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?
Now, I like Grylls. I once asked him: “You happily eat goat testicles, yak eyeballs, camel intestines and elephant dung. Should one be wary of the vol-au-vents and canapés at your drinks parties?” “Well, nobody comes to my drinks parties if they think I’m cooking,” he replied. Though I did worry about him after his recent escapade with Russell Brand, he has a sense of humour at least.
But there is no way I can match his alpha male mindset. The man is known for his ludicrous escapades, such as urinating into a snake skin then drinking it (as he did on Born Survivor), giving himself an enema on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (on Man vs Wild) and pulling a sheep out of an Irish bog, eating its raw heart, turning it inside out and using it as a sleeping bag (also on Man vs Wild). I mean, do I really want to take mental health advice from a man who has maggots boiled in a dead sheep’s testicle sack for breakfast?
“If you look it up, [mettle] means a person’s ability to cope with difficulties, with challenge, with change,” says Grylls in the opening video. Yes, thanks, Susie Dent.
I’m reassured by the fact that it’s not just Grylls dishing out the lessons. The app also features a gaggle of clean-cut male health influencers. There’s the breathwork coach Jamie Clements, the Australian meditation coach Chibs Okereke, the mental fitness coach (and ex-Love Island contestant) Dr Alex George and the hypnotist turned “mind-hack” coach Paul McKenna.
According to Mettle, to achieve a Grylls-like nirvana, we men need to do five things: sleep better (check), relax (if only), beat stress (sounds stressful), optimise success (whatever that means) and be happier (smiley-face emoji). The good news is that this lorry-load of self-improvement only takes a few minutes each day. This gives me “positive reinforcement” that there’s no need to change my inherent laziness and the constant pursuit of the shortcut. All I have to do is listen to short, daily voice messages from Grylls, McKenna and the gang. The bad news is that you have to get past an awful lot of self-help jargon that sounds as posh as Grylls trying to get the silver spoon out of his mouth.
For example, Grylls doesn’t just give you advice; he gives you your “daily mind fuel”, which sounds like the advertising slogan for a breakfast cereal. Today’s mind fuel centres on failure (my Mastermind specialist subject). “We’ve all chalked up failures in life. In fact, if we haven’t, maybe we aren’t aiming high enough,” reasons Grylls. “Failures are the doorways that we must pass through to get to the good stuff.” Good to hear, because my failure door is always open.
Next up, Clements gives me my “daily boost”, which sounds so manly I worry he’s going to suggest running up some concrete steps to the tune of Eye of the Tiger. Instead, all I should try is a quick pattern of double inhale through the nose, exhale out of the mouth – essentially the drum/clap intro to Queen’s We Will Rock You.
McKenna’s “mind hack” of the day is based around a psychosensory technique called havening, which is said to reduce stress and trauma. This has me stroking my arms, imagining I’m walking on a beach, remembering a happy time. For this happy time, I choose the moment I asked McKenna if he’d ever tried hypnotising his hair to grow back. (“If hypnotism could do everything, getting my hair to grow back would be top of the list,” he replied despondently). After a week or so fiddling on my phone, I’m left not quite knowing what to think, other than: if McKenna is so bothered, why doesn’t he just fly to Turkey, or at least go to the Belgravia hair loss clinic?
My summary is that Mettle will work well for the alphas: it’s aimed at blokes, by blokes, talking in suitably blokey terminology. (“I’m just off to do my daily boost sounds a lot more manly than: “Excuse me while I do my breathing exercises.”) But does it work for a less driven, beta male dweeb like me? When you’ve got five blokes telling you how to breathe, meditate, mind fuel, habit stack and mind-hack, their combined advice can – at times – feel a bit over-blokey, like the peer pressure on a stag do, and make you pine for the more caring advice of your wife/partner/mum.
Saying that, while Grylls’ app probably isn’t for me, that doesn’t mean men’s mental health isn’t important, and something that we men all need to get better at talking about. If Grylls can wear his heart on his sleeve, so can I. Just so long as I don’t have to eat it raw for breakfast as well.
Rich Pelley is a freelance writer
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