The Best Way To Improve Your Mental Health (That Most Guys Overlook) | Dean Pohlman | Better Man Podcast Ep. 086

Gentlemen, it’s Dean. Welcome back to the Batman podcast. Today’s episode is a solo episode, and in this short episode, I want to talk about one of the most simple, effective strategies that you can utilize for your overall mental well being. This is something that you can do as long as you have somebody to talk to and even if you don’t have somebody to talk to, you probably do have someone that you can talk to.

You just haven’t tried talking to them yet. And the simple strategy is finding support in shared struggles. And to talk about this. I want to highlight an experience that I had last week. So it might seem from outward appearances that I’ve got a lot of my life figured out. You know, I’ve got a family. I have a I have a pretty awesome career.

I’m in pretty good physical condition. But the reality is that I go through all of the same struggles that most of you guys go through and the people who are way more successful than me, the people who are way more fit than I am, who seem like they have a great, fantastic life and have it all figured out.

Those guys go through these same struggles as well. And so I was freaking out last week. I just had this sensation that everything was falling apart, that the systems that I had in place were going to fail, that that was going to lead to other things. Failing that, I wasn’t going to be able to to pay my mortgage and that we were going to have to move and that everyone would be so disappointed in me.

And I was just going on this downward spiral and I didn’t want to talk about it with my wife because I just I like to have a more controlled, more controlled expression when I talk to her because she would get really worried if I was doing that in a downward spiraling fashion. So I did something that not a lot of guys do, and I reached out to friends.

I just texted them what was going on. I said, Hey, like, I’m just going on this downward spiral. I’m really worried about stuff. Do you ever go through this? And everyone that I reached out to said, yeah, all the time, more times than I care to admit. And most of the guys that I responded to responded with really kind words.

One of my friends who’s who’s pretty religious, he said, you know, I try to sometimes I forget that I don’t have things all in control. And when I am trying to control everything, it’s nice. It’s humbling to remember that ultimately I am not in control, that God is control. Or if you want to think about it as the universe being in control and that you’re actually just a pawn in all of this, that’s helpful for him.

And then another guy that I reached out to, I said, Dude, I’m like, I’m just really worried right now. And he said, I know people that make $100 million a year who go through the same thing that you’re going through right now. And I can tell you that I don’t make anything close to $100 million a year. So that is that was reassuring to me.

In one sense, it was and also not reassuring because I could make a lot more money and still be worried about about all this stuff. But the point is that after I shared, the example isn’t important. The fact the important part is that I shared the struggle that I was going through with people that I trusted, with people who are in similar situations that I am.

And after doing that, it took that edge off for me. So I realized, this is something that everyone goes through. It’s okay. It’s not it’s not I’m not special. I’m not like, there’s not something wrong with me. This is something that everybody goes through. And so just having just knowing that that was a shared experience provided some relief and this is a basic strategy, but it’s one that we don’t utilize.

There’s a few reasons for this. One might be that we just don’t hang out enough as men, you know, if you are a guy with a family, you’re probably at home in the morning, then you go to work. Then you try and find some time for a workout and then you’re with your family and you’re not going out in, you know, hanging out with other guys.

You don’t have dedicated guy time. I think there’s also a cultural stigmas against men expressing weakness, talking about their failures. There’s also men might not want to share it with their wives, like for me, for example, or their partners or their spouses. So for me, I have difficulty expressing it sometimes because I don’t think that sometimes I just don’t think that my wife can handle me freaking out and in reality, she can handle way more than I give her credit for.

And practicing that, saying like, Hey, like I’m worried. Making her realize that I also go through struggles that I also have worry that I also have anxiety. It helps us connect on a deeper level. It makes our relationship better, and she’s able to support me. So it feels really good to be able to to find support and to feel comfortable reaching out, to support.

So I want to further illustrate this by talking about shared struggles that I hear about in the man Flow yoga community, things that you guys struggle with. And we actually just got this. We were able to kind of synthesize this information based on a poll that we just had. You may or might know, may or may not know.

We did a lifetime membership sale special over Black Friday of 2023. That was a really popular offer. We had a lot of guys sign up for it and we wanted to learn more about these guys. We wanted to learn more about how if you’re listening to this and you are a lifetime member, shout out to you guys. So we wanted to learn more about you guys and we wanted to figure out how can we help you guys more?

How can we go beyond just giving you workouts and programs and tutorials and providing a community with our Facebook group? How can we go beyond that to address the other things that you’re looking to solve? And so we asked guys in this poll, what are the other struggles that you’re facing that are non fitness related? And I’m telling me the answers because I think this will help you understand that you’re not alone, that these are struggles that almost everybody goes through.

And so I’ll go through I’ll go through kind of the top few of these. I’ll go through the top five, the responses that we got. And these weren’t multiple choice answers. These are actually all text responses. So the first thing that we heard about was health and mental health. So there is a strong interest for you guys in for you guys to go beyond just working on your physical fitness and working on your mental health, your holistic wellbeing as well.

And you may or may not already realize this, but one of the other big struggles that you hear about is motivation has being consistent. And the most important factor of this is mental well-being. It’s holistic well-being. If you’re not able to do your workouts on a regular basis, why don’t you have that motivation? Why don’t you have that clarity?

Why do you not have the proper environment or the proper habits in place that make that easy to do? If you don’t have that energy to exercise, there’s something else going on that’s sucking that energy. It’s not because you it could be because you have a you know, maybe you have a history of bad experiences with fitness. It could be that you you just don’t like working out.

But if you lack that energy, there’s probably something that’s draining that energy. And you don’t get to work on that by just showing up to your workout and slogging through it over and over again. And so you get so sick of it that you throw your yoga mat out the window. I never heard about throwing some you know, somebody throwing a yoga mat out the window, but you get the point.

So the point is that we need to address what are the root causes of these this lack of energy, this lack of motivation. And that comes up when we work on our our health and our mental health. So cool thing about yoga is that working on your body awareness, working on your breathing is a segway into being more aware of your mental well-being, being aware of what’s going on in your head, your emotions.

So yoga is a really cool way to segway into that. And it seems like that’s what’s happening with you guys in the band for yoga community. So that showed up in about 25% of the responses that we got. That’s a huge number. The second concern that we heard about is is time management. So guys are just busy. We’ve got too much going on, We’ve got family, Some of us have families, we’ve got jobs, we’ve got other obligations, community obligations, and we just don’t know how to best use.

So we just don’t have time. That’s part of it. The other part is guys don’t know how to structure the available time that they have. What are the most important workouts that they should be doing? What all do they really need to be doing for their fitness goals? If the goal is just longevity, what all do you need to do in order to have a healthy lifestyle and be able to do the things that you want to do for as long as possible?

So guys want more information. They want more targeted information to better understand how is the best, what’s the best use of my time? Because a lot of guys just don’t have time. We have so much content in the member’s area, but a lot of guys just don’t have the time to sift through all of those. There’s probably over 1200 videos to go through all of that content and to create, create, you know, to curate that exact those exact pieces of information that they need.

So it’s not that that that it’s not that you need personalized one on one because believe it or not, you’re not unique, you’re not special. This is kind of what this whole podcast is about, is that we all go through the same struggles, but there are certain specific pieces of information and strategy that are more relevant to you than other people.

So that’s something that that guys are looking for as well. The number three thing on here is stress management. I’m just going to lump that into the mental health category. Guys are just overwhelmed with with with stress. And a lot of that is they are not doing things to address the root causes of their life. I think another big part of that is that men are not just are they’re just not being honest about what they need.

They’re going through life trying to be of service to other people, but they’re not asking for what they need. They’re not they’re not getting support for what they need. They’re doing their duty as men, but they’re not. They’re not getting what they need for themselves. And the thing about this is the more that you can to a certain extent, you don’t need to you don’t want to be too on the other end, the spectrum where you’re totally selfish, but self-care is necessary for you to be of service to others.

And that’s something that, you know, we’ve tried to address a lot in this podcast and and something that I hope just being in this community will teach you that self-care is going to make you better to be of service to other people. Number four is weight management. So this is a big thing as well, excuse the pun. This is a big thing as well.

And you know, we’ve got workouts, we’ve got the programs, there’s information on diet. But this weight management goes into so much more than than just those those things. Ultimately. Yes, it’s those practices that lead to weight loss, but more so we have we have you know, there’s there’s a large portion of our population that is obese for reasons other than just not wanting to work out.

There are things there are there are there are subconscious beliefs, there are ingrained patterns. There are relationships between food and stress that lead to to not having the ideal weight. And there’s also just the reality that a lot of guys don’t have the opportunity to move throughout the day. And it’s easy to sit down and eat, but it’s hard to get up and move and it’s food is just really easy to get.

Part of this is understanding what are the strategies, what are what are some things that I can do to minimize my access to unhealthy foods. And that just takes time. That takes effort, that takes planning, and it also takes the it also is very helpful to be in an environment where you are supported in your weight loss goals.

So weight management was another big concern. And then the fifth thing that all is here is, is life balance and work. And this is this goes hand in hand with what I was talking about before with health, mental health and stress management. People just don’t have a good work life balance. You know, in Western societies in particular, in the United States and Europe and Australia, we work way too much.

We don’t take time to take care of ourselves. We prioritize work. We we we were a badge of honor for working more than we should be. And it has an impact on our overall wellbeing. It does. And so part of this is understanding strategies to separate work in life. Part of it could also be reducing your expectation of how much you get done.

It could also be creating barriers between your your work and your home life. It could be productivity strategies to make sure that you stay on task when you are working. But it is it is extremely apparent that guys are stressed out from overwork and that they need help with this. So this all leads me to say that this is something that we are working on addressing.

We’ve already done a lot of this stuff in the member’s area. There’s some content that you may or may not know about. There’s also, you know, this podcast I think is a really great way that we address a lot of these issues. But I want to go deeper than this. I want to have more structured conversations and more structured presentations around these issues.

We’re going to bring in expert guests who can talk about this. We’re actually going to have live community discussions as well where you can actually come on to a call and discuss these issues with other people in the mental yoga community. And this is something that we’re doing with Man flow yoga Engage. This is a brand new service in addition to the member’s area that we are launching on April 1st.

And I don’t want to give any more details now, but just make sure that you’re paying attention to your emails because we’re going to be releasing more information about this in the coming weeks. I am extremely excited about this. This is for all of you guys who want more from man for yoga. If you want more from me, if you want more in terms of depth and content, if you want more community to be able to more easily interact with other members from the Man for Yoga community guys, we’ve got thousands of men all over the world, particularly in the United States and the UK and then in Canada, who are going through the exact

same struggles that you are going through. And the best way to work on them. One of the best ways to work on them is to be in a community of like minded people who are also going through these same struggles to be able to have discussions around these and to be able to be exposed to the information that’s going to help you work on these things to give you the strategies, the tips, the other life experiences that are going to help you create your own solutions to this.

And again, I said this before, but being in a community that keeps you engaged, that keeps you motivated and held accountable, to continue to think about these things as you implement them is so helpful to being able to make those changes. Because change is hard. Change is really hard to do on our own. It takes a ton of effort and for most of us we’re already functioning at 100% capacity.

We don’t have extra time, we don’t have extra energy. So we need to first create space to be able to make space for other things. And then we also need to be in an environment where that change is encouraged. And that’s what we are doing with manual yoga, engage, providing that information, providing that community for the motivation, engagement that you need to make those changes to take it to the next level.

So I’m really excited about this. I hope you got a lot out of this podcast episode. I hope you remember or learned the importance of sharing your struggles with like minded people. Think about guys that you trust and emails you haven’t already reached out to them with the struggles that you’re going through next time you’re going through them, try it.

Just send them a text message. And I think even if you haven’t talked about that with it before, I think they’ll surprise you because men want this. Men are lonely. Men are not talking with one another. We are not being honest with one another. We’re not being vulnerable. And when you express that vulnerability, when you show that to somebody else, they might feel uncomfortable at first, but they also might be craving it and they might respond with something that totally surprises you, something that you might not have ever expected them to say, and they’re just waiting for you to say it.

So I hope you guys got a lot out of this. Thank you for listening to the Better Man podcast, but be on the lookout for man Yoga Engage coming April 1st. Again, check your inbox. I’m sending out some emails about this over the next few weeks if you haven’t already. Please consider leaving a review on the Better Man podcast.

You can do that on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. And if you are brand new demand for yoga, if you haven’t done any of the workouts yet, or if you’ve done some on YouTube, but you’re looking for a way to get started, I do have a free seven day challenge Beginner’s yoga for men that you can sign up for at man flow yoga dot com slash seven DC or put that link in the show notes here.

All right guys thanks for listening. Thank you for being part of the man for yoga community and I hope this inspires you to be a better man. See you on the next episode.

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