Josh TrentIdentity Transformation Architect and award winning Host of the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast—a decade-strong show with over 750 episodes and 15M downloads.

Conquer Your Demons: Inner Work Beyond the Gym #shorts

24 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:19

In this short monologue, the speaker reflects on how he previously used the gym as a way to suppress his inner "demons" and manage his mind, but recognizes that physical activity only offers short‑term relief and the issues inevitably return. He explains that lasting change required deeper inner work: journaling to uncover motivations and label emotions, engaging in therapy—including psychedelic therapy—and learning emotional awareness for the first time as an adult. He also shares that he now helps his daughter name and understand her feelings, emphasizing the importance of teaching emotional literacy to the next generation. Ultimately, he argues that it’s possible to achieve great things without constant anger, and that happiness can coexist with ambition when this inner work is done.

Chapters

I used the gym as this conduit to control my demons and to keep them at bay and to control my mind. But the thing about demons is that they always come back. So when you're trying to use the gym and physical activity and like, you know, all this kind of stuff in order to kind of like heal these parts, no, no, no, they just make these parts go away for the very short term. They will always come back. So I had to do the work on top of that. I had to journal the reasons why I was doing this. I had to journal my feelings. I had to understand what what these feelings were. Because like, even right now with our daughters, we're having my daughter name her feelings just to understand what these feelings are. I never got that. I never got a chance to understand like how to label the emotion I was going through. And I had to relearn, or actually have to learn that for the first time while I'm an adult. And yeah, I did, you know, I did things like I did therapy, I did, uh, things like psychedelic therapy. I didn't, you know, and, and I did the whole gamut of it, but The whole thing is, is that you have to work on yourself while you are using these things in order to help you keep these demons down. And you have to understand that it's okay to not have to be angry all the time, at least from my perspective. It's okay to not have to be angry all the time in order to achieve really great things. You can actually be happy in doing it.