Mental Wellness

The Mental Wealth Blueprint

5 Steps To Psychological Freedom

In life, becoming wealthy in any capacity takes time and investment. We spend time devising plans to improve our bank statements, set aside time to invest in our retirement plans, and penny-pinch our way to financial independence, all while ignoring the mental burden that is reinforcing that dire need for independence in the first place. That internal mind-bending battle that no matter how much money rolls in cannot be shaken down.

This may not be true for all of you, but that’s how personal wealth and financial independence felt for me; grinding away to fill the bank, yet the vault in my mind was completely empty.

Whether you’re a digital nomad trying to create a passive income business or an accountant saving everything trying to retire at 55, I’m sure this sounds somewhat familiar.

Let’s see if you can relate…

I started my ad agency in 2016, a dream I worked towards since I stepped foot in the marketing industry. Things were going well. I created a highly-efficient operating model, I had very little overhead or expenses, and the business was scaling up. I was working with Fortune 500 clients with massive budgets and I had a team spread all across the world collaborating on some super creative work.

On paper, I had it all. A self-sustaining ad agency working with some of the biggest brands in the world, great friends and family, and the freedom to work when I wanted and where I wanted. Exactly what I thought life was about. Yet something was brewing inside me that I couldn’t break. I had everything I thought I needed, yet happiness still seemed so far out of reach.

I realized, after twelve straight hours of smashing the letters off my keyboard for the twenty-eighth day in a row, not having taken a second away from work for the last two years, that even though I had created this career freedom, I worked myself to the bone to get it. I was obsessed with performing better, faster, stronger at whatever cost to get that next logo or retain that next contract. Even though I was building the business to where I thought I wanted to go, I woke up every day with an unshakeable dissatisfaction for life, pain in my entire body, a tumor in my throat the size of a rump roast, and an angry voice inside my head that was encouraging me to end it all.

The cost to fill the bank was costing me my mental and physical health and I couldn’t take it anymore. I realized I had to take some time away to start nurturing the mental vault in my mind that had been neglected for so many years.

Now, of course, my story is my story and it doesn’t necessarily represent the majority of individuals struggling with their mental health, but one piece of it is true for most that I know a lot can relate to, the “unshakeable dissatisfaction for life” that leads to destructive internal dialogue and unwarranted external behavior.

This malaise of mental misery is something many struggle with on the journey to mental freedom and while the path is different for everyone, I believe there is a map that can be used to aid in the adventurous search for inner peace and psychological sovereignty.

The makeup of my Mental Wealth journey

My Mental Wealth journey has taken me across the world to some incredible places in order to uncover what I was missing. I have spent thousands of hours dissecting my psyche, exploring various tips, tools, hacks, and techniques each one supposedly more promising than the last, all of which lead to amazing healing and a surprising new understanding of what it means to be mentally well.

I have explored the healing powers found in entheogenic medicine like Ayahuasca, psilocybin magic mushrooms, and MDMA. I sat silent for 10 days straight, guided by the Vipassana meditation discipline of the Buddism lineage. I wired up my skull with electromagnetic technology to adjust the frequency in my brain through electroshock analysis. I’ve floated in sensory deprivation tanks to quiet the mind, sat in 1-degree water to activate cold thermogenesis in the body, breathed intentionally to shut off the default mode network in the brain and I think that I have tried every technique ending in “therapy” you can imagine:

• psychedelic therapy
• cognitive behavior therapy
• somatic experience therapy
• hypnotherapy
• cryotherapy
• and the list goes on…

I don’t list all of these things out to gloat, this list cost me my successful advertising business, well over $100,000 and around 2 years of my life. None of which I would change, by the way, it is just to show how much time and money it has taken to avoid the current western approach to mental illness and express to you the importance of taking your health and mental wealth into your own hands.

The Mental Wealth Blueprint

Given that 9 in 10 Canadians are desperate for alternative mental health support, and that Canadian businesses will spend roughly $50 billion dollars this year on mental health-related illness in the workplace, and that 1 person dies every 40 seconds from suicide worldwide, I thought it was time to take a look at the current mental health paradigm and suggest a new approach. Here is that attempt.

Step 1: Analyze Psychological & Physiological Dysfunction

It is abundantly clear to me now that psychological dysfunction or mental illness is evidently correlated to physiological dysfunction. The relationship between the whole body systems and the brain is directly linked to various mental health complexities like depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.

Take for example the tremendously important function serotonin has on our happiness and mental stability. We know serotonin makes us happy, but the unnatural manipulation of it used in the popular drugs on the market can cause far worse whole-body issues that lead to more debilitating mental illness. Serotonin is only one component of the mental health paradigm and 90% of that serotonin in our bodies is stored in our gut, yet we don’t look at the gut and it’s increasing importance in the treatment of mental illness.

Emerging research is beginning to mold a promising case for the mental health industry to look at hidden physiological causes of psychological dysfunction like hormone imbalance, immune system response, digestion and body detoxification, energy production, and the nervous system. Looking at the body and the mind together creates a new, more holistic approach to mental freedom.

It is in my opinion that if we analyzed how these hidden systems in our body (the internal forces that keep us from disease) react to our environment (the outside forces that cause disease) we would be able to develop more of a natural protocol for dealing with and irradicating mental illness. We have the ability now to find the hidden biomarkers that tell the entire mental health story and this whole-human diagnostic analysis is, to me, the next evolutionary step in the mental health paradox.

Step 2: Apply A Personalized Protocol To Restore Whole Body Function

With the whole body analyzed, and the right information received to inform the individual of the root cause of their symptoms based on scientific, laboratory biomarker analysis (from step 1), we should now have all we need to understand the individual makeup of the person in order to build a personalized protocol to restore whole body function, reducing or completely removing the impact of the surface-level mental health symptoms.

To most people struggling with mental illness the idea that diet, rest, exercise, stress-reduction, and proper supplementation can cure mental illness might sound crazy, but it is absolutely possible. Don’t just take my anecdotal experience as truth, read a book called Disease Delusion and you’ll see for yourself many cases, hundreds of research studies and undeniable proof that there is a natural cure for chronic illness including most of the mental health disorders we face as a society today.

The functional health movement focused on natural behavior and environmental changes is starting to shape the way we unpack chronic disease and look at the entire body as a way to shape the lifestyle of an individual suffering from pain and unrest from years of undiagnosed disease, misdiagnosed symptoms and for some, an unfortunate unwillingness to look at the root of the problem.

The change is happening and the personalized, whole-body protocols, backed by scientific biological evidence are leading the charge to natural mental wealth.

Step 3: Do The Work To Uncover Self-Worth

For the first 30 years of my life, my worth was based on the perceived value other people put on my performance, or output, as a partner, son, brother, employee, player, business partner, etc.

I’ll break that down a little more because I think this will resonate. Because I didn’t understand my real value, I chased that value from others by trying to outperform everyone around me in whatever role I played. I only felt good when someone told me I was good. Every achievement I made was met with complete emptiness because I didn’t have any personal value in the effort it took to get there. Once I realized this and started to put it out there, I realized I wasn’t alone. This isn’t just something that 90% of people struggle with, our society sort of conditions us to be this way.

Think about it. We tend to feel better when someone recognizes how hard we worked on something, and we don’t give ourselves the credit until someone jumps in and pats us on the back. We all do this in one way or another. We all put a value on other people’s opinion of our performance.

Self-Worth is technically a noun that is tied to self-esteem, but to me, self-worth is a verb. Self-worth is an action. Self-worth is setting core principles based on integrity for one's self. Self-worth is an understanding of the value that we bring into every moment. Self-worth is an awareness of the doubts, fears, and negative self-talk and how those internal triggers are trying to teach us more about what makes us unhappy.

Like overcoming your mental health issues, self-worth is work, and I believe that in addition to understanding the physiological triggers plaguing your whole body function if you find the integrity, understanding, and awareness of your own self-worth, combined you will create an unbelievable amount of freedom in your life.

Step 4: Reduce the Technology Intention Gap

We are moving from the information age (all the info, all at once), to the understanding age (aware of what information is important to us) and things are changing. We are in the most exciting era of all time, and the rapid technological advancements are incredible, but we are still fighting the most debilitating mental constructs like anxiety and depression — in fact, they’re getting worse.

Recently, life expectancy has decreased for the first time in four decades due to substance abuse, alcohol-related deaths and suicide (among other things), all of which are related to crippling mental health.

We’ve figured out how to create meat from plants, discovered how to 3D bio-print organs, take a selfie on a stick, and put three camera lenses on a cell phone we don’t even use as a phone, yet we can’t figure out how to cure mental illness? What the F**K?

Human connection and love are all felt with a combination of senses and the only way to get that is to connect deeply with the people around you, without technology, but we have found a way to gamify all of that and it has become addicting.

For example: we long for love by swiping left and right on Tinder, but can’t seem to truly connect with the people we land on. We post our accomplishments on Instagram and we gauge our emotions based on how many likes it gets.

Technology is amazing, it has made our lives incredibly more efficient, but sometimes we need to take the time to rewire ourselves, the human — the greatest technology of all time — to ensure we don’t get lost in the counterfeit connection that runs our day-to-day.

My suggestion here isn’t to disconnect completely, that is impossible. And I’m not suggesting a “digital detox” either. I’m suggesting we find a little more intention.

We need to find intention around why we use technology and what we use it for. To me, there are only three productive intentions in life that can curb the technology intention gap: truth, clarity, and growth.

• We need to use technology to find truth: truth in information and connection.
• We need to use technology to find clarity: the understanding of complex problems and solutions for the biggest issues in our lives.
• We need to use technology to grow: learn new skills, connect to things that make us stronger mentally, physically and emotionally.

My suggestion in step 4 is to look at technology with these three intentional pillars and audit the tech in your life to make sure they’re fuelling you not fooling you. I’m not trying to shit on technology, it is rather the opposite. I’m trying to paint a picture of how these technologies work having built my entire livelihood around studying them for the last 10+ years. What I uncovered trying to beat the algorithms of life and business is a conversation for another day, but today the focus is on intention. Why do we use the tech we use? Could separating from the tools that don’t hit on truth, clarity and growth create a little more space for happiness, love and human connection?

I like to believe so.

Step 5: Empower Emotional Intelligence

I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about and understanding the future of technology and artificial intelligence, emotional psychology, and where we’re headed as we merge together with these devices, and to me, the unique difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence is emotional intelligence. I believe the #1 skill everyone one reading this article should be working on is emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence will not only help us become a better employee, partner, brother, sister, pastor, speaker, lover, or seeker, but it will help us become a better whole human full of joy, happiness, and freedom.

The unfortunate reality today is that most of us have a better relationship with our farts than we do with our emotions. Think about it, when you let one rip and it really stinks up the place you start to replay in your mind what you ate (brussels sprouts, beans, that taco bell taco you crushed at lunch that is playing slip-and-slide with your intestines). But when we’re in traffic and someone cuts us off, we go absolutely insane; honking the car, giving people the finger, using our cars as flexing mechanisms to try and intimidate someone as if we’re actually going to do something about it.

Just take some time to think about that (maybe not the fart part), but the awareness of our emotions. Do you really have a handle on your emotions and how you react?

If you don’t, how can you be expected to have a handle on your work, your relationship, the way you interact with the technology that is tracking your every move.

Every decision we make and almost everything we do every single day is based on emotions. If we have very little understanding of how our emotions impact us, how are we expected to make the right decisions?

Here’s how I look at it: You have your emotional mind — managing your feelings, you have your intellectual mind — making logical sense of everything and you have your wise mind — connecting to both sides to create clarity.

The wise mind is where you make sense of the emotional mind and the intellectual mind so you can see clearly and make the right decisions. This constant process of trying to process both sides is happening every minute of the day, but we aren’t even aware of it. The more you train yourself to understand your emotions, the more intelligent you will become as we get closer and closer to this head-on collision with human-tech immersion and artificial intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is about awareness of our emotions and how they affect our day-to-day lives and while it is way easier said than done, becoming an emotional master will really help us in every area of our life as we aim to overcome the obstacles brought on by years of mental illness.

And that is where we begin

The change of the mental guard begins now, with more knowledge, information and available therapies ready to provide a fuller picture of the root cause our mental disabilities, while some complex chemical imbalances are further away from being understood, it is clear that we have everything we need now to create an individualized protocol for everyone who is willing to do the work.

It’s unfortunate it took a pandemic to give mental illness more attention, but I’m glad it has. The personal equity approach I outlined in this article is important, I believe we need to find more ways to champion the individual to find the source of their discomfort, instead of just suppressing the symptoms. SSRI’s and other drugs will only go so far, and the amount of antibiotic resistance that happens with mental health cases is incredible. If we are going to get to a place where we turn mental health into mental WEALTH then we are going to need a personalized approach that empowers the individual to create change in themselves. The future doctor is the patient and the only way to stop the cycle of trial and error on medication is to look past the surface level symptoms and go into what is truly causing the issue.

We need to look at the whole body and the whole situation, that includes diet, lifestyle patterns, environmental stressors, and childhood trauma in order to identify the dysfunction and treat it with more of a holistic approach that is in the patient’s hands, not on the clipboard of an old man with a white coat on.

This post is part of my $100,000 journey into re-building my mind, body, and inner-self through a series of uncommon experiences that completely transformed my life. Head over here to view more.

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