Mind Health for Men 101

So, What Is Mind Health?

Most of us grasp of the basic ingredients of physical health: nutrition, exercise, sleep, daily stress and how we manage it. The most common health risks are straightforward and their treatments are generally well-understood: viral and bacterial diseases can be handled with drugs or vaccines, and injuries can be treated with surgery or Hello Kitty band-aids.

Mind health is a little slipperier, and even though we’re getting better at talking about it, we still don’t have a shared sense of its most essential building blocks. What, in other words, is the mind health equivalent of “eating healthy food” or “exercising three times a week”?

The short answer is that achieving mind health will generally require three things:

1. Keeping your brain physically healthy
2. Managing your thoughts and emotions
3. Living in a positive, supportive environment

Some of this stuff is counter-intuitive. For instance, “managing your emotions” doesn’t mean keeping them in check; sometimes we need to cry or yell or sulk, and expressing those feelings honestly helps us stay healthy. Emotional health is more about having the skills to recognize what you’re feeling, figure out where it’s coming from, and resolve any problems they’re causing in constructive ways.

Learn to manage these three areas and you’ll have much more control over how you feel, how you present yourself to others, and how easy or hard it is to get through the day. A common way to talk about mind health is to describe yourself as being at one of four levels: thriving, managing, struggling, or in distress. This article is about the most common factors that put someone in one of the lower categories—that, and how you can change them.

Before diving into the details, there’s something we need to get clear on: mind health vs. mental illness.

Mind Health and Mental Illness

It’s important to separate mind health—the everyday, universal facts of how well we’re functioning, thoughtfully and emotionally—from mental illness, the specific, identifiable clusters of symptoms that we describe in terms of syndromes and disorders.

It’s the difference between being out of shape and having a broken leg: both of them might stop you from running, but they have pretty different causes and call for pretty different types of recovery. In the same way, someone whose mind health is suffering because of work stress and challenges at home needs different kinds of support than someone with a well-defined condition like post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, or major depression.

Of course, there are people and cases that blur the lines. Depression and anxiety are the most obvious of these, with the difference between universal human experiences and clinical disorders basically coming down to consistency, persistence, and how much they disrupt our daily lives. The blurriness of those boundaries, though, doesn’t mean the boundaries aren’t there, or that the diagnoses aren’t real. After all, when exactly does bad heart health turn into heart disease? Where do we draw the line between weak vision and blindness? Those questions have good, solid answers, based on level of function, underlying physiology, long-term risks, and so on. The same is true for mind illnesses. Major depression and clinical anxiety disorders are caused by long-term changes in how our brains work. Someone who’s having a bad month can recover on their own; someone with major depression might need powerful drugs or specialized therapies just to consistently get out of bed.

This article is about mind health, not mental illness. In other articles, we will absolutely be discussing mental illnesses on this website, covering prevention and risk factors. Right now, though, we want to talk fundamentals, the rock-solid foundations of a healthy life.

With that out of the way, on to the big three. First up, the central nervous system.

Brain Health

We can start with this: the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe. We know a staggering amount about how it works, but still don’t have a complete enough picture to say, in any detail, what makes a brain healthy. Your brain is the most important physical component of your thoughts, but any particular feeling or idea is literally built out of potentially hundreds of billions of chemical interactions taking place in, on, and between tens of billions of neurons. So, when we say that someone is “struggling” or “in distress” when it comes to their mind health, we don’t (yet) have the ability to point to specific kinds of activity among particular networks of neurons.

Without that level of detail, we have three options for describing and promoting brain health. We can (1) learn to use self-awareness and psychological tools to manage thoughts and feelings, we can (2) change our outside circumstances to be more positive, or, the most direct route, we can (3) make sure that our bodies overall are doing well.

One thing we know for sure is that brain health depends, most of all, on cardiovascular health. An advisory from the American Heart and Stroke Associations lists 7 factors that are essential for optimal brain health:

• Don’t smoke
• Exercise regularly
• Eat a healthy diet (more on this later)
• Work toward an appropriate body mass index
• Maintain healthy blood pressure,
• ….healthy levels of cholesterol, and
• …healthy blood glucose.

The idea behind the list is that the first four are things we can control, and the last three are things our doctors can help us keep track of, so we know how well we’re doing.

There are also two “axes,” or connected body systems, that play huge roles in keeping our brains healthy. One of these is a set of connections between our brains and our gut microbiomes, the bacteria living in our bodies that handle all sorts of totally vital, necessary biological jobs for us. The gut microbiome is connected to the brain not just by nerve cells, but by hormones and the immune system, so keeping your gut healthy—taking probiotics, eating fresh and varied foods—is essential for your brain.

The other “axis” we care about here is called the “hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis,” or just the HPA axis for short. Those are the brain structures that are most involved in our response to stress, and the connections between them are what gets disrupted when we develop long-term chronic stress, ultimately doing serious harm to our brains. The HPA axis is also closely connected to inflammation, a body-wide measure of the levels of certain mostly-harmful chemicals that can kill important cells en masse and make the effects of brain injury worse.

So, until neuroscience advances substantially, those are the basics of brain health: think about stress, think about your gut, and think about your heart. In addition to the four practical pieces of advice we already mentioned—exercise, smoking, diet, and weight—the other top-line areas to focus on are sleep, stress-management (e.g. through mindfulness), and the use of other substances, especially alcohol. Finally, something that’s uniquely important for men: avoid “brain health” supplements. They’re almost never backed by real science. Instead, just eat as healthy as you can.

Managing Thoughts and Emotions

The next layer of our mind health foundation is all about what we’re thinking and feeling. This is something men often struggle with, as our shared social norms tell us to be stoic, strong, and independent rather than focus on building empathy and healthy relationships. That can mess us up in more ways than one.

The most basic stumbling block is about self-awareness, and how well we’re able to recognize and describe what we’re feeling. These skills fall under the label of “emotional intelligence,” and they can be practiced and improved over time. Indeed, just that kind of development is the focus of many common therapeutic techniques, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Specific strategies like journaling or self-talk, and more general skills for self-awareness and communication help us work through what we have going on inside. In fact, in several big studies, emotional intelligence plays a major role in determining whether outside stressors actually make our mind health worse.

A related topic is coping skills. Coping is just the stuff we use to help us handle psychological challenges. Getting drunk is, legitimately, a coping strategy. Not a very good one, since it hurts our health and typically makes the mind problems worse, but many people do drink to manage stress and unhappiness. Better coping strategies include things like exercise, getting outdoors, taking a nap, talking to a friend or family member, or spending time on a hobby. A lot of what makes coping work, though, is less about the action you take than the mindset you have as you approach it. Successful coping is about learning to see your problems as surmountable, practicing a positive self-image, committing to your decisions, and so on. (Here’s a great list.)

That brings us to a third major aspect of cognitive and emotional regulation, which is self-esteem. This is a critical brick in the foundations of your mind health. There’s no need to ignore your own limitations or weaknesses—instead, it’s more about building up positive experiences of your own abilities. Practice a new skill. Celebrate your wins. Notice when you do something well, and appreciate what you’re good at. Be kind to your friends, and enjoy kindness in return. Learn to notice when you’re being hard on yourself, and reject those thoughts when you notice them occurring. Here are some other ideas to get you started.

Finally, learning to manage our emotions can sometimes come down to getting help. It’s important to support our friends, colleagues, and acquaintances if we learn they’re seeing a therapist or undergoing treatment. It’s also, of course, important to seek out that same support for ourselves when we’re in over our heads.

Supportive Environments

This is another area that can be counter-intuitive. “Supportive” environment is a loose term—it covers work and home, social relationships and physical surroundings, labor and leisure. The goal isn’t for life to be easy or frictionless, and many men especially find tremendous psychological value in working hard.

Instead, the goal is to surround yourself with people, places, and things that make everything we just talked about more accessible. You need access to exercise, for instance, and ways to see your friends. You need a life with challenges that push you, but that you can ultimately overcome. Being near green space, whether a park or the wild woods, is linked to lifelong better mind health.

Beyond those basics, here are a few other environmental factors to bear in mind.

First, loneliness and isolation can be devastating to mind health. It’s important to understand that we’re talking about mind and emotional distance here, not physical distance. If you live in a full house but don’t feel understood by anyone—or don’t feel able to express how you feel—that can be more isolating than living alone. In fact, social isolation can be as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. It’s often a problem at work, as well, where weak relationships with colleagues, an abusive or exploitative workplace culture, or emotionally negative management can create profoundly isolating social environments.

The second big environmental variable is physical safety. Again, we’re not looking for perfection—it’s more about stability and basic needs. Having a home that you know isn’t about to be taken away, enough food to eat, and heat and electricity are just as important to your mind health as cardio fitness and friends you can talk to.

Speaking of which, relationships with friends and family make up what we often call your “support network.” You need people you can turn to in a crisis, and that’s part of what support means. But it’s also just about…hanging out. Having people you can laugh with, or share a hobby with, or with whom you can just sit, chat, and relax. Building up positive relationships over time is a key part of long-term mind health.

Looking Ahead

So, those are the basics of mind health. Brain health depends primarily on cardiovascular health, your gut microbiome, and stress management. Emotional well-being requires coping skills, self-esteem, emotional intelligence, and a willingness to seek help. Finally, a supportive environment is all about physical safety, basic needs, social connection, and your support network—plus getting outside.

Over the coming months, Grannus will be publishing a steady stream of articles covering recent developments in the science of men’s health. We cover mind and emotional topics, sexual health, nutrition, and physical well-being. A lot of what we have planned expands on what you just read, and all of it is based on solid, reliable data.

We hope to see you back here soon!

Share now: