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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Rich Pelley

Could Bear Grylls’ five steps to better mental health help a beta male like me?

Rich Pelley with Bear Grylls on phone.
Rich Pelley with Bear Grylls on phone. Photograph: Rich Pelley

I have never really been one for self-improvement. Sure, I’ve got my faults (where do I start?), but hey, I’m still a (vaguely) functioning member of society. Why change? For those of us happily stuck in our ways, the pressure is unfortunately mounting to better ourselves. It’s now all but impossible to amble into a bookshop without being confronted with a new self-help tome to “maximise YOUR productivity”, or to scour YouTube without a video thumbnail urging you to “motivate yourself to WIN”. All of which, on reflection, I could probably do with.

Enter the hard-but-posh adventurer Bear Grylls, who joined the self-help “space” in 2023 with an app called Mettle, billed as “the world’s first toolkit for men’s minds”. You can tell it’s marketed at alpha males like Grylls (as opposed to bottom feeders like me) because of the emphasis on mental fitness rather than health. My body is so unfit, I dread to think what state my brain’s in. But seeing as I at least qualify, as a bloke – albeit of the beta variety – I thought: why not give it a whirl?

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