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How to ‘Man Up’ in Mental Health

Being a 6’7 ex pro-athlete and on and off model, I have felt the full effects of society putting me into a box.

“You are too tall to have problems in life.”

“You are too good-looking to be depressed.”

“Man, you are living the dream.”

“I’d do anything to be you.”

I was the epitome of judging a book by its cover, and I let those people sway my thoughts about how I was supposed to live life.

What was happening inside my head and heart was the exact opposite of what those people perceived.
• Fear of failure
• Fear of being judged
• Thoughts of being inadequate
• Fear of not performing how women expected me to
• Constant anxiety from standing out

It wasn’t until I got C-PTSD from an abusive end to a relationship. Also, watching my father die from Parkinson’s, did I finally stopped worrying about what others thought and started acting for myself.

These are 5 takeaways from the lowest point in my life that helped me build myself up to the happiest version of myself to date.

1. Let your thoughts out
Society’s old views of how men should act, focus on us not showing any emotion, physically or verbally. I soon realized in my darkest moments that if I kept holding in my fears, I would never be able to overcome them.

There are many ways to take those thoughts swirling around your head and have them out in the open to digest in a new light.
• See a therapist weekly (here is a great article on how to email a therapist for the first time to help you start)
• Write daily in a journal
• Talk out loud to yourself when alone

2. Fail more often
Working on your personal growth is hard. By the time you are in your 20s and 30s, you have created this form of yourself from life lessons. This version of you kept you safe, guided you through puberty and now is all you know.

You can’t snap your fingers and re-train your brain to act differently. Instead, you need to fight that initial urge you have.

In the beginning, you will lose to the ‘old you’ far more than you win. And that’s ok!

Getting comfortable with failing is one of the main ways we learn and grow.

3. Get uncomfortable weekly
Constantly testing your comfort bubble will help your overall growth to combat anxiety, depression and other mental health struggles.

By choosing when you will get scared and most likely inducing the emotional pain, you can step away at any time it becomes too much to handle.

The more you poke, prod and test your comfort bubble, the easier it will be to handle other uncomfortable situations you can’t see coming.

4. Exercise often
Working on your fitness will help you feel more confident in your body, but not only that. Being physically healthy and in good shape does not get enough credit for our mental health.

Pushing yourself daily in the gym, CrossFit, spin class, or any other 60 minutes of sweat-inducing working out will constantly force you into those uncomfortable moments of potential anxiety-inducing pain.

Working out also positively affects the hormones and chemicals inside our bodies. Constantly leaving you in a better mood than when you showed up at the gym.

5. Learn how to sleep
“Learn” is the critical word in this section.

We all sleep at some point. Our bodies were made to shut down when we hit a critical point of exhaustion. That’s not the hard part.

What isn’t easy is getting constant sleep, night after night, that leaves you feeling well rested and repaired from the previous day.

All of these factors of everyday life can and most likely can or do affect your sleep.
• Money struggles
• Addiction to your phone/social media
• Drugs
• Alcohol
• Relationship issues
• Loss of loved ones
• Anxiety
• Depression

Here are some tips to start working at bettering your sleep
• Stop looking at your phone/tv/computer 30 minutes before your start your evening routine to go to bed.
• Track your sleep patterns with a sleep tracking device and app.
• Eat cleaner/healthier foods before bed that your stomach can digest more easily while asleep.
• Journal before hopping into bed. This will help de-clutter your mind if you have difficulty falling asleep..

Getting a good night’s sleep doesn’t happen to people who say, “I wish I could sleep better.” It occurs from trial and error and hard work.

It took me 35 years plus losing my father to finally start seeing things from a new angle in my life.

There is no blueprint to this and we are all different. So don’t be hard on yourself my friend, in time it will start looking brighter for you too.

Paul Marlow / Tall Paul
Paul is a mental health speaker & leading global Tall Men’s Fashion expert. Helping men 6’3+ feel confident in their bodies.
Learn more about Tall Paul

5 Benefits of Therapy

Talk therapy is a safe space for open and honest dialogue between you and your therapist. While the overall goal is to identify and talk about issues causing your distress, therapy goes a bit deeper than that.

For a long time now, therapy has been a consistent guiding light for me. Therapy helped me transition from a life that felt overwhelming and unbearable to one that I enjoy living and thrive in – one where I know that I can overcome my anxiety even on my hardest days.

In working with your therapist to identify stressors in your life and understand their impact, you will also learn strategies and skills to manage your symptoms and move forward. If you’re on the fence about it or aren’t sure exactly why to go or what to say in therapy, I highly recommend giving it a try – or a few.

No matter what, we all could use an unbiased, non-judgmental, and knowledgeable person to talk to at times. So, if you ever feel lost on where to turn to, set up an appointment with a therapist. In doing this, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, and the following five benefits of therapy will give you a clearer idea of what I mean.

Therapy helps with anxiety

Therapy is a highly valuable tool that helps treat patients with a wide range of issues and mental health conditions like depression, trauma, and OCD. And if I have not mentioned it straightforwardly enough yet, therapy is also a tool for dealing with the day-to-day challenges we all face as humans – something that anyone can benefit from.

That said, I want to touch on the most common mental health condition out there: anxiety. People who struggle with anxiety do not just experience moderate or high stress in understandable circumstances. Instead, people with anxiety feel unstable, irritable, or uneasy most of the time and for reasons they cannot always explain. This continuous state of fear can cause difficulty managing your emotions as anxiety begins to dictate your behaviors.

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The first way therapy helps people manage their anxiety is by identifying the factors and underlying causes contributing to it. From there, they come to understand their emotions better and reach a place of acceptance before developing techniques to ease anxiety and effectively deal with it.

Therapy can improve your relationships

By this, I do not mean that therapy is a great resource for dealing with social anxiety or recovering from a tough breakup, although it is. But while some therapists specialize in family, relationship, and marriage counselling, any form of therapy can improve your relationships in general.

As you likely already know but may not always apply, better communication is key to better relationships. For this reason, therapists focus on opening the lines of communication between two or more people.

However, even if it is just you attending therapy, your therapist can help you see other perspectives and find balance in the way you communicate with people you care for. For instance, you might have a hard time opening up and being assertive to get what you need from someone; or, it could be the other way around, and you don’t realize the impact your assertiveness has on someone else’s feelings.

While therapists help people cultivate more positive and long-lasting relationships, they can also help you learn how to manage relationships with people you don’t want to keep around. Even accepting that it is okay to let go of relationships that aren’t serving you is a pretty big first step that you can accomplish in therapy.

By learning more skills to gain perspective and communicate, therapy can help you navigate all your current relationships to find greater fulfillment.

Therapy can make you happier

I realize that this a broad statement because, let’s face it, happiness is an ambiguous word. Not only can happiness emotions range from contentment to immense joy, but the things that make us happy vary for all of us, too.

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No matter how you slice it, I think we can all agree that greater levels of self- acceptance and self-compassion make us happier. When you accept who you are, you will be more prone to take care of yourself and engage in healthy behaviors rather than succumb to negative self-talk. And the things you discuss with your therapist will help you find more self- awareness and understanding, which is always the first step before self-acceptance.

In other words, therapy is a great first step to a happier life. It is an opportunity to release your past, talk about your present, and foster more compassion for yourself moving forward.

Therapy can make you more productive

Have you ever noticed how you get more tasks accomplished or focus better when you are in a good mood?

We’ve established that therapy can make you feel happier, and the same chemicals, like serotonin, that your brain receives when you’re happy also signal you to learn more, work harder, and apply yourself.

My intention is not to say that you have to work harder to be happy or that what you are doing now is not good enough. Although, I won’t deny the fact that higher productivity is great for many reasons.

The more you strive for goals and succeed, the more accomplished, capable, and confident you will feel. Not to mention productivity gives your life a sense of direction. All of this can add up to a greater level of happiness, so if you think about it, happiness and productivity make up a positive and perpetual cycle.

Both happiness and productivity combined can help you advance in life, whether professionally or personally, and therapy is a way to identify your mental roadblocks so you can find effective solutions to overcome them. As you can see, therapy is not about directly helping people develop better wellbeing, but a tool that enables you to improve any areas of your life that contribute to your wellbeing.

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Therapy teaches healthy, lifelong coping skills

Last but certainly not least are the healthy coping skills you acquire from therapy. Coping is necessary to respond to all life’s challenges and problems. Sometimes all coping will feel like it is helping you to do is persevere. But if you continue to cope with consistency and efficacy using the tools you learn in therapy, you will ultimately move through and move on.

When your healthy coping mechanisms become habitual and take precedence over your unhealthy ones, you will feel more in control over your life. Keep in mind that nurturing skills and habits and achieving progress takes time, and so does therapy. It is normal if it takes a while to reap any of these benefits of therapy, which is one more reason not to wait any longer to try it.

Writing by Paul Marlow

“Paul Marlow is a mental health advocate who writes mental health help content to inspire others to find daily actions to get better. You can see more at his site for Never Alone

My Story by Kena Love, with advice from therapist Nicki Line

I’m one of the many people who follow your tweets on twitter and I just had to write ya a quick email in regards to addiction and sex work for myself. See unfortunately they both go hand in hand. I can’t do dates without being high. And now I get paid to had sex just to support my habit. It wasn’t always that way. At first it was a high in itself to be wanted so badly by men who wanted to pay big $ to fuck me. But when my friends realized what I was doing I began to hate myself a Lil bit more every day. First came opiates but when I take them I can’t get turned on/wet/ or cum at all. That’s when I was introduced to meth. First time I did it I was hooked. I fucked for hours . My orgasms were amazing and all I could think about was getting that next on hit and dick.

Hello Kena,

I agree with you that the sex industry does have a high rate of individuals who struggle with addiction in one form or another. Let me start my response by defining addiction as I understand it. Addiction is an obsessive compulsive out of control behavior done in spite of negative consequences for self or others. Under this definition any behavior can be an addiction whether it is sex, shopping, food, or substances. While reading your email the stages of addiction and the cycle it can keep a person in comes to mind: initial use, abuse, increased use, dependency, and relapse. You describe “at first is a high … to be wanted so badly by men” which started the process of looking for an outside person or thing to regulate an internal issue. It felt good and distracted from other feelings in the initial stage. Then you started to have an internal conflict of your work and self-worth, to numb those feelings you started taking opiates and the opiates numb feeling as well as your body. Continuing to search for an external cure you tried meth which gives you a feeling of euphoria and increases sexual desire which switched your reward center in your brain into overdrive. This is where you need to increase your use to get the high or reward you felt the first time; which will never happen because you have already experienced it once. Now you are used to the combination of work and meth and you are dependent on them to function “normally.” I imagine it is hard to working without the meth and when or if you try you crave the substance which leads someone to relapse. You are correct in that it is a cycle and it is a cycle anyone can break if they learn and use new tools in recovery. Recovery is not easy and requires a person to develop new coping skills to use instead of the obsessive compulsive behavior. I will go into more detail about all of the topics I have touched on above in the Pineapple support group on Sundays. I hope you keep fighting for yourself.

Sincerely,
Nicki Line LMHC CST

Pineapple Sundae Radio Show Now Available As Podcast

The Pineapple Sundae radio show which is hosted by Pineapple Support’s President Leya Tanit and UK based therapist Shelly is broadcast live every Sunday at 12pm EST on Demonseed Radio and has been growing from strength to strength since it was launched on the 13th of May this year.

Pineapple Sundae hosts discuss different mental health topics each week and interview some of the industry’s biggest stars, new talent and veterans, inviting them to share their personal experiences and opinions. Although many of Pineapple Sundae’s topics may be serious, co-hosts Leya and Shelly always manage to keep a good balance of compassion and humor throughout the two hour shows.

To date the pair has discussed everything from substance misuse, depression, anxiety and coping with suicide, to maintaining a good work/life balance, relationship in the industry and being kinky.

This week all the episodes that have been aired to date were made available to listen to as podcasts. Leya Tanit states “It is of paramount importance that the complexities working in the adult industry can have on a performer’s life and therefore their mental health are discussed openly. It not only helps others within the industry understand that they are not alone in their experiences, but exposes consumers to the fact that performers are real people.”

Pineapple Sundae podcasts are available at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pineapple-sundae/id1439021361?mt=2