Hamza’s Full (Written) Mental Health Guide For Men

This is a full written and curated version of Hamza’s full mental health guide video 👇. My goal for creating this is to understand the content better and create an asset that I can come back to on my self-improvement journey. That said, I hope publicizing this can bring you value as well.

All credit goes to Hamza Ahmed.

Outline

Jump straight to sections of this written guide:

• Actionable Steps
• Guide Sections:
  • Introduction
  • Get Your Mental Health Score
  • Hamza’s Mental Health Story
  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Gratitude
  • Mindfulness
  • Challenges
  • Physical Health
    • Diet
    • Exercise
    • Sleep
  • Social Connection
  • Environment (Nature, Sunlight, Adventure)
  • Kindness
  • PTSD/Trauma
• Q&A
• Conclusion

Actionable Steps

Here are the actionable steps to come back to after reading/watching the full guide.

3 steps to improve your mental health in 2 weeks:

1. Take the UK’s depression and anxiety self-assessment quiz to get your score.
   • Mood self assessment quiz
   • Depression self-assessment quiz
2. Create a habit tracker for the habits below. There are more habits you can do but if you’re just getting started with self improvement it’s good to make it easy and simple for yourself. These habits should be at the top of the page and going down the page just write numbers 1-14 representing the days for the next 2 weeks.
   • Meditate
   • Gratitude
   • Exercise
   • Adventure
3. Do those habits every single day, no matter how small the length, and tick off the box when done. “Try your best to tick off every habit every day, but be totally ok with missing some habits. I still miss a bunch of habits sometimes.” – Hamza
   • Meditate:
     • You can follow his guided meditation video: https://youtu.be/N0tY-TaEEQI or download the free meditation app Medito
   • Gratitude:
     • Send a text message of gratitude to someone you know saying something like “hey bro, I’m really grateful for that thing we did, thank you.”
     • Spend a couple minutes just closing your eyes (or writing down) and feeling grateful for someone or something.
   • Exercise: Choose whatever form of exercise you wanna do, but make sure you do at least 1 minute every single day. That’s all you need to do to tick the box, just 1 minute. This could be:
     – 10 pushups
     – A little run
     – A full gym workout
   • Adventure:
     • Go somewhere new. This doesn’t mean to commute to a totally different city, although that would be fun but it’s quite a big thing to do. Literally just go on a mini adventure and go see something in your local area that you’ve never seen before. There’s a street/road you’ve never been on, a house you’ve never seen, a tree you’ve never looked at properly before. Go out on a mini adventure like you’re a child, climb a tree, jump over a puddle, pick out your favorite leaf.
     • Pretend you’ve been blind all your life and now you finally have the magic and beauty of being able to see from your eyes. Go out like it’s the first time you’re looking at the world.

Supplemental:

• If you want an interesting book to read through all this which will make you feel more positive and successful, the book I always recommend to people is called The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. Here’s a free PDF: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YNCiKAFb71ivVH_H9NAp0tKSgG97B8AF?usp=sharing

Introduction

Problems you may be facing right now:

• Procrastination
• Poor diet
• Lack of motivation
• Lack discipline
• Stuggling with habits like exercising, nofap, eating clean
• Your brain keeps choosing the bad option even though you know you don’t want to do that
• Overindulging in YouTube, porn, video games, social media
• Struggling with negative thoughts
• Feeling quite bad

Key understanding: These are not problems, but rather SYMPTOMS of the REAL problem: poor mental health

If we improve your mental health, all of these symptoms will dissipate by themselves.

Positive results of improving your mental health:

• You’ll feel a lot more positive
• You’ll feel pleasant
• You’ll be able to sit and enjoy life without needing to be hyperstimulated
• You’ll be able to take control of your thoughts, not always thinking negative and belittling things about yourself
• Work will start to feel fun, you’ll start to crave sitting down and doing work
• It’ll feel good not to procrastinate
• You’ll get higher grades in school
• You’ll become more intelligent
• You’ll become more productive
• You’ll build the best physique of your entire life
• You’ll make healthier choices

Get Your Mental Health Score

First thing’s first, we need a baseline, a “before picture.”

Action Item: Take 2 minutes to complete this free depression and anxiety self-assessment quiz from the UK’s National Health Service.

This is your “before” picture. Save your scores somewhere.

The goal of this guide: After 2 weeks, we decrease your score by half.

Hamza’s Mental Health Story

Listen to Hamza’s full mental health story here in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E6cg8c0M38&t=327s.

Depression

Defining depression: It’s less about feeling “sadness” and more about a general emptiness, nihilism (believing that life is meaningless)

Why do we get depressed?

• We’re living without purpose and meaning
• We’re overindulging in instant gratitifaction

Key Terms:

Instant Gratification: When you do something that feels good right now, but that makes your life worse in the long run.
– Common activities: Watching porn, video games, watching TV

Delayed Gratification: When you resist an immediate reward (instant gratitification) to make your life better in the long run, or obtain an even better reward in the future.
– Common activities: Exercising, investing

Understand that overindulging in instant gratification decreases our baseline/normal happiness level, our baseline fulfillment. It makes it harder for us to feel happy or fulfilled.

A note on the whether depression is curable: Believe in things that serve you. Believing that you can’t change your depression does not serve you in any beneficial way. Even if you have depression, there is always some kind of progress you can make.

• Hamza has noted that he’s helped multiple people out of depression that were absolutely certain their depression was genetic and unchangeable.

Try this: View depression as your ally instead of your enemy. Be grateful for your depression. Use it as a thermostat for telling you there’s something wrong in your life. Use it to direct you into the right course of action.

To cure depression: Stop doing the activities that lead to instant gratification and do more of the good delayed gratification habits and mental health practices.

Common catch-22 feeling: Depression makes it feel like we have an inability to do the good habits which would cure the depression, thus, we don’t do the habits that would cure our depression.

• Try this: Reframe your mind to think of doing these things as “just habits” rather than feeling like you have a handicap (depression).
• Understand: Changing your habits will improve our depression. It is a fact.

Anxiety

Anxiety can lead to panicing, fear, agressiveness, negative effects to your physical health. It’s often quite unique to each person, though.

It generally triggers fight or flight mode which allocates more resources to short term survival mechanisms and away from long term mechanisms.

Like depression, we should feel grateful for our anxiety. We should reframe our minds about our anxiety.

So much progress comes when we realize the utility of depression and anxiety, the value they provide us.

To cure anxiety: Mindfulness

Gratitude

Gratitude is the first tool for improving your mental health.

Defining gratitude: Forcing your brain to think positive thoughts about things you appreciate.

Action: Create a habit of expressing gratitude every day for 5-10min. Examples:

• Send a text
  • Pick one person in your phone’s contact list and text them that you’re grateful for them. Think about some positive memories with them. If you do this, you might notice that it puts a smile on your face, that you feel happier, and that you can actually create that feeling in someone else.
  • If you do this every day and run out of family and friends to send texts to, join the Discord server with other motivated people on self-improvement https://discord.gg/PtjC4ZSfG3 and try reaching out to someone new.
• Gratitude journal
  • Write down 3-5 things that you’re grateful for on a piece of paper.

Over time your mind will start to automatically come up with things you’re grateful for without you having to force it.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is often joined with meditation.

We know that meditation is good for our mental health so let’s talk about how to practically implement meditation into our life.

Defining mindfulness: The ability to be present and aware of what is happening right here and right now instead of having random thoughts.

Why are we so mindless every day? Answer: Our smartphones and social media.

• On these apps we see new and different information every couple of seconds which trains our brains to have shorter attention spans, to only hold on to information every couple seconds.
• Are you truly using social media fully for your own benefit? Truly. Be honest.

Action: Take a big step back from using social media, especially: TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube shorts, and any other short form content. Switch over to more educational uses, longer videos, longer podcasts.

Benefits of increasing your mindfulness:

• You’ll become more present and enjoy what’s happening
• You’ll be able to regulate your emotions
• You’ll make friends and maintain relationships so much easier
• You’ll be able to focus on work and studies so much better

The 4 concrete steps of meditation:

1. Be mindful and focus on something in the present moment (most commonly people use their breath).
2. After a couple seconds or minutes you will inevitably (uncontrollably) lose your focus and awareness on that thing (the breath).
3. Realize and just observe that your mind has wandered away from focusing on the present (the breath).
4. Refocus on the present (the breath).

A crucial tip:

• People often feel frustrated that they cannot focus for very long on the breath. Realize that losing focus is part of the process and is actually a GOOD thing. Think of going through all 4 steps as: one bicep curl for your brain. Losing your focus and having your mind wander gives you an opportunity to practice the act of refocusing on the present (breath).

Challenges

Challenges help us enter a flow state and a flow state helps us tap into our full potential.

Defining flow state: a mental state in which a person is completely focused on a single task or activity.

You can only enter a flow state through some kind of challenge that you can obsess over.

Working hard on a meaningful goal makes us feel good, especially if YOU are the one that set that goal.

Action: Take a couple minutes to write down a challenge for yourself for the next week.

• If you want, this could also be a longer term (months, years) goal that you work towards rather than in the next week.
• e.g. Finish reading X book, workout 5 times, go on 3 runs.

Physical Health

Understand: Our physical health might be the single most important influence on our mental health.

If you improve some parts of your physical health, you’ll indirectly improve your mental health.

Important Note: The above parts of this guide are required before working on your physical health. If you haven’t worked on those, spending time and effort here will just be a waste of time. If you’re struggling with things like diet, working out, or being consistent, work on Gratitude, Meditation, and Challenge first. If you improve those, working on your physical health will naturally become easier.

There are 3 parts of our physical health that influence our mental health

• Diet
• Exercise
• Sleep

Diet

Diet actually has a huge affect on our mental health. If you want to learn more and go deeper, Hamza made a full guide on just diet here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXW7dpuxYzU.

The advice here is unsexy

• In general, eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, meats, nuts, whole grains
• More specifically, eat “single-ingredient meals”
  • e.g. a potato, broccoli, salmon. Each of these does not have an “ingredient list.” They ARE the ingredients.

Action: Start off by substituting just one meal a day with a single-ingredient meal (e.g. potato, broccoli, and salmon)

When you’re at the grocery store, take a look at yours and others’ trolley/shopping carts. The cart of a true athlete/warrior is just a bunch of vegetables, meats, nuts, single ingredients, etc.

If you’re a young man who doesn’t have much control over what you eat (i.e. your parents make most of the meals). Try asking your parents for single-ingredient meals. If that doesn’t work, try just eating less of the processed foods you’re given, responding with “oh I just want more X (chicken, potatoes, broccoli, etc. – more of the single ingredients)”

Exercise

Exercise intentionally at least 3 times a week.

However, we need to move our bodies every single day. If you take a rest day from weight lifting or calisthenics, you still want to move/do cardio for at least 20 minutes (walk, run, shadow boxing, etc. anything that gets you a little sweaty)

Sleep

Sleep is so overlooked in the majority of people, but it is so important. Most people just accept a lack of sleep because of our schooling or jobs.

If you want to learn more about sleep, check out the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

Hamza talks in the video that he’s paying $2,500 for a program with experts to optimize his sleep. The 3 main learning lessons he shared are:

1. The number one thing most important thing is morning sunlight.
   1. Every single morning when the sun comes out, get sunlight in your eyes (5 min, 10 min, 20 min). It helps you wake up, improves your dopamine levels, all this sciencey stuff.
   2. It’s crucial to go outside and get it directly, not through a window, glass, car windshield, etc.
2. Go to sleep and wake up at the exact same time every day (yes, even weekends).
   1. Even though it feels healthy to “catch up” on the weekends by sleeping in, it has a cascading negative effect on subsequent days.
   2. Doing this means we need to find a sustainable (something we can continue to do long term) sleep schedule (bed/wake up times).
3. Winding down before bed.
   1. Specifically what we need to do is lower our heart rate so that by the time we go to sleep our heart rate is already at our lowest point.
   2. Spend 20-60 min doing things that lower your heart rate before going to sleep.
   3. The most effective way he has found to wind down is: lie down on the floor and follow a long meditation guide, 20 min, 40 min, 1 hour. After that, then do you night time routine and get in bed.

Social Connection

There’s a book on a Japanese concept that says the single greatest aspect of longevity (living longer) is actually social connection. Lonliness is similar to sleep deprivation in that it makes a lot of aspects of our lives worse. This shows us just how important social connection is.

Where should we go to meet friends?

• This question is actually not what we should be asking. Instead, we should be asking, “Who do I become to meet friends?”
• It’s not about where we go, it about who we are.

With some humility, a question to seriously ask ourselves:

• Have I made good new friends over the last few months?
• Do I frequently get into deep, loving, spontaneous conversations with strangers?
  If we answer no to either of the above, we need to work on our social skills.

Remember: The person you want to be friends with, has to want to be friends with you.

The mindset we can use to make and maintain friends comes down to our social skills. Think of life and social connections like a video game where we need to “level up” the skill of being social and gain XP (experience points) to improve.

Social Skills Leveling Guide:

• Holding eye contact and smiling at a stranger = +20 XP
• Stopping to have a chat with a stranger (if you initiated) = +100 XP
  • e.g. Having a bit longer conversation with the cashier at a shop
• Conducting yourself well in that conversation = +200 XP (a whole level up)
• Getting rejected while maintaining a positive mindset = +500 XP
  • e.g. Asking people silly questions like “can I have that TV for free?” Of course they’ll say “no” but the intention was to feel some discomfort and rejection to gain some experience in your social skills.

Environment (Nature, Sunlight, Adventure)

When was the last time you had a real adventure? Most often we just wake up, go to school, go to work, etc.

We humans are supposed to be in awe of the natural beauty around us, to be curious and adventurous, to appreciate that one tree, to pick up a leaf off the ground and really look at it.

Hamza mentions that getting out into vast open spaces, into nature forced him to think more about grand things, about long term plans, about fatherhood, about the next generation rather than short term things.

Imagine a map of your area like the map of the game GTA (Grand Theft Auto) where the places you’ve been are visible and the places you haven’t been are greyed out.

• There is inevitably some place on our own map that we haven’t seen (that’s greyed out), some street we haven’t been down or house we haven’t seen that’s literally 2 minutes away from us.

A simple rule: Go out and do the things you did as a child. Go kick a ball around, climb a tree, jump over a puddle.

We need practical advice here or else our excitement in this section will fade and we won’t make any long term changes.

Practical Advice: Get into long-distance cardio.

• Go on a long run. Download an app on your phone and track your runs.
• Start challenging yourself like the Challenges section.
• BUT, focus more on the adventure than the actual cardio, exploring trails, streets you haven’t been down, looking at buildings you’ve never seen.

Kindness

From a free online course called The Science of Well-Being from Yale, the professor mentions this study that says: people are actually happier if they spend money on others rather than themselves.

Being kind and generous makes us feel better about ourselves.

If you spent around the equivalent of 20 minutes of your country’s minimum wage (a coffee, drink, bottle of water) on a friend, you might find that you actually feel better than if you spent it on yourself.

Kindness and generosity are linked to this feeling of being needed, which is so important for us as young men. We’re so individualistic as a society, we don’t have tribes anymore like tens of thousands of years ago.

The reason we don’t feel so good, that we feel lonely might be that we feel deep down that if we just disappeared, no one would really notice. We need to express these thoughts of humility to ourselves to be able to aim to change them.

Become a man that is needed in the community.

• Men are built from pressure and responsibility.
• If you are not responsible for someone else right now, you are not a man, you’re just a boy, a “guy.” You turn into a man when you take on responsibility of other people.
• You will become more masculine, more like a man when you start helping other people.
• It doesn’t just have to be money, if you help someone else with something like their diet, your diet will also improve.

Action: Think about how you can be kind or how you can help someone else.

• It could be as simple as buying a drink for someone or tipping a waitress
• Or it could be something bigger, like asking yourself what purposeful work could I dedicate my life to in order to help other people?

PTSD/Trauma

Trauma is something more severe than “habitual” mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.

Defining PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
– Usually just comes from one event, like a car crash

Defining CPTSD – Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
– Many times comes from repeated events, like childhood abuse from parents

Common physical symptoms of PTSD:

• Anxiety
• Stress
• Hypervigilance
• Faster heartbeat

2 methods to improve symptoms:

• Top down model
  • Focus on improving the brain, then the rest of the body will follow
  • e.g. journaling, therapy, being in love
• Bottom up model
  • Focus on improving the body, then that will help improve the brain
  • e.g. the Physical Health section of this guide, sunlight, nature

This is a very complicated subject and Hamza mentions that he’s still working through things.

One last thing about PTSD: If you do relate to having PTSD/CPTSD/Trauma, try to be grateful for it. Rewrite your story, use it as an opportunity to make progress. Hamza mentions that his own experiences formed him into the man he is today.

Q&A

How do you find something to talk about with everyone you see?

You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking, “how can I be comfortable with silence in a conversation?”

It’s fine in a conversation to just stop. You don’t have to keep saying everything on your mind to fill the space. Learn to become comfortable with silence.

What would you say to someone struggling mentally in school?

You’re not alone.

• It’s very common nowadays.

You’re not special.

• Improving your mental health will improve your grades.
• Trying to study for 10 hours because it’s “just part of the culture” is not healthy for your mental health. Work on the practices that are part of this guide – taking rest, getting out in nature, adventure, etc. Doing those things will help you succeed in school.

How do I stop comparing myself to others?

Understand: Comparing ourselves to others is an absolutely fundamental part of the human existence. There’s no way to get rid of it.

The real issue is that nowadays (because of social media) we have too many people to compare ourselves to. We used to have tribes/communities of 150 people, maybe 20-30 people our age. Nowadays with social media, we have the ability to compare ourselves to THOUSANDS of people our age. That’s not healthy for our brains.

The best way to stop comparing yourself to others is actually to reduce your time on social media.

Conclusion

Understand that your mental health is the greatest asset you’ll ever have.

Any time you spend learning about or improving your mental health will payoff tenfold down the road.