The 40s Health Stack
If you're in your 40s, and you take your health seriously, you probably have a 'stack': the sleep tracking, the blood panel twice a year, the training program, the non-negotiable diet, the morning ice dunk… Things you do on a schedule, because they compound.
More and more of the men I work with are adding therapy to that stack. Not because they're falling apart, but because they've decided the inside is worth training in the same way they train everything else.
One of them said it plainly: He trains hard because he wants to stay hot as long as he possibly can. He added therapy because he recognized that his inside is a piston in the same engine as his outside.
They've figured that you can be operating on all cylinders physically, bench pressing your goal, running a seven-figure income, and still not be happy. Which means there's another part of them, which also needs work. They've decided to take that part of them to the gym. Therapy is that gym.
It lands in your 40s because that's when the body starts sending memos that you're not Superman anymore. The knees aren't as limber as they used to be, your metabolism isn't keeping the abs rock solid after eating whatever you want, reading menus requires squinting… These are the signs that humans are mortal, and these guys are doing the math: They're roughly halfway through, and they want to optimize their experience of the time they've got.
They also see how the generation ahead of them absolutely didn't do this. Every midlife-crisis story you've ever watched is the same story, where a successful man's unaddressed inner pain catches up with him, he implodes, and takes his family down with him. All that work on the outside and none of it on the inside. Our brains are incredibly good at telling us the inside doesn't matter as much, because society has taught us that the metric of success is what can be listed on a resume and asset portfolio.
"I Don't Need Therapy. I'm Not Falling Apart."
I never said you need therapy. I never said you were falling apart.
Therapy has a dirty meaning attached to it: the capital-T Trauma vibe of come in and sob on my sofa while we talk about how your mom didn't love you. But what if we're not talking about that? What if we're not saying that you're broken, that I've got to scoop you off the floor and rebuild you?
What if we're talking about the fact that you get angry a little too easily. Or that inner critical voice hammering you that you're supposed to be perfect all the time. Or the way your stress overloads, and you blow up at people, or go numb and reach for the thing that works in the moment and costs you later.
Those are things that need to be refined. What if the work we're doing is refining, toning, chiseling? Helping you become more and more psychologically ripped?
What comes out of it is what my clients describe as being more in their own skin. Captains of their destiny.
You get a prostate exam in your 50s because it's a thing you do to take care of your health.
So take care of all of your health. If this resonates… let's talk.