But now the Games are over, even the upcoming footy finals aren’t enough to keep me from being overwhelmed by the news.

When I consider that we’re still months away from a US election, with our own election right around the corner, I can easily let that feeling of being overwhelmed either shut me down or worse – start to make reactive choices for me.

So, in the interests of being able to cope for the next little while and making sure that I’m not getting played like a useful idiot (a naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda, something I have been in the past, much to my regret), I’d like to share a basic plan for keeping your head level and thinking straight when we’re in tumultuous times.

It’s all about control.

Take the US election for example. The saying goes, ‘If the USA sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold’.  The US election is really important to us. There’s so much at stake for our country economically, culturally, and from a national security standpoint.

Yet we have absolutely zero impact when it comes to influencing the outcome of that election. Most of America is in the same boat as us. Is it fair that a few hundred thousand people in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin get to decide the national security and economic outcomes for the rest of the world for the next four years? No.

Can I do anything about that? No. And this is what I want to talk about.

After I got divorced, I was in complete upheaval, totally stuck in an emotional mire. My ideas of how to handle things weren’t enough, so I needed ideas that weren’t mine to get me moving. I reached out to a mate, the elite-level executive coach Siimon Reynolds. I must have sounded desperate because he swiftly gifted me three incredibly expensive sessions of his time.

Siimon taught me the concept of having an internal locus of control vs an external locus of control (locus is just a fancy word for location). An internal locus of control is the belief that our actions and our choices directly influence what happens. With a strong internal locus of control, we tend to feel more empowered and more responsible for our lives. An external locus of control is when we believe life happens to us and we have absolutely no power over it.

We believe the reason things happen to us is because of external factors like luck, fate, or what other people choose.

When I called Siimon, I was helpless, passive, and truly believed I had zero influence over what was going on. I had a very strong external locus of control. So, how do we change that? How do we take the power back?

Simply put; if we focus on what we can control and accept what we can’t control, we replace fear and powerlessness with stability and resilience. Given the political polarisation we’re experiencing, economic instability, horrible international conflicts, it’s understandable to feel anxious or powerless sometimes.

But those feelings get in the way of you actually enjoying this day today. They get in the way of connecting with people you care about and who care about you. Your kid who’s asking you to look at this cool thing they made with Lego doesn’t care what some politician is saying about nuclear power. Yet because the politician said that, your kid gets the message that they don’t matter to you as much as your phone, where you’re reading that story.

Managing these feelings is about more than you.  Here’s a way to figure out what’s in your control. It’s pretty simple, all you need is a piece of paper and a pen.

Draw the outline of a soccer ball that takes up the whole page, and in the middle of that, the outline of tennis ball. Inside the tennis ball (the internal locus of control), write down all the things in your life that you can actually influence. Your personal health, your relationships, your work, your daily routines, and crucially – how you think about things. Because you might not be able to control the outcome of elections or wars or whether that nice lady will text you back; but you can control how you respond to the news, how you engage with people around you, and how you take care of your mental and physical heath.

Then in the soccer ball circle, write out all the things you can’t control. Climate change, power prices, traffic, how the sun is in your eyes when you drive home, who wins the AFL grand final, Ryan Papenhuyzen’s ankle, the tone of voice your partner uses when they remind you to take out the bins – whatever it is, if you can’t actually control it, put it in the big circle.

Then take a long hard look at it. Look for what’s missing. What is your ego insisting is in the outer circle but might have more to do with what you think about or what you make it mean? What choices belong in the inner circle that create things in the outer circle? (For example, choosing to stay in a relationship or a job, or choosing to not go and see a psychologist.)

Once you’ve had a few minutes contemplating your lists just go about your day, while still holding these balls in your mind. (I didn’t want you to forget it, so I deliberately made this whole thing into a dick joke.) Every time you get worked up about stuff in the outer circle get in the habit of reminding yourself that you have zero control over it, but you have 100 per cent control over how you think about it.

This is not to say that we have to accept things that are shitty and just suck it up. Things actually start to feel heaps better when we begin to change the things we can change. To do that – set achievable, measurable, realistic goals for things within your control and then make them scheduled daily habits.

With me, if it doesn’t go in the calendar, it doesn’t happen. So, everything goes in the calendar.

I find it quite motivating to remember that we can’t change the world, but we can change the world around us. By focusing on bringing positive change to our home, our work, and our community, soon we can feel like our whole world has changed – mainly because it has.

Like anything, it’s important to treat the cause once the symptoms are under control. It goes without saying that our simple brains can’t ever beat the algorithm – it will hook us every time.

Constant exposure to negative news can increase anxiety and a sense of helplessness. We can take control by limiting how long we’re exposed to it. Actively manage your media consumption. Set boundaries for how much news you consume and seek out positive or neutral sources of information.

If some of the stuff I’m talking about sounds impossible, a psychologist can offer another perspective or help with navigating rigid thinking. Since I’ve learned how to focus on what I can control, actively reframing my thinking, practicing radical acceptance, and getting into action in a problem-solving direction, things feel heaps better. I also get a lot more done because I’m not wasting time and energy lamenting at the state of the political left or Ryan Papenhuyzen’s tibia.

So, as we bob around on our esky in the stormy seas of the news cycle, if we can remember to hold onto our balls, we can accept we can’t control the weather or the waves, but we can build a sail out of our boardshorts and Kon-Tiki that thing all the way to Tahiti.

Related:

Osher Günsberg on why you need a mental map

Osher Günsberg on why vulnerability and resilience are connected

The post Osher Günsberg on coming to grips with what you can actually control in life appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

It’s not always going to be bad, and it’s not always going to be good. And recently, it hasn’t been good. Honestly, it got pretty bad – and I got lost in the wilderness without realising that I had tools to get myself back to mental safety.

You’d think I’d notice it coming with all the familiar warning signs piling up. I was becoming unusually quiet around people and then breaking out in a cracking great cold sore, but I still didn’t notice.

I didn’t want to be unable to cope, so I just kept pushing on, reframing my increasingly uncomfortable reality to fit the narrative that I’m okay despite, in the words of Pulp Fiction’s Marsellus Wallace, being “pretty far from okay”.

One of my favourite books, Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, describes something called “bending the map”. It’s a term taken from the world of orienteering, where runners refuse to update their mental map despite overwhelming evidence that they are lost in the woods.

Rather than stop and figure out where they actually are, they stick to their planned course and just keep running, convinced that it’s the surroundings which must be wrong and not them. It’s a kind of unconscious hubris that can be deadly.

Gonzales tells the story of a very experienced hiker who was found barely alive, five kilos lighter than he was three days prior, clinging to a tree and nearly dead from hypothermia because he refused to open his backpack full of survival gear, as admitting he was lost would mean admitting that he needed help.

I’m not awaiting the mountain rescue chopper, but I absolutely relate to that. I didn’t want to accept that I was getting strung out again.

I’ve been going through a career transition, and as often happens, financial uncertainty comes with such a moment. Uncertainty that almost tells the universe “Hey, if you want a free shot, now’s the time”.

If you’ve ever owned a pre-1980 car, you’ll know that the vehicle waits until payday to blow up the alternator. Similarly, our 100-plus-year-old house waited until now to transform our basement into the underground canals of Antwerp.

As the plumber sharply inhaled through his teeth looking at our new subterranean river system and then started describing the size of the digger we would need to redirect the groundwater around our foundations, my brain jumped into self-protection mode and just shut down my ability to understand English.

On top of that, after getting some blood tests done, I got a call from the specialist’s office, bumping my appointment up from a month away to this Thursday without saying why.

As the stresses increased, I didn’t recognise the signs. I got quieter around the house, which worried my wife, Audrey, because she knows somethings up. I, however, just kept ploughing on.

This included pushing my body at the gym, in an effort to gain some respite from the uncomfortable feelings in my body. The last straw was going as hard as I could at mat Pilates. My stepdaugher Georgia is an excellent teacher, and I try to go once a week to balance out the barbells. I don’t care what your 1RM is, mat Pilates is pure brutality.

Pushing forward with no regard for my own health, I was futilely hoping that doubling down on everything would make it all feel better soon. Instead, things just got worse, and then, boom – I got a cold sore. A pet corn flake of my very own, so large that I’ll need to introduce it when I have my next video call, making its home under my right nostril.

I’d been bending the map, not wanting to accept that I am struggling, taking numerous wrong turns, in an attempt to deal with rising levels of stress.

I wasn’t paying attention to my rising anxiety levels and rather than stopping and noticing my brain catastrophising, I allowed those thoughts to get away from me and start to run the show.

There was a time when I had a strict daily regimen that helped me avoid all these things, a practice that included journalling, tracking anxiety levels, and having realistic expectations around what my work schedule and training might look like.

As I got better, I used these structures less and less. It’s all working well, why bother? Like most things, everything was just fine until it wasn’t.

While I wasn’t clinging to a tree on the side of a freezing mountain with a backpack full of warm clothes and gear to make a fire, I was on the way to a perilous mental state. Not only unable to notice I was in trouble, but also not utilising any of the tools that I have to deal with such a situation.

The only move then is to find acceptance and get into action.

So, I marched up to the pharmacy to grab some over-the-counter Famciclovir for the face-herpes. As the only cure for the over-training was rest, I sat myself down to deal with the catastrophising I was experiencing around the suburban submarine base and whatever the doctor had to see me about so quickly.

I find catastrophising a by-product of having a creative job. I make things up for a living. I write books, screenplays, TV scripts, podcasts, live comedy shows, songs – I even draw.

My mental reward system for amplified ideas and unpredictable connections is very trigger-happy, which is good because that’s what I need for work.

Yet my brain can be just as creative with the negative stuff. I have to understand that I can’t have one without the other, so staying on top of the creative catastrophising allows the positively creative side of it to flourish.

That looks like grabbing a pen and paper, and taking whatever it is that I’m catastrophising about (money, for example) and then writing out in detail, the absolute best, best, best-case scenario. The full, over the top, everything goes in our favour, dream version of how things might turn out.

Then I write the absolute, worst-case scenario. The darkest, most grim, most unintended consequence domino effect horror-show scenario, like Dean Koontz and Stephen King were in a pissing contest trying to describe how horrible things are, graphically describing every flow-on effect as ridiculously as I can, as far into the future as I can, going into great detail about how, 25 years from now, there’s no question that something awful will absolutely happen because of this thing now.

The final step is to write the more probable outcome in between the two of those things, in similar detail.

Trying to do this when I’m in an already heightened state is impossible because my brain can refuse to see how things could be any other way, so it’s important to consider this situation with a brain that’s not mine. So, I asked Audrey what she thought was going on. Her take was tangential, yet far more optimistic than any of mine.

This is where things get interesting. There’s something about writing out those three scenarios, by hand – not typed into my phone – but written in my barely-legible, son of two doctors cave scrawling, that makes the working bits of my brain say to the ruminating bits of my brain: “Wait up…hang on fellas, we can see it all written out in front of us. Looks like he finally understands that we’ve been thinking about it over and over and that we can’t stop thinking about it over and over, but it’s clear now that he got the message. Good job amygdala. Pack it up hypothalamus. We’re done here.”

In a few short minutes, without changing my circumstances at all, still with a potentially massive plumbing bill and possibly enormous news coming from the specialist – I feel heaps, heaps better.

So, I’m back on the daily five-star rating to track my anxiety to remind myself that no mental state is a permanent state, and with my full daily routine back in operation, hopefully it will help me from getting lost in the wilderness and refusing to accept it.

Osher Günsberg on why vulnerability and resilience are connected

Osher Günsberg on reframing your reaction to bad news

The post Osher Günsberg on why you need a mental map appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

There’s got to be more to it. This question floated around the back of my head for years, until the other day taking out the compost an idea popped out of my subconscious like a computer punch card from a ’50s sci-fi film. Vulnerability and resilience are two halves of the same whole. They can only exist if both are present. Think about it. Without Big Boi, André 3000 is just making an instrumental flute album. And while it’s a great record, it’s not OutKast. Vulnerability and resilience are two sides of the same piece of toast. There’s a sweet spot where it’s just right.

Too high on the dial and your bread hardens so much that it is at the same time impenetrable to melting butter yet so fragile if you pick it up incorrectly it will disintegrate. (Side note: that is the best toast-related mental health metaphor you’ll read today.)

Vulnerability is how susceptible you are to danger, harm, stress, and damage. Resilience is the capacity to recover from or deal with that harm, danger, stress or damage. They can only exist together.

One without the other leaves you with a suit of brittle armour masquerading as a false sense of safety. It’s almost like you become a plate-glass window. You’re so hard that the nastiest weather can’t touch you, yet when life sends a Mitchell Starc bouncer hurtling towards you at 160km/h, it’s inevitable that the whole facade will shatter and now a thousand razor-sharp slivers are raining down on you.

So many of us go through life far too fragile. In perilous danger of financial or emotional calamity at any moment because we have no resilience. Things might feel secure, but it we aren’t able to form relationships, express our personality, our creativity, or engage with others without thinking everyone’s trying to steal our stuff. From there it’s a slippery slope that can lead to hours of YouTube rabbit-holing, which starts out looking for footage of ’70s piano bars on the upper deck of a 747, yet ends at 3am texting all your friends about the terrible dangers of contrails.

We need to be vulnerable to feel anything worth feeling. We need to be resilient to deal with the full scope of feelings that show up, so we can keep going for ourselves and for others. Usually, we don’t get to choose when vulnerability comes for us. Resilience, however, is something that we can develop. To build within us the knowledge that we will be able to handle whatever comes.

And that’s really, important. How much are we limiting ourselves because our choices are coming from a place that fears negative outcomes? If we actively work on our resilience, that allows us to be vulnerable when needed. We contribute to a super fund so we’ll have financial resilience. We train so we’ll have physical resilience. Yet what about emotional resilience? Without it we can’t be emotionally vulnerable.

How can we enjoy the full spectrum of what it means to be a human if we aren’t emotionally vulnerable? When our youngest child was born, I cradled him to my bare chest for the first time with two equal ideas in my head – “My wife has harnessed the power of the universe to create this pure and perfect manifestation of love in human form. I no longer matter. Everything is now about you” and “HOLY SHIT YOU COULD DIE AT ANY MOMENT, HOW CAN I LIVE ANOTHER SECOND KNOWING THIS?”

We feel the first thing because of the second thing. We can deal with the second thing because of the first thing. That’s the deal. That’s what it means to be equally vulnerable and resilient.

It’s the same with falling in love. It takes vulnerability to fully be in love with someone. If you’re worried about what will happen to you if they ever leave you, are you ever going to fully commit?

In my experience the other person starts to pick up on this, resentments start to creep in, and soon enough that relationship falls apart quicker than a flatpack cupboard on a rainy hard rubbish day. You know, the one you built together when you moved in?

If you’re prepared to be vulnerable, all the joy and growth and experiences that you can only have when you fully put your heart into someone else’s hands, all of those things can be yours.

Yet to do that, you need the resilience to deal with whatever that vulnerability might bring into your life. Including that relationship ending. If you’re vulnerable enough to tell another person that you’re really into them and they say, “Yeah, nah, I don’t feel the same way.” You need resilience to handle that, to be with the hurt and the heartbreak and yet also know you’ll be okay. It might take a little time, you might need to figure out your part of what happened so it doesn’t happen again, but it’ll be okay.

Yet what if someone has no emotional resilience and hears, “It’s been lovely yet, this isn’t for me. Thanks for the pancakes, good night.” We all know what it can look like. You could head off on a week-long drinking binge, set about writing horrible things from fake accounts 72 weeks deep into a new partner’s Instagram, spreading lies, acting out, possibly hurting themselves or hurting someone else, showing up outside their work . . . Those are not the actions of an emotionally resilient person, and none of us want to be in a situation where any of those things feel like a really good idea.

The long-term consequences of making choices like that can cause way bigger problems than someone you’re sweet on not being into you. Vulnerability is imperative in having a deep and loving relationship with another human being, and being okay if it ends. So, what’s the couch to 5K equivalent of emotional resilience? How do you build emotional resilience like a muscle? It’s the simple stuff. It starts with getting decent sleep, eating a well-balanced diet, moving your body, having something to do that’s not about you, and having a small but strong circle of relationships.

If you’re alone, your problems are yours alone to hold. If there’s someone to talk to, it’s immediately half as bad.

Don’t worry we aren’t trying to recreate an Iron Age village here. Yet if you try to cultivate and nurture just two close relationships in your life that aren’t your partner, you’re golden.

How close? Close enough that if you couldn’t make school pick-up in an emergency, this person would drop everything, make sure your kids got home safely, got fed and got to bed okay.

You can never have too many people to call on a bad day, and to make sure that happens, put the work in to start having great days with those same people.

Because that’s the stuff that builds resilience.

Related:

Osher Günsberg on reframing your reaction to bad news

Osher Günsberg on the mental burpee everyone needs to do

The post Osher Günsberg on why vulnerability and resilience are connected appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

I certainly know what it used to feel like.

When I lost Australian Idol, it felt like the world didn’t want me, like my life was over, and I’d be moving into a caravan park eating tinned spaghetti and Weetbix for the rest of my days, a washed up ex-TV guy shouting “I used to be someone ya little shits!” at the groms who are knock and running the tri-axle Viscount I now call home. However, between then and now, two important things happened;

1) I got sober, and 2) I lost two jobs in the same day (which is why this week is hilarious because it’s not the first time this has happened.)

I am incredibly grateful for my television career. I’ve worked hard to be the undeniable choice to keep the gig if the shows roll over.

At one point, I hosted four prime time television shows in the same year. To say that the last decade has been successful would be an understatement, and the cherry on top was getting nominated for a Gold Logie Award last year, a career defining moment if ever there was one.

So, to go from that workload, (and without being crass – that income, as those four prime time TV shows were on the mortgage application form when we bought this house) to nothing, well that could be tough.

The fact is, when the news broke publicly this week, it was just another Tuesday and the only remarkable thing about today is that it’s bin night.

This was not how it used to be.

My mentor David, who has guided me as I learned how to deal with uncomfortable feelings without needing to reach for a drink (or drugs or porn or sex or gambling or all of the above) held my hand the last time I got double-fired back in 2012.

I can still recall his voice on the phone as I told him “David I’ve just lost the last two jobs I had in the space of 18 hours”.

Without missing a beat he said, “I’m excited for you pal, this means that there’s bigger plans for you”.

Shocked that he did not want a front row seat to the pity party I was throwing, I repeated myself. “I don’t think you heard me correctly – I am now unemployed, divorced and paying rent out of my savings in a foreign country.”

“And I don’t think you heard me correctly – I’m excited for you. This means there’s bigger things ahead for you”.

Thankfully I’d been working with him for a while, so I knew enough to take a deep breath, reset on my exhale and by the time I breathed back in I had been able to let go of that old self-pity and experiment with the new way of being he was describing.

That reframe changed everything.

Instead of focusing on what I’d lost, I was able to put my energy into what was possible. The terrifying first-date question, “So, what are you working on?” now had a new answer. “I’m not working on anything”, became “I’m not working on anything, which means the next thing I work on can be anything”.

I am very grateful for David. I am equally grateful for my accountant, who had helped me save up a few vital months of runway. I used that money to pay myself a wage. My job? To invent the next job that I was going to do.

One of the shows I created was a dating show, and after pitching it around LA, a network in Australia bought it in the room. Not long after, the same network called to say they’d just acquired another dating show, would I like to host that one instead?

That was May 2013, and the show was The Bachelor Australia. I’d gone from unemployment to booking a massive network show once again, but I knew to not approach it the same as I had last time.

My former manager in LA, the late John Ferriter was an absolute mogul of the television industry. With the perfect combination of wisdom and strength, listening to him was like sitting at the foot of a showbiz oracle, his every sentence could be the title of the next massive business book. His wisdom guided me then, and still guides me now.

Two of his best have been with me these last few days. “Unless you host the 6 O’clock news, one day the big show you just booked is going to get cancelled. The moment you get that big show, you need to allocate time every week to planning for the day that happens.” Now I know when it happens, it’s not personal. It’s show business, not show friends.

You can be super tight with everyone on your production team, the network, even be driving a fancy free car the sponsors loaned you (thank you Mazda for that Turbo MX5 – I promise it was only sideways a few times). Yet the moment the show no longer makes a good business case, it’s over.

This is a little contrary to another hard truth of my game – it’s a fast yes or a slow no.

I’ve become better at spotting a slow no coming. When I was in breakfast radio in Brisbane, I saw a slow no appear on the horizon and before it arrived and made the choice for me. I was able to orchestrate a dignified exit.

Thankfully I spotted the current slow no a while back, but you wouldn’t have known from looking at me. I learned through my own mental health journey that the antidote to panic is a plan. Similar to how the ABC that has a folder full of clear action steps for when a reigning monarch dies sitting in the corner of every radio studio, I had a contingency plan and it slowly became my main mode of operation even though I was still shooting television and outwardly things looked like they’d keep going.

Importantly, my wife and I discussed this distant possibility well before it became a close possibility, and after seeking the advice of a business mentor I began to put everything in place about a year ago.

I changed the structured of my business, streamlined processes, hired people to help where I had blind spots.

While I was still actively shooting big shiny-floor TV shows, in the background projects I had been allocating time to develop were put on the top of the Trello board, and by the time there was confirmation that what we expected was going to happen (that these two jobs weren’t continuing on the network) it was a mostly seamless transition from one mode of operation to another.

There might have been a slight flicker as the UPS handed over to the emergency generator but other than that you wouldn’t notice anything was different, except that Dad’s around the house a bit more.

I won’t lie to you, I’ve had to do a heap of work around the self-worth and entitlement piece – but that’s all a part of it.

To make sure I was ready for the eventuality, I’ve been living as if this was going to happen since late last year. In that time, I’ve woken up with resentment, anger, or entitlement (sometimes all at once).

And rather than make any choices from that reactive space (like sending a verbose email to someone I really shouldn’t if I ever want to work again), I have been doing something different.

I’d try to notice those feelings, and then say to myself How fascinating! There’s a part of me that’s angry at (nice TV person) for getting the gig on (TV show I believed I should do). Well, that’s interesting isn’t it? I’m going to make a cup of coffee, sit down and write out all the things I’m angry at on the right side of my notebook. Things like ‘that guy gets all the gigs, ‘his podcast is HUGE, or ‘he’s got a massive deal with the Good Year blimp’ and then on the left side of the page, line by line I will write “of course” at the start of every one of those complaints, and then say them out loud.

If you’ve never tried this, you’ll be amazed at how effective it can be. A version of this happened at least once a week at first, then every fortnight or so, with perhaps a spate of three days in a row here and there. As uncomfortable as it was, the work was worth it.

By the time I was given the news face to face, I was able to smile and say something like “Of course. I totally get it. It’s tough to commission anything in this market. I love working with you, the whole team are great, I love the formats and if they ever get a chance to get up again, I’ll be first in line to show you I’m still the undeniable choice to host them.”

Because all of that is the truth.

The hurt and anger and resentment? That’s just me as a reactive petulant child, but sometimes he can take the wheel. The wreckage that kid has caused my life, the lives of others, my health and my career is immense – so it’s worth the work required to keep him in the back seat.

There’s one more powerful reframe I use if the childish resentment Demogorgon starts to reach for the steering wheel – it’s a moment between Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth in the film The Godfather Part 2. Speaking about his mate who got whacked to Corleone who ordered the whacking, Roth says, “I never complained, because it was business. And this is the business we have chosen”.

And this is the business I have chosen. I chose this life. I can un-choose it any time I want. So as Butch Coolidge said to Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, “What now”?

I’ll tell you what now. It’s got to do with one other thing that John taught me. Leaning forward in his chair under a photo of him jamming with Paul McCartney he says, “Someone’s going to be the next hit songwriter. Why shouldn’t it be you?”

Giving myself permission to think big and to execute big has changed my life.

Changing my mind from thinking, That sort of thing is for other people with connections and capital and lower body fat, I won’t even start, to That is exactly the sort of thing I would do. Pass me the post-it notes.

What a gift. What a wonderful present to get for my 50^th birthday. An opportunity to reinvent what I get to do.

That’s what now.

Related:

Osher Günsberg on the mental burpee everyone needs to do

Osher Günsberg on what healthy masculinity actually looks like

The post Osher Günsberg on reframing your reaction to bad news appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

That’s not to say that recent local and global events haven’t put a strain on that. When it comes to mental fitness, the recent weeks living in my city of Sydney has been like trying to play first grade footy with no preseason warm-up. I’m sure you feel the same way. There’s been a lot going on and it’s a lot for anybody.

My mental fitness had been pretty good, however, just like when I find myself puffed at the top of a flight of stairs or my “good t-shirt” is a little too tight, I came to understand that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I needed a bit of mental strength and conditioning work to get into better shape.

If you’ve ever done a 10-week challenge at your gym you’d be familiar with the most bastardly of all exercises, the burpee. I hate them, you hate them, we all hate them. Why? Because the burpee is possibly the best total-body strength and conditioning exercise you can do in a confined space. It doesn’t do everything, but it does a lot in a short amount of time.

There’s no doubt if you were to do 100 burpees a day for 30 days, it would transform your aerobic fitness, strength and flexibility. It would change your physical fitness. Luckily there’s an exercise I can use to improve my mental fitness just as profoundly. Mental fitness being the ability to make healthy choices that are not influenced by strong reactive emotions. If I’m mentally fit I’m able to feel all those powerful feelings and pause long enough to think, is this the right thing to say or do? More often than not, it isn’t.

So, what’s a really powerful, really efficient technique that if you can perform on a daily basis would transform your ability to be less reactive and more deliberate about your day? What’s the burpee of mental fitness?

Before we get there, it’s important to know what it is we’re hoping to improve. The Zen Buddhists say we all have two minds.

The “thinking mind” and the “observing mind”. Our thinking mind is an excited Labrador chasing a frisbee. Our observing mind is sitting on a park bench watching that frothing Labrador about to run straight onto a busy freeway. Yet if the Labrador runs onto the freeway, the observing mind also feels the consequences.

When we’re flooded with emotion, we can get stuck in “thinking mind” and it’s almost impossible to see that the frisbee isn’t the best thing to be focusing on. So, how do we build up the strength of the “observing mind”? For me, it’s noticing.

You can get into it in a couple of ways. Try putting the words “I’m noticing” in front of a physical feeling. For example, right now I’m noticing that my left ‘sit bone’ feels a little heavier on the chair than my right sit bone. Just that is enough to get me out of my thinking mind and into my observing mind. Set a timer on your phone and try just noticing sensations in your body for one minute.

Another way to use ‘noticing’ is to enquire about the emotions we’re feeling. Right now, I’m a little nervous I won’t make the deadline to write this column. If I notice a bit more, I discover that nervousness comes from wanting to do a good job for the people at Men’s Health, and that I don’t want to come across too sincere when you’re reading this. And once I’m aware of the fact that I’m feeling a bit nervous, a bit tense in my stomach, and my body’s feeling a bit stiff and sore, I know that when I’m like that, I tend to not make great choices. But now I’m aware of it, I can carry on typing this alongside those sensations and emotions, instead of letting that fear change what I write here.

“Noticing“ really helps my observing mind get used to jumping into emotionally intense moments and taking a look over things. Noticing can also be used as meditation. When I meditate, I can get extraordinarily frustrated that I can’t not think of stuff. So instead I just close my eyes and notice the things I’m thinking about, watching the thoughts go by me. Sometimes the thoughts are like slow boats on a river, usually the thoughts are a waterfall. What kind of SUV is Blaze from the Monster Machines? What did that bloke who paddled a Pumpkin down the Tumut River like it was a canoe cook with stuff he scooped out? Does my dog remember songs? I try to just watch these thoughts go by, and not get trapped under the weight of the thought waterfall.

Other times I’ll put a five-minute timer on my phone, and just notice the different parts of my body as I breathe in and out. Going clockwise from my left big toe all the way around my body down to my right big toe, spending a breath on each part. So – left big toe up through my foot, ankle, shin, knee, thigh, hip, all up my torso, back down the other side. All I’m doing is training my observing mind to get used to getting involved automatically.

You can even do it walking. When you walk, just walk and notice things. Notice the different hubcaps on the cars. Notice the different species of grass on different people’s lawns. Notice the different kinds of trees. Name them. It’s not a tree, it’s a eucalypt. It’s a Melaleuca. It’s bottlebrush. It’s not a bird. It’s a magpie. It’s a currawong. It’s a Channel Bill Cuckoo, if you’re unlucky enough to live next to one of those noisy bastards. You’d be amazed at what just ten minutes of that can do.

If you haven’t got time for any of these, try a tactic that is way harder than it sounds. See if you can notice just three times today when you go from sitting to standing. What you’re doing is you’re getting your observing mind involved in these otherwise subconscious or automatic behaviours. You’re getting your observant mind used to just being there in those spaces where sometimes you’re just on auto-pilot, or worse automatically reactive. The more sets and reps you do, the more you’re building up that neural pathway to that observing mind, getting in the habit of noticing your thoughts.

And when those peak moments come, for example, I’m noticing that I’m getting really frustrated at what’s my partner is doing here. I know that sometimes when I get really frustrated, I say things I regret. When I’m mentally fit, that tiny moment helps me take a breath and perhaps make a better choice, which serves me and my partner, than I otherwise would have.

If you’ve never done it before, just try it yourself for a couple of minutes. Just try noticing. Noticing how your body’s feeling. Try to notice when you feel happy or sad or anxious or bored or joyous or excited or horny or dull. Just notice. Soon enough, that observant mind starts to show up a bit more and help you make better choices that are aligned with the kind of person that you want to be in the world, and the kind of person you want to be to the people you love and the people who love you.

Related:

Osher Günsberg on what healthy masculinity actually looks like

Osher Günsberg: how I found freedom from fear of death

The post Osher Günsberg on the mental burpee everyone needs to do appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

As I scan the room and see my friend and I step around the full table by the door, and that delightful feeling is completely shattered as out of nowhere someone at the table next to me punches me in the shoulder hard enough to rattle my teeth and knock me off my balance.

I swerve around to face whoever hit me, my adrenaline firing as I’m wondering what’s about to kick off and I see a smiling face that my brain recognises but I struggle to immediately place.

It’s a man I haven’t seen in maybe five years. I think it was someone’s birthday lunch, and he was their older friend. Tall fella, mid 60s, long reach, an older-model Australian man – let’s call him Clancy*. (*That’s not his real name or his real description. I don’t want to out him)  We had sat next to each other at lunch and connected over motorbikes. It was a good chat, however, I haven’t thought of this person, said this person’s name, or spoken about this person to my friend that I met him through since that day five years ago.

It took me a little bit to get my head together, until my mouth caught up with my brain and I explained that it was good to see him, I’m here for a meeting, I won’t be long and after I’ll come and chat.

Walking towards my friend, I had to take a moment to recalibrate because I was rattled by what just happened. I’m not a person that gets into fights. Ever. There was one time that I punched a bully in the tuck shop line when I was 14, but that’s another story.

I was rattled by this. Clancy is a big kind of bloke, a surf club-life-member type who looks after himself.  And now I have my back to him and it’s hard to focus on chatting with my friend because I’m wondering if this bloke is going to come and put me in a friendly headlock and give me a noogie as a way to say goodbye before he heads off.

To centre myself, I try to understand where he’s coming from. As an older guy, when he was younger that’s probably how Clancy was told how men connected, how blokes of his cohort showed each other that they cared.

Wrapping up my meeting I went and chatted with this guy for a few minutes, then took the lead with a one-handed goodbye handshake.

Riding home I investigated why I got so rattled by the whole exchange. Turns out it was a physical flashback to the school I went to, where a hard punch on the arm was a way of saying hello. If you were joining a group of people then it was a dead arm as a welcome because everyone gets in on it.

There are a number of other such greetings.

I used to work with a bloke who was from the country and his signal of affection was a nut slap. He’d misdirect and signal an incoming handshake and as you came together his other hand would just flick you in the nuts. Hard enough to make you drop to your knees struggling to breathe. That was hello.

We’ve all met a guy who does the crushing handshake, like he’s the henchman in a Bond film. Is he assuming I’m keeping some walnuts in my palm and he’s helping me crack them? Does he work on commission with an orthopaedic surgeon? Does he think I’m hiding a piece of coal in my hand and together we’ll make a diamond?

If it’s not a physically dominant greeting, it’s verbal.

“Hey! Osher ya fat fuck!”.

“Yeah, nice to see you too, Gav”.

It might be a controversial take, but here goes.

I don’t like being greeted in any of these ways, and I don’t think it makes me any less of a man because of it. I would like to think that we don’t need to call someone horrible names, or punch them in the arm, or slap them in the nuts, to say hello, or show that we care about them.

When I point out that I don’t like it in the moment, I’ve been told it’s playful and harmless. No, it isn’t. It’s a shitty way of asserting physical dominance over somebody.

Punches, nut-slaps and insults are like shields we weakly cower behind, dominating the other person so we don’t have to be emotionally vulnerable when engaging with them.

It takes self-worth, confidence and presence to look someone in the eye and connect with them as you shake their hand.

Because in that cafe, what does the old guy want to do? He just wants to reconnect with the guy he had a great chat about motorbikes with but he might not know how to do that in a way that doesn’t involve a slug to the shoulder. It’s not his fault, perhaps he doesn’t know there’s another way to say hello.

Talking about this moment to an acquaintance, she commented that “this kind of toxic masculinity needs to be called out”.

I do take issue with that word.  A punch in the arm is not great behaviour and labelling it ‘toxic’ just ends the conversation. In an effort to help men and especially boys, figure out what’s okay and absolutely normal, I believe that referring to aspects of masculinity as “healthy” and “unhealthy” offers not only a pathway to change but a way for others to model behaviour for them.

I appreciate it’s “toxic” is word that describes many aspects of workplace culture and overall behaviour that detracts from our society yet that label is limiting when it comes to offering solutions or alternatives for young men and boys to find their way towards, as they figure out how to fully express their masculine self in a healthy way.

When it’s expressed in a healthy way, masculinity is as important to our community as femininity. It’s vital that we model healthy masculinity for the young men and boys around us, and it’s on all of us to make sure that unhealthy expressions of masculinity have less and less impact on our workplaces, our friendships and our families.

Masculinity has played a huge role in my life. My career couldn’t possibly be what it is, nor would I have the relationships that I have without the drive, vision, confidence and whatever other things that are often labelled, but aren’t exclusively, masculine traits. I most certainly do have those things, yet my masculinity doesn’t express itself like a slap in the dick to say hello.

I don’t believe that makes me any less of a man.

Related:

Osher Günsberg: how I found freedom from fear of death

Osher Günsberg on the hard road to a healthy ego

The post Osher Günsberg on what healthy masculinity actually looks like appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

On the 2023 season of The Masked Singer, one of the masks was The Grim Reaper. Three metres tall, carrying a scythe, he was terrifying to look at, yet had the unmistakable voice of a pop superstar. When I finally screamed “take it off” at the top of my lungs, I was rewarded in that I’d correctly guessed it was Darren Hayes.

He’s a showbiz machine, commits so completely to everything and embraced this character fully. One of his huge performance sets featured a throne sitting atop a mountain of skulls. After it was wheeled off stage, knowing it wouldn’t get used again I accidentally on purpose pocketed one of these skulls on the way out to the carpark. Now it occupies pride of place on my desk, gratefully reminding me every day that I am going to die, and it is a wonderful thing to think about.

There was a time when my own death was too terrifying to contemplate. Part of a greater suite of problems I was struggling with, a very kind and very patient psychologist had to walk me through the ego-pummelling journey of accepting that the denial of my own mortality was actually the root cause of why I was struggling with depression and anxiety; why I was either emotionally unavailable in relationships, or conversely ickily clingy when I did get into a relationship.

It even had something to do with why I was relentlessly pursuing career opportunities at the expense of my health, relationships, and even the career I was trying to build. Nothing gets you to “no” faster than the stink of desperation.

Whenever you’re trying to find relief by avoiding something uncomfortable, you often don’t realise that your avoidance actually amplifies the discomfort. The fact remains, the only way out of the flames is through them.

So I started small. I eased myself into things with the Flaming Lips’ classic ‘Do you realize?’. Hidden among the uplifting lyrics, the goosebump inducing cadences and lush orchestration is the glorious line from Wayne Coyne: “Do you realise that everyone you know someday will die?”.

That line hits you like an accidental kick in the balls from a peppy two-year-old. A powerful blow, delivered with a giggle and a smile, is followed by a few seconds of anxious contemplation before the true deep ache sets in—an ache that can sometimes leave you weeping in agony.

It’s the same thing.

Darren Hayes on The Masked Singer I Channel 10.

At first, it’s absolutely overwhelming to think that everyone you love and everything you love will one day be gone. You get breathless when you consider that day might even be today. Yet just like how the first few workouts of your latest health kick absolutely suck, soon enough your body begins to adapt and you are able to cope with more and more.

Within weeks, you forget about your stitching intercostal muscles and start to enjoy a newfound ability to apply previously inaccessible force to objects and the greater world around you in order to execute the ideas in your mind. Whether it’s saying ‘yes’ to a holiday where you’re going to do lots of walking or lifting up a giggling toddler to play with them (just mind your balls this time). In the same way, thinking about your own death has a paradoxical effect of helping you enjoy life more than ever before.

If you are in acceptance that it will all eventually go away some day (and that day might even be today) whatever we’re doing and whomever you’re doing it with becomes immensely more precious and important.

It can take an otherwise mundane moment with the same people doing the same thing and fill it full of love and joy and curiosity, forcing you to examine the minutiae of the situation and to cherish it simply for what it is. It supercharges even the most banal activity by forcing the question “would I have wanted to go out this way?”

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not super-comfortable to think about my kids dying before me, and the death of my wife fills me with dread. Same goes for my brothers and my friends. But if I take some deep breaths and sit with it for a few moments, I have a chance to re-evaluate what it means to spend time with them and for them, and to have a good think about what I dedicate each of my finite number of breaths towards.

Why wait until a terminal diagnosis to take powerful actions in accordance with your values, free from regret? Because I have some uncomfortable news for you. All of us have a terminal diagnosis right now. We are all going to die. We all have only so long to live, and there’s no cure.

So whatever it is that makes your heart sing, don’t waste another breath thinking about it. Make time to do it. No matter what precious possessions I purchase with my hard-earned dollars, not one single object in my home will become a priceless archaeological artefact. Every single thing in my house will eventually be recycled or become landfill. That’s not to say I don’t care for a beautiful guitar that I own, or a precision camera I enjoy using—however I am mindful of how in the past I had an unhealthy attachment to such objects. It’s nice stuff, but it’s just stuff. And one day it will all be gone.

The only thing that will still be here when any of us are gone are the stories that people will tell about us, specifically stories about how we made them feel. Knowing that is the absolute key.

As someone who used to have a problem with leaving the house and even just being around people (including people I knew well), now I search for genuine and appropriate moments of connection in everyday interactions, because those are things that cannot be purchased, and those moments of connection tie me to this present moment and bring lasting happiness.

Staring into the skull of a pop star every day helps me think about how I can do a better job of life today than I did the day before. I get enormous self-worth and satisfaction out of trying to improve all aspects of my life.

Perhaps it’s finding ways to not get stuck in unhelpful argument routines with my wife (sure, I’m not alone there) or figuring out how to make my morning coffee without spilling one stray grind during the whole process from bean to cup. Sometimes these two things are related, and it’s worth putting the effort in to find a way to improve them every day.

Darren Hayes’ plastic brain bucket helps me remember that there’s a time coming at the gym when I won’t be able to just keep putting weight on the bar every workout, and the feeling of achievement I get from a PB will start to come from simply showing up and pulling five sets of twelve deadlifts with good form. I’m not there yet but knowing it’s coming means that every single rep of every single set is a privilege.

Whatever it is, in my experience there’s absolutely nothing that can exponentially multiply the love you feel for those around you, increase the attention to the thing you’re doing, amplify the appreciation for the moment you’re in, or focus your choices so clearly on actions that are in accordance with your values than spending time every day thinking seriously about the inescapable fact that one day you and me and everyone we know will be taking a dirt nap. That day might be years away, it might be this afternoon.

Nobody who died in an accident today walked out of their house this morning expecting it to happen. Today could be my day too. And I think about this every day because I want to be in a place where every time I get on the bicycle, the motorbike, or climb a ladder on a weekend holding a power tool (I’m in the age bracket where this sort of thing is my most likely cause of death) I know that the people I love are aware how much I love them, nothing is unsaid that needs to be said, and that whatever I’m doing when it happens is something so aligned with my values that people will say “it’s how he would have wanted to go”.

Not a bad affirmation I reckon.

Related:

Osher Günsberg on the hard road to a healthy ego

Osher Günsberg on the importance of finding purpose in your work

The post Osher Günsberg: how I found freedom from fear of death appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

Pulitzer Prize-winning musician Kendrick Lamar is no stranger to this concept, and he has made it easy for all of us to remember one of life’s most vital lessons: “Be humble, sit down”.

Despite the weight and power of this message, it’s something I still need to remind myself of every damn day. Like anyone, I have an ego. Yet staying humble and keeping my ego in a healthy space is a daily practice, because for a large part of my life my ego was not very healthy at all.

The signs of an unhealthy ego read like a list of regrettable things I did as younger man, and some things I still struggle with today. For a start, I was overly competitive. I couldn’t stand someone else getting something I wanted and I was the worst at team sports. I’d gnash my teeth when people I admired won awards or got shows I wished I was hosting. It was so bad that I had to stop playing pool at the pub because I transformed into an absolute prick of a person.

An unhealthy ego makes it difficult to accept criticism, and that has always been rough for me. To be clear, I’m only where I am in life because smarter people than I have told me that what I’m doing isn’t good enough, and I’ve been lucky enough to then adjust in the direction they guide me. However, I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that when I get given notes or critique on my performance, I have a petulant version of me who can’t bear to be told what to do, struggling to escape a headlock as I attempt to stop him from using my mouth to say something.

My unhealthy ego can give me a sense of superiority. I discovered this when I was walking some of the steps I take to stay sober. I discovered that so many of my problems were caused by a sense of being better than others, a feeling that’s dominated my life. It was horrible.

This unfortunately extended to frequently failing to consider the feelings of others. Yeah, I know. It was what I knew at the time. Now I know better. I try to do better and I do my best to remember that I’m not better than anyone else and nobody else is better than me.

One of the worst aspects of having an unhealthy ego is that you need external validation or approval to feel okay. I didn’t have the sense of worth inside me to feel okay. This put me in relationships with romantic partners and even colleagues that left a lot to be desired. I’ve been told I could be icky, clingy and not great to be around. Every now and then that trait still pops up—especially when I’m stressed out—so staying on top of it is super-important.

That leads to dealing with failure. There was a time when failure would utterly destroy me. The failure would then prevent me from trying anything new. Thank goodness I learned how to get a hold of that one, because I’m now able to feel the disappointment of failure, and then take the time to learn what I did wrong. To take the time to appreciate the things that I learned from the failure.

An example of this would be when I met a beautiful, fascinating woman at a party in Venice Beach. We hit it off really well then made a date to see each other again. After the first dinner, she never texted me again. Totally ghosted. I was disappointed for sure, and yet instead of making it mean “I’m worthless” I was able to see it as “good intel”. After all, I didn’t want to pursue someone or be involved with someone that wasn’t as interested as I am. That reframe got me back out the door, and off to get out among the single people once again.

Getty Images.

So, what’s a healthy ego look like? What am I working towards?

A healthy ego looks like measured self-confidence. The ability to hold boundaries, a solid sense of self-worth, the ability to handle criticism, and the power to not only set realistic goals and achieve them but also to enjoy the success of those goals in a healthy way. Knowing where you’re going is vital with anything we do.

Coming home from our summer break, we drove from the Sunshine Coast to Sydney. One thousand kilometres in the same direction, sure, but probably 10,000 minor adjustments to lane position and speed along the way. Achieving meaningful change like cultivating a healthy ego isn’t a quick fix. It’s about constantly catching the old patterns and adjusting before you run yourself and your family off the road.

To come back to the words of Kendrick Lamar, this is where humility comes in.

David, the incredibly wise man that guides me on my journey of sobriety told me soon after I stopped drinking, “Find humility before humility finds you”.

And let me tell you I did not want to be found. After I got divorced, humility found me cowering under the coffee table in my one-bedroom rental apartment and dragged me out into the street in front of my neighbours, me kicking and screaming “why is this happening to me?” the whole way. For me, humility is the way out of awful situations just like that.

As soon as I feel the flood of rejection when someone’s offering a critique of my work in the hopes of making me better, I know to take a big breath in and suck that feedback down into my lungs like a humble pie-flavoured vape. By the time I’ve breathed back out, I’m on a path to being better at a job that I already thought I was pretty good at. Not a bad result.

This morning at the gym, after warming up I got under the barbell and tried to squat the same weight I did before a week off for the aforementioned holiday. You may already know where this is going.

Unfortunately, I had to hurt myself too many times trying to lift things I just can’t lift safely to know that I have to be humble about what my body can do today.

So, I swapped out the plates on the bar for some lighter ones, even doing less reps than last time. But I did my sets safely with a full range of motion, with the humility that those sets will signal my body to adapt and soon enough I’ll be back where I was.

I wouldn’t want to be inauthentic with you, so I have to point out that most of these things are pretty simple to adjust for me—except for when it comes to my wife Audrey. She gets a version of me that’s more intimate and vulnerable than I am with anyone else on the planet, and for whatever reason she also gets a version of me who struggles to keep his unhealthy ego at bay sometimes. It’s not great, it’s not all the time, but it does happen.

I have hope, though, because life is about progress not perfection. I learned how to play guitar. I learned how to snowboard (backwards), and I even learned how to roller skate. With practice I know I can learn how to do this too. And once I catch my unhealthy ego in the act, I just try to do the same as before.

Breathe, apologise if needed, be humble, and sit down.

Related:

Osher Günsberg on the importance of finding purpose in your work

Osher Günsberg on the highs and lows of ageing

The post Osher Günsberg on the hard road to a healthy ego appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.