One of the Biggest Mental Health Mistakes Men Make

Alright guys, welcome back. In today's episode, what we're going to talk about is a pretty big confusion.

I see a lot of men making that I work with. And it's one that can really impact the quality of our life and our ability to move forward and grow. And what it is is really a confusion, a mixing up. And that confusion is between ruminating and feeling. So while they may seem similar, they're actually two very different things.

So ruminating is basically when we kind of compulsively keep running the same thoughts through our head. When I was a teenager, this would show up in me as angst and angstiness. Angstiness about women, angstiness about girls. And that type of energy that ruminating often involves kind of replaying things obsessively, things we should have said, what we should have done differently, what, what was going on for that person when this happened or that happened.

And it's basically like an energy that just gets trapped in us mentally. So we talked about this before in terms of energy and motion. Now I'm not anti mind, but for a lot of us guys, we hang out in our heads because it prevents us from, from getting into our feelings. Ruminating is when all that energy just gets trapped up in our heads and is bouncing around, recycling, replaying through itself over and over and over again.

You know, you can probably think of some moments in your life or even things you're thinking about right now that you're ruminating about, meaning you're, you're just recycling the same thing over and over and over through your head for no real purpose or point. So just this week I was out myself and I lost my wallet. I was checking out somewhere, I was managing my daughter and I must have put it down somewhere, totally lost consciousness and didn't find out till we were out in the car.

And by the time I got back it was gone. Now for six hours after that event, I just kept replaying that moment over and over and over again, mentally trying to figure out what was happening. Now there's times that rumination can be useful when we're actually mentally trying to figure something out, right? If we're working on a math problem or something creative often will ruminate.

But what I'm Talking about what I was doing and what a lot of men do is not productive, Right. It's basically just running energy through the same thought loop over and over and over again without it actually supporting us in feeling better. And so I've been talking a lot on this show about the importance of us men turning inward to feel the feels, so to speak, and that it's really important for us as men to have access to our full feeling state in our bodies.

And that the quicker we can turn towards the sensations, turn towards the actual feelings in our bodies, the faster they'll move through us. Rumination tends to prevent that. And I've had many clients push back on this idea of feeling because they think, well, isn't that just gonna keep me stuck in it? Won't I just be dwelling on the same things? Because what they're doing is they're confusing ruminating with feeling, right?

That when. When I say go feel the feels, you need to feel the grief of that relationship or you need to feel the anger of that boundary. What they're actually mapping onto that is, well, I don't want to ruminate about it anymore. I've already been ruminating on it for, you know, hours, days, weeks, sometimes even months. Definitely see this as a really big one for guys that are out of a relationship that they didn't necessarily want to end.

Right. Ruminating about an ex, constantly thinking about her, constantly thinking about what I did or didn't do, or what I should have done differently or what she meant by X and if only I had been present in Y. And you can just feel that energy, the energy of rumination, it tends to kind of be, like, quick and repetitive and all located up in the head. That is totally different than dropping down into feeling.

Feeling like I've talked about before, does not tend to just loop feeling. Emotion, like I've said, is energy in motion. Meaning when we feel, there's often movement. Doesn't mean it all gets better, doesn't mean it goes away. But there's an actual movement in our body, in our hearts, in our minds, of energy.

And at the end, our state is different than the beginning. That is not the case with ruminating. We could ruminate on something for hours, and at the end of it, we're going to feel exactly like we did at the beginning. And we may even have the exact same thoughts as we had at the beginning. You know, I can remember when I first moved to Los Angeles, part of that transition for me was exiting a relationship, one of my real first relationship.

And I ruminated about her, about that relationship, about moments we had for probably a good solid month. And it just so happened that I went on a seven day Zen retreat where I sat in silence for seven days for, you know, 14 hours a day. And that was a powerful experience for me at that time because it was almost like an accelerant on my rumination.

What I mean by that is within that first three or four days, I think I literally obsessively thought every possible thought I could have about that relationship, that person, that situation, at least a thousand times, right? There's nothing to do when you're just sitting there. And there was a point where I realized, wow, I'm just thinking these same thoughts over and over and over again.

And every time I do that it makes me feel bad, which is often what ruminating does. It actually keeps us stuck in the same spot. For a lot of men I, I know and I work with, it can harbor on a type of like self harm as a, as a way we can kind of keep poking ourselves over and over and over, keep shaming ourselves or keep ourselves stuck in the pain. Now that eventually lifted for me on that trip because I was in such an intense container and I had thought every thought I could think about that situation and so I stopped.

You know, something lifted in me on that trip. Now not everyone has something seven days to go sit in silence every time they're ruminating about something. And that's why it's super important to know some of these somatic skills I teach guys and I work with guys in men's group around of how you move from rumination to feeling. Because they are not the same thing. Feeling is a release of energy.

It's an actual progress forward. It incorporates the whole body, heart and mind. Not just your mind usually involves sound, bodily movement and release, release of some kind. If your nervous system isn't changing states, you're probably just ruminating.

And it's so important to not confuse the two. Like I Said oftentimes, guys I work with think they're feeling, but they're actually just ruminating. They're actually just running the same thoughts compulsively through their heads. And so nothing's changing, nothing's moving, and they're in fact stuck in the exact same spot they started sometimes when they started working with me, sometimes when the event happened that caused them to ruminate.

Now why do we ruminate? Well, it's easy, right? When we're ruminating, there's a kind of a masculine part of us that thinks, well, if I just figure it out, if I could just think it through, maybe there'll be some kind of insight or aha. That will release the tension in my body and I won't have to feel right. If I just. If I knew why she did that thing, if I understood that from a cognitive place, you know, then I wouldn't be feeling sad that we're not seeing each other anymore.

And it's not actually true. It doesn't really work. I've seen guys really try it. I've tried it myself. And it tends to just keep us stuck when we're ruminating like that, and sometimes makes it even more painful. Instead, feeling this process of being in our body, being in our sensations, being with our emotional energy, is something that actually causes us to have a release, have an experience, and move forward.

It doesn't necessarily fix the situation, nor does it even require you to interact with, oftentimes, the people that caused that situation. Right. We can't change the past, and it's pretty brutal on ourselves to keep thinking the same thoughts that maybe we could. So this ruminating is so dangerous for us, guys, and shows up all the time.

And when we're ruminating, our attention is on ourselves and on our own thoughts. And the truth is that's not very attractive. You can probably feel it. You've probably been around people when they're ruminating, when they're stuck and lost in their heads, particularly men. And they often feel inaccessible or less trustable versus the often powerful presence that comes on the other side of deep feeling.

Whether it's grief, anger, sadness, disgust, rage, the whole spectrum. Feeling tends to happen faster. It tends to cause movement, and it tends to open our body to the moment and create a little bit more spaciousness. You know, as you start to feel into, am I ruminating or am I feeling. Check in with yourself, do I feel more spacious the deeper I go into this?

Or just as stuck? If you feel just as stuck, you're ruminating. If you're starting to feel more spacious. And what I mean by that literally is my breaths are deeper, often a little bit slower. My nervous system is unwound, is a little more relaxed. Those are signs that you've been feeling.

Ruminating tends to keep us wound up, tends to keep us tight, tends to keep our breath shallow. You'll start to notice these things in yourself. You'll definitely start to notice these things in others. And sometimes it just takes an intervention with ourselves. Wow, I'm ruminating right now. I'm just thinking the same things over and over and over again and it's not doing me any good.

How could I approach this differently? How could I do some feeling around this? Maybe I need to get in my body and exercise and move. Maybe I need to put on some music to help me get into a different feeling state around anger or grief. Maybe I need to go for a walk or one of the most powerful ones. I'm certainly a proponent of may. Maybe I need to get connected to someone else and be witnessed as.

A lot of times the feelings we're avoiding by ruminating will be unlocked when we're in relational presence with someone else. That can hold space for us where we can start to actually speak the feelings out loud. And when our body feels like it's in a space where it's trusted and held, it can start to release. And release it will, through sound, through movement, through emotion, which again is totally different than thought, than rumination.

So start to notice in your life, how often are you ruminating? How often are you obsessively thinking the same thoughts over and over and over again? And what's the cost of that on you? Your wellness, your life and your relationships. Don't confuse that with feeling.

Most of us guys have not been given the experience growing up of what it means to feel, to give the safe spaces, to be given the leadership to guide us into those parts of ourselves. A lot of men, a lot of men's culture, a lot of what we're valued for is not feeling right. We're told to stuff it up. Stiff upper lip, stop crying, put your feelings aside, get the job done, right?

All these kind of bullshit old school paradigms that are finally starting to melt away. They're embedded in us. And because of that we don't have a lot of tools to help us feel. So we'll turn towards rumination, right? Just sinking our mental capacity into these same thought loops and running that energy on repeat in the same place, sometimes in almost perpetuity.

And that has an impact on you and your nervous system and your sense of well being. So it's important to become very conscious of that and not to confuse the two and to give yourself permission to call yourself out. I think I'm ruminating here. I need to do something to get more into my feeling state, my feeling body so I can actually be with this energy and move it. If you want to do some work with me, check out my drop in men's groups at Evolutionary Men events.

And if you want to take a super deep dive into your dating relationships, purpose and presence, check out my free training evolution revolutionary.men webinar.