that 80% of the information is going from the body up into the brain, and only 20% of the information is going from the brain down to the body. So what that means is that your body is sending a tremendous amount of information up to the brain and calling the shot in a lot of different things. And that's your nervous system. That's whether you feel stressed or you feel calm. And so learning how to listen to the information of the body, ground the body, regulate your nervous system is one of the most important things that you can do for your mental health. Many guys that I see that I work with, their mind is just inundated with an onslaught of information from their body that they do not know how to deal with. And it causes all types of issues. So let me know what you thought about this video today in terms of a guide to your mental health. What did you learn? What are you taking away? What are you implementing? Drop it in the comments below if you're on YouTube or DM me if you are listening to this on Spotify, don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to give me the thumbs up on the video and hit the bell notification so that you'll be notified when new episodes drop till next week. Connor Beaton signing off.

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