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.

The mortgage we paid when we moved in a few years back was paid for with two jobs. Nowadays I need at least five jobs to meet the transfer with enough funds, so it’s good that I like to work.

Working for money is good because it feeds and shelters my family, however, much to my wife’s chagrin I like to work on holiday, too. If it’s a choice between lying around by a pool or working on my turns (snow or surf, doesn’t matter) I’d much rather the work.

One of my great doctors once told me, “As long as you’ve got something to do, and a healthy reason to do it—you’re going to be ok.”

There was a time in my life when I really struggled with my mental health, and unfortunately got very unwell. In those calamitous moments, I had enormous amounts of anxious energy flowing through my body, flooding my mind with noise.

I had no outlet for it, so it turned inwards and very nearly killed me.

Having a sense of purpose can help that energy get out of your body, allowing you to harness that sudden rush of adrenaline and put it to good use. A sense of purpose is vital when it comes to staying healthy.

Some guys are fine just being in themselves. Me? I need something to do and a reason to do it.

Imagine any machine that you can think of—that machine was designed because a problem needed solving. What happens to that machine when you just leave it on and give it no problem to solve? Usually it burns out or runs too fast until it breaks, or if it’s a moving machine it can hurt or even kill people.

A high-powered speedboat with a captain that’s piloting it across the bay? Brilliant. A high-powered speedboat with no captain flying across the bay? Now it’s a terrifying death machine that will carve up every turtle, dugong and human in its path. I feel that in many ways, humans are the same.

We are the most intelligent, most highly-powered machines on the planet. And if we don’t have a problem to solve or a job to do, that’s when things get dangerous. Because a lonely man with too much time on his hands is a danger to himself, and a danger to others.

You are probably reading this on a phone, so it might be a stretch but can you think about how it feels when you’ve got nothing to do? I detest having nothing to do so much I can’t remember the last time that I had nothing to do. Probably because it feels so icky when it happens. What we don’t realise is that feeling compounds and pretty soon you’re on a downward trajectory that’s impossible to get out of by yourself.

For someone who likes to have something to do, being aimless is not healthy for me. In my late teens, I was on the dole a few times between gigs and the feeling of nothing to do became mixed with shame and hopelessness. The worse it got the harder it became to escape. Like a free diver trying to get to the big lobster right down under that big rock—no the bigger rock off the edge of the shelf way down there—there’s a depth you can swim below where your lungs compress to a point that they no longer displace enough to keep you buoyant, and you just keep sinking.

I didn’t realise it, but as an unemployed 19-year-old I’d already passed the point of being able to float up by myself. Luckily someone noticed and I wound up as an outpatient in a public health psychiatric clinic.

Whenever I’ve been in those particularly low points, having something to do and a reason to do it was incredibly powerful when it came to kicking my way back up to the surface.

The ‘something to do’ starts with ‘go see your psych today’ and the reason you’re doing it can be for you—but it can also be your partner, your parents, or the bus driver you’re going to see on the way to the psych who is kind of weirded out because by this point you’re pretty strange and mumbly and don’t make much eye contact. Do it for the bus driver if you have to.

Sure enough, day by day, week by week things start to feel better because you’re now having a bit of agency about your day. When you’re not doing well, the amount of organisation it takes to pick out a T-shirt and get to the bus stop on time is equivalent to the moon landing. However, if you put the work in, reclaiming that ability starts to build up resilience, transporting you to a healthier place. Soon enough you’re able to make eye contact with the bus driver.

Once you get to a place where you can get out of the house a bit—finding a reason to do something for someone that isn’t you begins to unleash a sense of belonging that may have been missing for a while. You are connecting yourself to the rest of the community, and as social creatures it’s vital that we are able to feel like we have a part to play. We might not always have control of what work we do, yet we always have control over our reason to do it.

A way in to finding reasons can be as simple as swapping out a vowel. “I’ve got to go to work” becomes “I get to go to work”.

Connecting with purpose is a profoundly powerful way of finding motivation where there wouldn’t otherwise be any. So perhaps ask yourself what’s the purpose you have in your work? In your home life?

Take some of my TV jobs, the preposterously cushy gigs where I have dressing rooms and catering and someone paid to comb my hair. Those things are wonderful, and there are also 16-hour days and sometimes weeks away from my family, and no matter what you get paid you can’t buy time back.

So, what’s the purpose that helps me get on with the day when I’m at work and Audrey [my wife] has been up since 2:30am for work, dealing with a sick toddler who’s home from daycare and she’s working the phones trying to get someone to cover her afternoon shift because he’s cooked and I’m not home until midnight? What’s my purpose that makes sure I do the best job I can do? It’s to provide for my family, and ultimately to give people who sit together to watch the show we’re making a reason to be with each other. Helping bring those strangers together is as strong a purpose as anything else.

Connecting with those two things get me out of my head and helps me harness the otherwise uncomfortable feelings about not being home to support the family and instead channel that energy into doing the best job I can do that day. Once you get a little practice with reframing what you’re doing through the lens of a healthy purpose, you’ll be surprised at how much pride you feel inside when you’ve completed even the most banal of tasks.

And yes, it takes a little work—but that feeling doesn’t cost you a cent.

Related:

Osher Günsberg on the highs and lows of ageing

Osher Günsberg on the liberating feeling of saying ‘I don’t know’

The post Osher Günsberg on the importance of finding purpose in your work appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

This surgeon has an office right behind the old Channel [V] studio where for many years I worked at the very centre of Australian music television. Turning the Harley onto that very familiar road, it’s clear something big is happening. There are generator trucks, lighting trucks, and catering trucks. Getting closer, I’m noticing the pedestrians are looking really good, everyone’s all dressed up. What’s all this about?

When the iconic Sydney venue, the Horden Pavilion, comes into view, I see the marquee and it reads “Welcome to the Australian Recording Industry Awards”. Holy smokes, it’s the ARIAs.

In a flash, I get to spend a moment in the skin of my former self. It was only a few seconds but I felt once again like I did when the ARIAs was once the biggest night of my year. There was always so much expectation around it, the kind of expectation I had around my high school formal. What will I wear? How will I get there? Which after-party can I get into?

At the time I had an external sense of validation, so if I didn’t gain access to the coolest of the coolest party, clearly, I was an absolute loser. I would spend days figuring out how much potential debauchery I could line up in the weeks and days leading up to this night. Just in case Plan A, B and C failed. When you add on the prep for the number of interviews I would do on the night, it was all-encompassing.

Günsberg with James Blundell at the 2007 Aria Awards I Getty Images.

Snapping back to the present (a good place to be on the back of a motorbike!) I hear the cheers of the crowd as limousine doors open, and I notice that there is still a petulant pang of ego complaining that I didn’t get invited. But I have to be honest and recognise that it’s actually the part of me that used to drink and do drugs (I’m sober now) who’s upset, so I get to tell him, Come on, mate, it’s not for you anymore, and that’s a good thing.

It’s easy to do now, but it took a long time to get to that head space. In the beginning, I complained like a teenager who’s just had the Wifi password changed on him. It hurt when it was over because for a long time that’s all I wanted in life—yet as I got older, what I want in life has changed.

There’s something to be said for willingly embracing the time when you’re no longer in the cohort of the coolest of the cool kids. I didn’t want to embrace this idea, but I had to. I was so bitter about it. I carried so much resentment that I wasn’t a part of it anymore that I was a total punish to be around. For me, the way to make those feelings stop bothering me is to willingly embrace the reality that that period of my life is going away, and instead put deliberate effort towards being happy for those enjoying that adventure today.

So as I ride past the glorious rivers of hot and talented young men and women having their turn at the centre of it all, I wish them a night of fun, exploration and the adventure of seeing how many people you can actually fit into a toilet cubicle. Because mark my words, I have done my fair share of field research trying to find joy doing such things. I’ve been on my knees inhaling mystery nose chemicals off filthy toilet seats in a stall full of best friends I’ve just met more times than you’ve lost a multi-bet on Eastern European Soccer leagues. And yet as I get older, along with the aches and pains of a body I’ve punished way too much, what I value has changed, and with it the value that I bring to others has changed, too.

Inside, the surgeon tells me, “You’re 50 and it’s bad but it’s not terrible. I won’t operate unless you’re a professional athlete. See if you can live with it” (Another benefit of getting old, you make choices about living with things that hurt every day). So I ride home, swap the motorbike for a pushbike and go to pick up our four-year-old son from daycare.

We listen to the Flaming Lips all the way home and then spend ages cracking up as we play a game where he is Yoshimi and I am a Pink Robot trying to eat him. At bath time I pretend-narrate his Jacques Cousteau undersea adventure while he tries out his new goggles. Out of the bath, he throws his towel off and streaks naked through the house at top speed. I chase him down like Josh Papali’i (just with more cuddles and less ankle taps). We snuggle up, read some Oliver Jeffers books and I spoon him as he goes to sleep.

Lying there with him tucked under my chin and softly snoring in my arms, I remember when I held him for the first time. Cradling him on the day he was born, smelling his newborn head while he and his mother slept, whatever bonding pheromones his body was secreting found their way into my brain and just let off an explosion unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

That rush, that breathtaking high, that overwhelming concussion of oxytocin was the high I’d been searching for in every single line of questionable chemicals I’d ever snorted over the years. I wouldn’t want to make an unscientific claim here but based on my own extensive field research into the matter, I can absolutely say that my night with my son was hands-down better, more fun, more incredible than any after-party I’ve ever been to. But those after-parties only happen once a year.

I get to do this again tomorrow.

Related: 

Fear of a cracked planet: Osher Günsberg on climate anxiety

Osher Günsberg on the liberating feeling of saying ‘I don’t know’

The post Osher Günsberg on the highs and lows of ageing appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

I physically flinched. And straight away Audrey asked if I was okay. My body had instantly recalled the sensation I’d get when I would lie like that. It’s the horrid feeling in the moments after a blatant lie – the feeling of, If they figure this out, I’m toast.

This is something I hadn’t done in more than a decade, mind you. It was a time in my life when I was trying hard to hide my own insecurities by projecting an image of someone who knows everything about every band (or movie, book, actor, podcast, city). I never ever wanted to admit that I hadn’t heard of something. Someone would say, “It’s like the synth sounds on that Ultravox song All Stood Still.” And I’d nod convincingly: “Yeah, it is.”

But I had no idea what those “synth sounds” sounded like.

 

 

 

 

 

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Unfortunately for me, I had learned that once I said “Yeah!”, the other person would get so excited they’d start to share enthusiastically about why they love that band (or song, book, album), and in doing so would reveal more and more information, causing me to dig ever deeper to come up with a response like, “Oh yeah! Ultravox – WOW. And would you believe that Midge Ure from Ultravox was in Thin Lizzy right before that? They’re so much more than The Boys Are Back In Town. Have you heard “Jailbreak?” It’s a riff so nasty you’ll need some enzyme spray to soak in for a couple minutes if you ever want to wash the stink off.”

Just like that, taking control of the conversation, moving it from a space where I couldn’t appear clever to a space where I could get very excited about something that I knew all about, and in doing so I could: a) show how smart I was; and b) protect my fragile little ego.

Too often I found myself clutching at the edge of credibility in conversations in pubs or at parties – or even in the middle of an interview with a musician on live television. Considering my job for a long time was to give the impression of possessing unshakeable musical pop-culture credibility, this was a stupid thing to do.

Thankfully, my man David (the guy who helped me get – and helps me stay – sober) taught me that when I have memories that make me flinch, to remember this: “We get to live the rest of our lives not being that guy anymore.”

But when I chase safety, I’m always the greyhound and safety is always the electric bunny. I’ll never catch it. Never. And the idea that things will be safer if I say no to fear is an illusion. Because after a while of saying no to things you’re afraid of, your options get pretty limited. In my story, the option I was left with to try and stay safe meant not leaving my house for days at a time. Not good.

The paradox is that the safest path forward is actually to say yes to the thing that I’m afraid of. In this case, I’m chasing control of the conversation – and the approval of the person I’m talking to. Because I’m afraid of what my self-worth will be without it.

But what does saying yes to that fear sound like? I found four excellent words to use instead of lying.

“Have you heard about this super- cool thing, G?”

“Not yet – tell me!” In a blink, everything changes. Inside, it feels like I’m okay not

knowing about this super-cool thing. And because this thing sounds super cool, on the outside I’m excited to hear about it.

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Osher Günsberg (@osher_gunsberg)

Also, I have given a gift to the person I’m talking to, because who doesn’t love to share their passion for a band or a book or a YouTube channel about human-powered wood lathes?

But what about when you’re on the other side of this situation?

I used to be a punisher when people hadn’t heard about things I was in to. “You’ve never heard Gang of Four?! How can you say you love the Chilli Peppers if you’ve never heard Gang of Four?” I was protecting my scared little-man ego by being a superior, arrogant asshole.

Nowadays, I try to remember a time before I’d heard or seen the thing I’m into, and that makes it easy to say something like . . . “You’ve never seen Pulp Fiction? I’m so jealous of you! I wish I could watch it again for the first time. To see the non-linear storytelling which hadn’t really been done before. You are so lucky.”

Since I started saying yes to my fears, I’ve lost count of how many random and wonderful things I’ve discovered about the world.

Also, I am so much more comfortable in conversations with strangers. I’ve said it before: if I backed away from all the things that frightened me, I would end up living on the head of a pin. But when I say yes to things that scare me, I’m saying yes to trusting myself that I can cope – and I’m saying yes to possibility. Saying no is a binary outcome: running from fear or the status quo.

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

When I say yes to possibility, there’s nothing but options.

The best part about possibility is that nobody has figured out how to predict with certainty what is going to happen in the next second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year or decade. So I could let fear paint that picture for me, or

I could invent a new possibility about whatever might happen.

If I’m going to be thinking about it for potentially years, I may as well make up something wonderful to carry in my head until that moment arrives. And when that moment does arrive, it may look how I imagined . . . or nothing at all like what I imagined.

But if I try to carry a positive possibility with me, and the belief thatI will cope and figure things out no matter what happens, then I won’t have wasted minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades worrying, or allowing fear to take me away from the present. Otherwise, every choice I’d have made in the meantime would have been guided by fear, shutting myself off to possibility.

We don’t know what we don’t know. So we may as well create something that’s easier to live with than fear to carry with us until the moment when we do know, trusting that when we get there, we’ll cope.

Because, somehow or other, you and I have always figured stuff out in the past. Who’s to say we won’t then?

For more of Osher’s insights into self- acceptance, fulfilling your dreams and getting the most out of life, listen to his bi-weekly (every Monday and Friday) podcast, Better Than Yesterday.

The post Osher Günsberg On The Liberating Feeling Of Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

It’s a time when interrogations into our lives are all but unavoidable, ranging from, “Are you sure you’re gay – maybe you just haven’t met the right woman yet?”, to, “We’re having lamb, but the lamb was vegetarian – does that mean
you’ll eat it?”

As you move through your 20s, those kinds of questions get replaced by just one: “So, when are you gunna have kids?”

Reasons for not having kids are many. But from the emails I get in to my podcast each week, one reason is becoming increasingly common. 

Taking into account the facts of the climate emergency, it’s understandable that someone would hesitate to bring a child into a world that, by the time they’re an adult, could easily be underwater, on fire and at war – all at once. 

The science is undeniable (despite what your mum’s older brother who’s down from Kingaroy has learned from his “research”). 

Me, I know and understand that hesitation very well.

Early in 2014, I began experiencing paralysing climate anxiety, sometimes kicking up into episodes of psychosis that manifested as paranoid delusions. I’d see and feel climate apocalypse as if it were all happening right then and there. 

For years, I would recoil in horror as I drove past a school of squealing five-year-olds playing at little lunch. I’d think, “You are going to grow up into a world that’s on fire, underwater and at war. What have we done to you?” 

I’d visit mates, and when their children would run up and hug me hello, instead of their gorgeous giggles transporting me from my grown-man worries, I’d plunge into a pit of shame with a face that said, “What a clusterfuck we have
passed on to you. I’m so sorry.” (Uncle Osher was heaps of fun to have around.)

Six months into this traumatic time in my life, I met Audrey and her daughter Georgia. Things got serious quickly, and not long after I’d proposed we were all up at Mum’s place in Brisbane for Christmas lunch. Mum really loved Audrey, and adored that Georgia was now in her life. 

I never hid how sick I was from Mum and she could see that even on this perfect summer’s day, I was terrified. Her apartment was right on the Brisbane River and I was still experiencing glitches where I’d look out the window and see the the raging flood of 2011 – a nightmare of ruined homes, dead livestock and raw sewerage.  

Mum caught my face and read my mind, and somewhere between lunch and the kettle going on before the cake came out, she took me into the kitchen. 

You see, my mum was a refugee. When the Russians invaded Lithuania to drive out the Germans in 1943, Mum and her family fled with the retreating German Army. 

Choosing between gruesome and ghastly, my grandfather loaded his wife, two kids and whatever they could carry onto a cart, hooked his cavalry horse to the front, and off they walked into the Baltic winter. 

For months and months, they slogged their way south, an endless column of plodding humanity searching for safety. Death came daily, either from sickness and starvation or from the sky, as warplanes strafed them. 

Mum at the time was my son’s age now, a tiny three-year old who still remembers my grandmother telling her to crawl between the rows of the cabbage farms and steal the outer leaves so that her family could have some precious nourishment. 

On that Brisbane afternoon, as the kettle first began to whistle, the woman who’d lived through this told me, “You’re right to be worried. But when we were on the road for those months, amongst all that death, just because the world we knew was gone it didn’t mean that life stopped. People still laughed, kids bickered at dinner and mums and dads found comfort in intimacy. Your grandfather was an obstetrician, and delivered a lot of babies between Lithuania and Germany. Your uncle was born as allied bombs fell all around us.”

These were people who knew they were never going back to their country and couldn’t see the world beyond Europe at the time, a bloody pile of rubble with the smoke of genocide thick in the air. But still, these people were choosing to bring children into the world, finding joy and purpose with each new life. 

Mum looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure it out. And worrying about what might happen isn’t worth denying you and Audrey and Georgia the joy, love and transformation that comes
with a new baby.”

When I became stepfather to Georgia it changed me as a man because life was no longer about me. Every thing I did became about making sure that this incredible girl would have the best chance at whatever life she chose to have. 

I already had a strong desire to take climate action, but when G came into my life it became an unstoppable drive to
get cracking. 

I worked hard on getting my mental and physical health right, and then got to work. A few years later, when Wolf was born, I levelled up in ways I could never have imagined. I actively pursued climate action both publicly and privately. 

I can now wade into intense conversations that once paralysed me with a sense of empathy, power and possibility. 

Choosing to be a father or stepfather isn’t for everyone. But if worries about the future are holding you back… please, consider what I’m saying. 

Don’t deny yourself the chance to raise a child who will be born into a world with challenges. They will overcome those challenges in ways you can’t imagine. 

Climate fears are no reason to deny yourself the joy of fatherhood, the deepening of your relationship with the child’s other parent, or the daily transformational experience that comes with explaining the world to someone who’s still learning how it works. 

Because it’s in those moments of explanation we figure out that, just because we’ve always done something a certain way, doesn’t mean that we always should. 

Those are the moments that change us as people, and those are the moments that will change the world.    

In less than twenty years, the world G & Wolfie were born into won’t look a thing like it does now.

And yes, that’s scary, but remember you won’t be alone. 

I’ll be there, you’ll be there, Bernard Fanning, Ash Barty, Fev, Abbie Chatfield, Lee & Keith from Gogglebox… everyone you’ve ever known and everyone that’s to come will be there, too. And because life goes on, we will figure it out. 

The post Fear of a Cracked Planet: Osher Günsberg on Climate Anxiety appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.