4 Keys to Men’s Mental Health: What Most Men Are Missing
/With June being Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, I thought I’d take a minute to talk about the four key elements I’ve found over the years that help men fully come allive.
A little qualification to this…I’m a licensed counselor and love what I do, but it’s not enough. It might sound crazy for a counselor to say counseling isn’t enough, but what I mean by that is counseling alone is not enough to help a man achieve or maintain an optimal level of emotional health. Over the years of doing, leading, and being in men’s groups, individual & group counseling, intensives, and all the like, I’ve found that there are four things that are usually missing in a man’s life, which lead to a deficit in their mental health. Counseling can help these things, but it’s no replacement.
Play - Risk - Comradery - Rest
Let’s look at each in turn.
When I talk about Play, I’m not necessarily talking about the things that typically come to mind, like going to football games and tailgating (that’s spectating). What I mean is the ability to enjoy for the sake of enjoyment. For instance, on our last Men’s Mountain Adventure, we decided we would take the guys up the mountain and find some routes to climb. For most of the guys, this was an entirely new experience. We had to explore the area, look around, get a little lost, and try some things out. We found a cave up high on the mountain that fascinated us.
Play is what we were naturally inclined to do when we were kids - to imagine something and go after creating it. Most men I know have lost this or traded it in for being a spectator or consumer - rather than tapping into that instinct to create and explore.
On the way to Summit Mt. Harvard
Risk is also a bit different from most of us think of. A lot of men I know end up in counseling because they did something ‘risky’ - like drink and drive, have an affair, or some other stupid impulsive act. That’s not risk, that’s self-sabatoge. Risk involves doing something that scares the shit out of you, but offers the reward of a more full life - not a deficit. For many of the men that go on our retreats and adventures, the riskiest thing they do is to tell their story to the men around them. Uncovering and unmasking is typically one of the hardest things a man can do. For others, it’s pushing themselves physically and emotionally to lean into their fear of heights, failure, or fatigue.
For myself, this happened often (always) in rock-climbing. Since I was a little kid I was absolutely terrified of heights. If I was a few feet off the ground my legs were knocking. But, by leaning into this fear and taking what felt like a huge risk to climb or rappel, I eventually was able to uncover the source of this fear, and it had nothing to do with heights. By taking risk, I was able to add more to my life than I ever thought possible.
Rapelling in Boulder, CO
Community, as my friend Bill says, is an extremely overused word. The community is simply the group of people you find yourself in the midst of, and it has nothing to do with how well connected you are to any of them. Comradery, on the other hand, involves the intentional choosing of your community towards a like-minded purpose. For most of the guys in my life this involves something to do with the pursuit of sobriety. Comradery is a combination of ‘doing life with others’ and ‘pursuing purpose’. It’s much more than just hanging out or proximity to each other.
Isolation has been, in my opinion, the kryptonite to men’s mental health. And yet, this is what most of us were taught or shown to do. Be on your own. Don’t have needs. Be bullet proof. And yet, the opposite is what we need. Be with others, and have your needs met through your vulnerability. It’s not easy and it requires a lot of practice. But knowing that you have folks in your life who have your back, are for you, and who are willing to work towards your growth is absolutely essential.
Exploring the backside of Mt. Harvard towards Mt. Columbia
Finally (but not exhaustively), men need Rest. Real, actual rest. Not escape. Not shutting down and isolating. Not laziness. But rest. Rest is not a reward for productivity—it is a fundamental need that protects emotional balance, physical health, and relational integrity. Most of the men I know have been taught to equate their worth with their output - they are only loved if they are needed.
So, how can you rest? It’s more than a power nap over the lunch break (although I’m a huge fan of power naps). We begin to rest when we intentionally take time for activities that quiet the nervous system. One of my favorite parts of these trips we do is offering men the freedom to do what they need to do - for some that involves pushing themselves to summit a 14er and breathing the clean, thin air at the summit - for others it involves pitching a hammock by a creek and napping - and for others it happens when they cast a fly out on an alpine stream and catching a cutthroat trout.
Fishing under the Crestones on Mens Mountain Adventure
There’s no one right way to get these four elements into your life, but it’s essential that you try. Focus on the small shifts you can make at first. Maybe it’s just a powernap during lunch, or maybe it’s even taking a lunch break in the midst of a hectic day. You don’t have to do everything all at once, but it’s important that you do something.
If you’re interested in one of the trips I talked about, be sure to check our events page for the adventures and retreats offered by Rocks to Rivers.
If this scratched an itch and you’d like to learn more, check out this podcast with myself and Bill Blair discussing the way we design and model the trips discussed.