Peter Attia· MD
and that I think is a project worth tackling it's a lot but that's yeah this this depression I think particularly among men who are very very very bad generally and I'm just gonna paint with a broad brush because that makes this type of conversation a little easier but broadly speaking cross across cultures it really doesn't matter where you go women are generally better at social cohesion and building groups of friends who are mutually supportive and we can look at it through an evolutionary lens but men very often are biologically culturally who knows fill-in-the-blank trained and may be born to just bite their lip and suffer in silence and I do think there are certain places for that look if you're gonna be a Navy SEAL commander waking up every morning and like telling the your direct reports like about your really hard dream you had probably not like strategically tactically professionally or ethically the right thing to do when you have to go out and then risk your lives doing things that are mission-critical to fill in the blank right so there there is a time for that but to make that your one coping mechanism for navigating life or like the sort of the mesh that is imposed on everything else that you suffer in silence and that the solution to that is just to get tougher to get better at accepting pain to use cheesy tech parlance doesn't scale it just doesn't scale you know when I was on your podcast the first time which I don't know how long ago that was it feels like it's probably been three or four years ago one of the questions I remember you asked me which of course you asked many of your guests is what book have you gifted more than any other and I remember the book I mentioned at the time it was and remains a great book but I now have to update that answer what was it just for people who were curious it was mistakes were made but not by me which is just an amazing book on the psychology of cognitive dissonance but of course that now has been surpassed there is now a new book that is most gifted book and amazing that I can't believe I didn't bring a copy to Austin to give you because I now I probably I think I just buy Amazon out of this book like I just have stacks of it all over like you have stacks of certain books in your place and this book is called I don't want to talk about it by Terrence reel who have since reading the book and becoming obsessed with actually it comes back to you you introduced me to Esther Perel Esther recommended the book the book was one of a series of little nudges that ultimately led to me meeting Terry and of course that book has now been the book I have given most but what you said is spot on which is there is just this epidemic of male depression and it's not always overt that's the thing right people have this image of what depression is but you know like a guy who's constantly angry or emotionally volatile he can be quite depressed so depression isn't always dysthymia and I think that's where people miss this idea of how much pain people both men and women carry around but how men have this more orthogonal way of displaying it that makes it get masked longer and longer and I want to go back to something you said earlier cuz it really hit home about a year ago when a mutual friend of ours Paul Conte made this point to me which was the way you treat yourself is ultimately how you will treat those you love most and you know when he really pushed me to think about that which is do you want to be the guy who treats his kids the way you treat yourself and it had to be put that way for me to think no I mean if I'm gonna be brutally honest I would not want to watch my kids get treated by another human the way I treat myself even though I think it's good for me to treat myself this way so again I think the challenge is by far the hardest part is getting people to accept that maybe what they're doing isn't the right thing or isn't that maybe rights the wrong word a it's not the best thing it's not the optimal thing I loved your analogy of taking the best blade in the world and not having a hand I mean it's a limited tool yeah and there are so I would say just to maybe put a fine point on it going through life merely tolerating yourself which would have been a dream for me I mean I I actively loathed myself and any weakness any mistake any foible any flaw I was I was and and and still at times I'm am so incredibly violently critical in my own head that it is not the treatment I would want to that I would wish on anyone I care about that is not a state you have to accept it is not programming that you have to accept and there are ways to begin to chip away at that and to rewire it and to reformat in the sense certain behaviors that you've experienced for so long many of them our thought patterns self-talk that you've come to believe they're completely unchangeable and in my experience and more and more the experience of dozens and hundreds of that