We are proud to host Cameron K, Community Manager at Women For Change South Africa, for an important conversation on gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa. Cameron shares insight into the realities of GBVF, the importance of advocacy and community action, and the need to keep these conversations going.
Mind Over Matter.
We are proud to welcome Michel’le Donnelly, Project Leader for Advocacy and Awareness at the South African Federation for Mental Health, to the conversation.
Mind Over Matter.
Psychotherapist Judith Belmont brings more than 40 years of private therapy experience to her work as a motivational speaker, online coach, and author of 11 self-help books. She is also the founder of BelmontWellness.com.
In this episode, Judith discusses her book 110 CBT Tips & Tools, sharing practical skills and resources to support a healthier mindset. She breaks down how we can recognise disturbing or negative self-talk, understand the thinking patterns behind it, and work towards more rational, balanced, and healthier alternatives.
A practical conversation filled with accessible CBT tools for developing greater awareness, challenging unhelpful thoughts, and supporting emotional wellbeing.
Mind Over Matter.
There is a kind of armour a person puts on when there is too much to feel and too little time to feel it in. Mine, on the day I left the United States for good, came in the form of a cowboy hat. Boxes had to be shipped across an ocean. Documents had to be faxed across the same ocean. And somewhere in the middle of all that logistics, I was also supposed to be saying goodbye to seven years of my life. So I did what any reasonable person does when the emotional maths does not add up in the time available. I put the hat on, channelled something closer to a stoic rancher than a woman quietly unravelling, and got on the plane.
It worked, for a while. Through one flight, through a last meal in an airport the size of a small city, through a boarding gate filled almost entirely with fellow South Africans heading the same direction I was. It stopped working somewhere over the ocean, once the plane levelled out and there was nothing left to organise, nothing left to pack, nothing left to do except sit with seven years compressing themselves into a single overwhelming replay behind my eyes. The hat stayed on. The composure did not. You can outrun a feeling for exactly as long as your hands stay busy, and not one second longer.
What surprised me was not the collapse, grief tends to collect what it is owed eventually, however cleverly a person tries to dodge it. What surprised me was what happened the moment I actually landed. Something in my body recognised home before my conscious mind caught up. My exhale came out longer than my inhale, which is the physiological signature of a nervous system finally being allowed to stand down after months of running on alert. This is where the first kind of ground shows up, and it is the one most people mean when they use the word at all: the physical body settling back into safety, measurably, in real time.
That settling deepened the moment my bare feet touched the grass of the new lawn my partner and I now owned. There is an actual name for this specific practice, grounding, sometimes called earthing, direct physical contact with the earth through grass, sand or soil, used to support the nervous system’s return to baseline after periods of chronic stress. Researchers have found measurable changes in cortisol rhythm and autonomic balance in people who practise it consistently, and whatever the precise mechanism turns out to be, the felt experience is difficult to argue with once it has happened to you. Standing barefoot on my own patch of earth for the first time in years, I felt more anchored in thirty seconds than I had in the entire chaotic month leading up to that flight. This is physical grounding at its most literal: skin against soil, breath against panic, a body being given permission, finally, to stop bracing.
But physical grounding on its own could not account for everything that steadied me over the following weeks, and this is where the story needs a second kind of ground entirely, one built from time rather than terrain. Standing at the base of a mountain reserve overlooking a statue of Nelson Mandela, arm raised in the salute that has become shorthand in my country for power returned to the people once denied it, I felt something that had nothing to do with my nervous system and everything to do with lineage. The statue faces the church where the oldest liberation movement on the continent was founded. Surrounded by giraffes, ostriches and undecorated history, I understood that grounding is not only a present tense event happening inside one body. Sometimes it is historical, the deliberate act of tracing yourself backward into the people and struggles that made your current freedom possible. Clinicians working with displaced or historically marginalised communities sometimes describe this as ancestral grounding, the process of consciously reconnecting to where you actually come from, and it matters most for anyone whose lineage carries displacement, forced removal or struggle somewhere in its history. Standing there, I was not calming a stress response. I was remembering, physically and geographically, that I descend from people who fought for the exact right to stand where I was currently standing, and that kind of remembering does something a passport stamp never could.
That same historical thread pulled taut again a few weeks later on a road I used to walk with my grandmother as a child. My hometown had changed in the ordinary ways hometowns change, new shops, aged faces, the particular disorientation researchers call reverse culture shock, the experience of returning to a familiar place and finding it subtly, unsettlingly new because you have changed as much as it has. And yet walking that specific road, I felt exactly as safe as I had as a child, which told me something about historical grounding that the statue alone had not. It is not only about ancestry stretching back centuries. It is also about the accumulated ground of your own single life, the roads and rituals that stay solid underneath you even after everything else about you has shifted. A hometown, it turns out, holds you for a lifetime whether or not you still technically live there, because the version of you who once belonged there never actually leaves.
The third kind of ground took longer to recognise, mostly because it never arrived as a single clean moment the way the grass and the statue did. Attachment researchers have a concept that fits it precisely, the secure base, the idea that another person’s steady presence can regulate a nervous system almost as directly as solid earth underfoot, a process sometimes called co regulation. I felt an early, communal version of this at a wedding a few weeks after landing, plate piled with the kind of home cooking that had lived rent free in my memory for years. I ate slowly that night, fully present with every bite, less because I was practising any deliberate mindfulness and more because being surrounded by family who had missed me made the food, and the moment, impossible to rush through. That is what relational grounding often looks like in its earliest, least dramatic form: full attention arriving naturally because the people around the table are the ones holding you steady.
The clearest version of it, though, came later, and it was not a place or a plate at all. It was handing a piece of this new life to my younger brother, showing him a home built from nothing, letting him help choose the small things that would fill it, watching him ring in a new year in a space that had not existed a few months earlier. There is something quietly restorative about letting the people who knew you at your least established see exactly what you have since built. It closes a loop that words alone struggle to close. He got to walk through the rooms and see, in a very literal way, that the version of me who once left was not the version standing in that kitchen now, and that whatever had been given up to get here had amounted to something real. That is relational grounding doing its fullest work: not just another person calming your nervous system in a single moment, but another person witnessing the whole arc of what you built, and steadying you simply by seeing it clearly.
If there is a single thread running through the cowboy hat, the tears at thirty thousand feet, the bare feet on new grass, the statue and the road with my grandmother, the wedding table and my brother in that kitchen, it is that grounding never arrives as one clean, singular event. It moves through three distinct layers, and each one does a different job. Physical grounding steadies the body in the present moment, breath and skin and nervous system finding their way back to baseline. Historical grounding steadies identity across time, connecting a person backward to the lineage and personal history that shaped them long before they had language for any of it. Relational grounding steadies a person through others, whether that is a table full of family or one sibling standing in a kitchen that did not exist a year earlier. You can armour up to get through the leaving, a cowboy hat, busy hands, forward motion. You cannot armour your way through the returning, not fully, and I am not convinced you would want to. The entire point of coming home is finally letting all three kinds of ground catch you at once.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.
I spent my last morning in North Carolina the way I handle most endings: quickly, and with my guard half raised. I have always been an efficient goodbye person. Quick exit, minimal ceremony, spare everyone the slow motion ache of watching someone leave. I built that habit as a kid, moved between towns and schools often enough that packing up a life stopped feeling like loss and started feeling like routine. When you learn young that you might have to leave a place without warning, you get good at building a new life fast and getting out of the old one faster.
What I did not understand until my final two weeks in the States is that being efficient at goodbyes is not the same thing as being at peace with them. There is a particular kind of coping that looks like resilience from the outside and functions like avoidance from the inside, sidestepping discomfort instead of moving through it, and psychology has a specific name for it: experiential avoidance. It is a completely functional strategy in the short term. The problem is that avoided feelings do not disappear, they wait, and mine had apparently been waiting a long time. I felt it in my body before I understood it in my head, which is usually how this works: tight shoulders, a low locked in tension that had nothing to do with normal tiredness. A breathwork session meant to loosen something specific instead handed me something obvious in hindsight. I had never actually learned how to let go of anything. I had just gotten remarkably good at leaving before the letting go had to happen.
I arrived at twenty one with what I would now generously call an unresolved relationship with my own family history, and a quiet hope that distance might do some of that sorting for me. I had just finished a psychology degree, which mostly meant I understood how much I still did not understand about myself. The plan was simple on paper: do the programme, see the country, come home and deal with things properly. Life seldom follows the plan written on paper, and mine did not either.
What actually shaped me was the experience itself, in ways four years of lectures never quite managed. The first real shift showed up around individualism, a concept I had studied clinically long before I felt it personally. I grew up in a fairly collectivist frame, where decisions get filtered through family expectation before they get filtered through personal preference. That is not a flaw in collectivist upbringings, it is simply how they are built, and there is real value in a life organised around interdependence rather than independence. But America gave me something I had not been offered before: permission to ask what I actually wanted, separate from anyone else’s expectations. The developmental term for that process is individuation, the gradual work of building a self distinct from one’s family of origin, and it is supposed to unfold slowly across adolescence rather than land all at once in your twenties. Mine got delayed and then compressed into a handful of years on a different continent, mostly out of necessity rather than design.
The useful psychoeducational point here is that individualism and collectivism are not opposites you have to choose between forever. Geert Hofstede mapped this exact tension decades ago as a single cultural dimension, individualism on one end and collectivism on the other, and most people who move between cultures eventually settle somewhere in the middle of it rather than fully on one side. Acculturation researchers have a name for the healthiest place to land: integration, keeping meaningful parts of the original culture while fully taking on parts of the new one, instead of trading one for the other. I did not know that framework existed while I was living it, but it names what eventually happened to me accurately. I did not stop being someone shaped by a collectivist upbringing. I became someone who could hold both frames at once and choose deliberately which one served a given moment, family loyalty in one context, personal agency in another, rather than defaulting permanently to either.
Then came the harder lesson, wrapped in a work ethic I had heard about my whole life but never actually lived inside. The belief that effort reliably produces mobility is not universally true, and the American dream carries real, well documented limits and inequities that deserve saying plainly. But in that specific window, for me, it functioned often enough as advertised to shift my sense of my own ceiling in a way that stuck. Albert Bandura had a term for exactly that shift: self efficacy, a person’s belief in their own capacity to produce an outcome through their own action. Watching effort translate into a visible result over and over recalibrates that belief in a way reading about it never could.
It is also worth naming the other side of that work culture honestly, because it deserves more than a highlight reel. American hustle culture has a cutthroat edge that can quietly reorganise a person’s sense of self around output. When effort keeps getting rewarded, it becomes very easy to let your worth as a person become contingent on how much you produce, a pattern psychologists sometimes describe as contingent self worth. I felt that pull too, not just the empowering version of hard work but the exhausting version, the one where rest starts to feel like falling behind. Anyone chasing a similar experience abroad is worth warning about that edge specifically, because the same culture that will teach you real self efficacy can also teach you to measure yourself only in output, and that lesson is much harder to unlearn afterward.
Communication style reprogrammed me in its own way too. I came from a culture where opinions get softened or buried in the name of politeness and hierarchy, a pattern communication researchers sort under high context, where meaning depends heavily on tone, status and what is left unsaid. What I found instead sat firmly under low context: people said the actual thing, argued the actual point, and moved on without the residue of resentment I had been trained to expect from disagreement. It fit a part of my personality that had been there underneath the socialisation the whole time, waiting for a culture that would let it out.
Living across several states, chasing seasonal work the way a lot of people on similar programmes do, taught me something closer to applied psychology than anything in a textbook. Adaptability is not a fixed trait, it behaves more like a trained capacity, and the useful concept here is the idea of a comfort zone with two edges rather than one. Stay too far inside it and nothing changes. Push too far outside it and the nervous system reads the situation as threat rather than challenge, which shuts down learning rather than supporting it. Growth tends to happen in the narrow band between those two, sometimes called the stretch zone, where a task is difficult enough to demand something new from you but not so overwhelming that it triggers full blown threat response. Every relocation asked something slightly harder of me, and every time I met that ask inside my stretch zone rather than my panic zone, the next relocation asked less of my courage and more of my competence.
But growth does not stay comfortable for long, and this is where the story stops being a tidy success arc. Somewhere between twenty five and twenty six, a different signal started interrupting the momentum. I had sacrificed pieces of myself along the way without fully tracking the cost, my relationship with food among them, my body simply not agreeing with a pace of life I had adapted to out of necessity rather than fit. Stress physiology has a word for that kind of debt: allostatic load, the cumulative wear a body takes on from repeatedly adapting to demand without enough recovery in between. Adaptability has a price. Part of growing up is learning to actually notice that price instead of treating your tolerance for it as a personality trait to be proud of.
There is a specific discomfort that shows up right before a person chooses growth over comfort, and it makes complete physiological sense even though it feels awful while it is happening. Once complacency sets in, it starts disguising itself as stability. You know the shape of your days, you know what to expect, and the moment you consider trading that for something less certain but more aligned, your nervous system treats the uncertainty itself as a threat. The body runs its own background check for this, a largely unconscious scan for safety or danger that arrives before conscious thought does, and the term for it in the polyvagal research is neuroception. Novelty and danger get filed in overlapping neural territory, which is exactly why leaving a stable but misaligned life can feel more frightening than staying in it. I felt that acutely once I asked myself a harder question than any I had asked in years: if you stripped away the currency, the job, the whole comfortable architecture of this particular life, what would actually be left of you? The answer, thankfully, was still someone with a psychology degree and an actual pull toward clinical work, buried under a few years of well paid distraction.
That question points at something worth naming directly for anyone reading this while sitting inside their own version of it. Money and meaning run on different systems entirely. Self determination theory, one of the more useful frameworks in motivational psychology, separates extrinsic motivation, working for an external reward like income, from intrinsic motivation, working because the activity itself feels meaningful and aligned with your values. Both can coexist for a while. But when the extrinsic side keeps getting fed while the intrinsic side goes quiet, it is possible to end up with a fuller bank account and an emptier sense of purpose at the same time, and that gap tends to widen rather than close on its own.
One more piece of this deserves naming honestly, because it changed the shape of everything else: access. The United States handed me a density of mental health infrastructure, therapy, wellness resources, platforms built specifically to make support easier to reach, that I had simply not grown up around. That access alone did not change me. But it gave me the tools to do the interior work I had been avoiding since childhood, and that is a different and far more durable thing than access on its own.
Looking back at the twenty one year old who landed here carrying more unresolved history than she knew what to do with, and the twenty eight year old getting ready to fly home, the real difference has very little to do with geography. It is that the version of me leaving finally knows how to sit inside a goodbye rather than engineering an exit around it, and knows how to hold both cultural frames she was raised between without needing to reject either one to feel whole in the other.
If there is a lesson bigger than my own timeline in any of this, it is probably this. Growth seldom happens where you expect it, doing the thing you originally set out to do. It tends to happen while you are technically busy doing something else entirely, chasing seasonal work, learning a new city’s rhythm, working out how to disagree with someone without flinching. If any part of this resonates, a few things are worth carrying forward regardless. Notice when efficiency at endings is doing the emotional work that grief actually needs to do instead. Treat adaptability as a skill with a cost, not a personality trait to wear as armour. And if you are building a life between two cultures rather than fully inside one, know that integration, holding both, is not indecision. Psychologically speaking, it is the healthiest outcome on offer.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.
Some of what informs this piece comes from a long, honest conversation with a friend of mine, who was generous enough to walk me through how her own relationship with her body took shape over the years. What she described did not sound like a personal failing so much as a pattern, one I suspect a lot of people will recognise in some form. So instead of telling her story as her story, I want to pull that pattern apart and look at what it reveals about body image more broadly: what it is, why it takes hold so much more readily in girls and women, what feeds it, what it costs, and what actually helps.
Body image is the internal picture we carry of our own body, along with the thoughts and feelings attached to that picture. It is not the same thing as appearance itself. Two people can look objectively similar and hold entirely different relationships with what they see in the mirror. When that internal picture becomes persistently negative, psychologists call it body dissatisfaction, and it is one of the strongest known predictors of disordered eating later on.
Body image seldom forms through one dramatic event. More often it accumulates through a comment that was never meant to wound, then steadily gathers supporting evidence for itself over years. A stray remark from a classmate about a body that has not yet developed. A look. A silence where a compliment should have been. Each of these on its own is small. Stacked over a childhood and adolescence, they build something far heavier than the sum of its parts.
That accumulation also helps explain why this lands so much harder on girls, and the reasons deserve spelling out properly rather than being treated as a given. Puberty itself is timed differently and interpreted differently depending on gender. Girls typically enter puberty earlier than boys, at a developmental stage when they have had less time to build a stable sense of identity separate from how they are perceived. The physical changes of puberty for girls, increased body fat and rounder proportions, run directly against a cultural beauty standard that prizes thinness, which is not true in the same way for boys, whose pubertal changes, increased muscle and height, tend to move them closer to a culturally rewarded ideal rather than further from it.
Layered on top of that timing mismatch is what researchers call objectification theory, the idea that girls and women are socialised from a young age to view their own bodies partly from the outside, as objects to be evaluated by others, rather than purely as instruments for living in the world. This habit of self surveillance, constantly checking how one appears rather than simply existing in one’s body, is mentally exhausting on its own, and it is strongly linked to anxiety, shame and disordered eating.
Comparison adds another layer, and it starts working on children earlier than most people realise. A young girl will begin measuring her own body against whichever body in the room seems to be rewarded with attention, ease or approval, long before she is old enough to question the habit itself. Social comparison theory explains part of why this feels so automatic: humans are wired to evaluate themselves relative to others, especially in areas where objective standards do not exist, and appearance is one of the least objective standards there is. This comparison can take hold even in a girl who is, by every actual medical measure, perfectly healthy. That is the quiet cruelty built into comparison as a mechanism. It does not require anything to be medically wrong. It only requires a girl paying close attention to which bodies the world seems to prefer, and concluding, often incorrectly, that hers is not one of them.
A fuller picture also has to include where these lessons are actually learned. We tend to point at magazines, influencers and diet culture when we talk about where body image comes from, and all of that plays a genuine part. But the earliest and most persistent commentary a young person receives about their body usually comes from inside their own home, and this part of the picture is often left out entirely. In many households, and this shows up across a wide range of cultures, not just one, body commentary is treated as completely normal, even affectionate. Nicknames built around size. A relative asking, loudly and in front of everyone, whether you are eating enough, or eating too much. A well meaning suggestion that a child go on a diet, sometimes offered before that child is even old enough to understand what a diet is. Almost none of this is delivered with cruelty behind it. Most of it is delivered as care, phrased the only way a particular family or culture has ever learned to phrase it. But intention and impact are two separate things, and a body that gets discussed constantly by everyone around it starts to feel like it belongs to the room rather than to the person actually living in it.
There is also a cultural dimension to how emotion itself gets handled, and it matters more than it might seem at first glance. In households where composure is prized, where showing distress reads as disrespect or weakness rather than honesty, children absorb the lesson early that feelings are meant to be managed discreetly, ideally invisibly. When that becomes the operating rule for an entire household, the body often becomes the one place feelings are still permitted to surface, because everywhere else they have been asked to stay contained. This is sometimes described in psychology as emotional displacement, where distress that has no acceptable outlet gets rerouted into a domain that feels more controllable, such as eating, exercise or appearance. A young person who has been taught, directly or indirectly, that the quieter you are the more acceptable you are, does not stop feeling distress. She simply stops narrating it out loud, and starts routing it somewhere else instead.
Isolation tends to be the accelerant that turns ordinary insecurity into something far more serious, and there is a reason so many people trace a turning point back to a period of enforced separation, a pandemic, a house move, a friend group fracturing. Remove face to face connection, replace it with a curated scroll of everyone else’s highlight reel, and take away whatever physical outlet had previously been regulating mood and stress, and you have built close to a perfect storm. It is a particularly cruel irony that this often happens precisely when a young person’s body is also changing fastest, during the exact stretch of adolescence when hormones, growth and social comparison are already working overtime without any outside help.
This is the point in the cycle where things can shift into something that needs to be named honestly rather than softened. Disordered eating often develops as a cycle rather than a single behaviour: a period of restriction, followed by a period of loss of control around food, each one feeding the shame that fuels the next round. Clinicians sometimes call this the binge and restrict cycle, a self reinforcing loop rather than a simple choice. It can coexist with other forms of emotional pain, including depressive symptoms and, in more serious cases, thoughts of self harm. A dramatic home life or an obviously visible crisis is not required for it to take root. It can develop below the surface, almost invisibly, inside a young person who looks, from the outside, like she is coping perfectly well. That invisibility is precisely what makes it dangerous. The people closest to her, family, friends, even the young person herself, often do not recognise what is happening until it is already deeply established, partly because the signs are easy to miss from the outside, and partly because she has spent years being taught, implicitly, that this particular kind of struggle is not something you say out loud.
Recovery, from everything I have seen and heard, seldom comes from one clean intervention. It tends to come from accumulation, built up in the same slow, layered way the struggle itself was built. Honest conversation and community do a great deal of that work. Voices that actually name body image struggles instead of performing effortless confidence make isolation feel less total simply by existing, and a shared moment of vulnerability, where a struggling young woman realises she is not the only one in the room carrying something heavy, tends to do more to loosen shame’s grip than almost anything else. Media literacy plays its own part too: learning to recognise how images are edited, staged and selected does not undo a culture of comparison overnight, but it does give young people a framework for questioning what they are seeing rather than absorbing it uncritically. Families have a role that is just as practical, learning to separate care from commentary, to keep showing love without narrating a child’s body, a skill that can be learned and practised deliberately even in households where body talk has always been the norm. Approaches built around self compassion and intuitive eating help from another angle, aiming not to replace one set of rules about the body with another but to rebuild trust between a person and their own hunger, fullness and emotional signals, treating the body as something to listen to rather than something to manage. And for anyone already caught in a restrict and binge cycle or experiencing distressing thoughts about food, weight or self harm, self help strategies alone are not always enough. Reaching out to a psychologist, counsellor or eating disorder specialist is not a sign of failure. It is the same as seeing a doctor for anything else the body needs help recovering from.
Body image has no single culprit. It is built from early, often incidental comments, sharpened by a comparison culture that intensifies through adolescence, shaped by family and cultural norms around whose business a body is considered to be, and then frequently destabilised further by isolation of any kind. What helps tends to mirror what damages: community that makes isolation feel less total, honest conversation that treats a struggling body image as something worth naming early rather than outgrowing alone in silence, media that reflects a wider range of what a body is allowed to look like, and underneath all of it, real permission to take up space exactly as you already are. In practice that can be small: a parent choosing not to comment on a child’s plate, a friend admitting out loud that she has struggled too, someone asking how a person actually feels about their body rather than complimenting how it looks. Not one of these fixes everything alone, but each closes a gap where silence would otherwise take root, and together they are what turn speaking up eventually into something a person can actually do before reaching a crisis point alone.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.
A few weeks before I was due to leave the United States, wrapping up a chapter that had felt like one blessing stacked on another, I found myself standing somewhere up in the Great Smoky Mountains, talking out loud to nobody in particular. Not quite praying, not quite journaling, just this unfiltered little monologue of gratitude, thanking whatever was listening for everything that had gone right. A home my partner and I had bought. A postgrad programme I’d already been accepted into. A job waiting on the other end. I was on a real high, the kind you don’t question too hard in the moment because it feels earned.
The next day, Hurricane Helene made landfall.
I want to be honest about the scale of what happened, because it matters more than my own small piece of it. Helene claimed the lives of well over two hundred people, more than half of them in North Carolina, the state I was living in at the time. Entire communities close to where I was staying were torn apart. I was lucky, undeniably lucky. We kept our power, our water, our roof. The worst of it, for us, was losing signal and Wi-Fi for a few days. But being that close to devastation, watching places I actually knew get flattened while my own street stayed standing, does something strange to a person. It doesn’t just scare you. It reorganises you a little.
What I want to talk about isn’t really the hurricane itself, though. It’s what it taught me, almost against my will, about storms in general, the literal kind that show up on a weather forecast and the kind that arrive with zero warning in the form of a diagnosis, a breakup, a layoff, a loss. Because once you strip away the specifics, weathering either kind of storm turns out to draw on the exact same internal muscle.
Before Helene actually hit, we had a small window to prepare, and most of the advice circulating was, understandably, physical. Stock supplies, secure your space, charge your devices, keep a backup power source, stay hydrated, eat properly, move your body to burn off some of the building tension. All necessary. But the part that barely got mentioned, the part that ended up mattering just as much once the actual chaos arrived, was mental preparation. Any storm, whether it’s rearranging your coastline or your entire sense of what your life was about to look like, demands a kind of resilience that no amount of bottled water can provide on its own.
The first thing losing connection did was strip away, almost by force, everything I didn’t actually need. Once the signal dropped, I found myself only chasing a connection for one reason, to check in with family. Not to doomscroll, not to see what the algorithm had decided was urgent that day. Just to hear that the people I loved were okay. There was a strange, uninvited relief in not knowing what else was happening in the wider world at that moment, missiles, headlines, the usual noise. For a few days, none of it could reach me, and instead of that feeling like deprivation, it felt like being handed something back.
There’s a particular kind of clarity that shows up when you’re forced to confront the limits of your own control. I’m someone who likes to feel like I’ve got a handle on things, who wants to walk into a room already knowing the plan. Helene took that completely off the table, and rather than that being purely frightening, part of it was oddly freeing. Once you cannot influence the outcome, once the only honest option left is to let what happens happen, something in you exhales. Not helplessness. More like permission. The energy you’d normally spend white-knuckling every variable gets to go somewhere else instead, toward the things you actually can shape.
For me, that meant returning, almost instinctively, to the handful of practices that had nothing to do with circumstance. Meditation. Deep breathing. Journaling. A bit of yoga on the living room floor. These weren’t grand gestures, they were small, stubborn acts of continuity, proof to myself that even with the outside world in freefall, there were still a few things that were unmistakably mine to hold onto. That’s worth remembering the next time a metaphorical storm hits too. Whatever your version of that grounding ritual is, protect it fiercely, especially when everything else feels like it’s up for grabs.
The other unexpected gift of those days was how quickly my housemates and I got shoved back toward basics. No signal meant no scrolling, no streaming, no easy digital escape hatch. So we played actual board games. We dug out an old Nintendo. We cooked, constantly, absurdly large amounts of food, because someone would get a mood and declare it was time to feed everybody, and honestly, there is nothing quite like a good potato curry to make a hurricane feel briefly survivable. We talked, properly, the kind of conversation that doesn’t happen when everyone’s half looking at a screen. It sounds almost too simple to say, but stripped of every distraction, what was left underneath was just people, choosing to show up for each other in a small shared space, and that turned out to be more than enough.
That’s really the heart of what got us through, and I think it’s the heart of getting through most storms, literal or otherwise. You focus on what remains within reach. You keep in communication with the people who matter. You build in enough structure that the day doesn’t collapse into formless dread, still getting up, still washing your face, still eating something that isn’t purely out of a packet, small proof to yourself that some sense of normal is still intact even while the world outside your walls is anything but. You lean into gratitude on purpose, not as a forced positivity exercise but as an active decision to notice what’s still standing rather than only what’s been lost. And you allow the fear to actually be there when it shows up, rather than pretending calm you don’t feel. I was scared, plainly, of losing things I hadn’t even gotten to enjoy yet. The home I hadn’t lived in properly. The programme I hadn’t started. The job I hadn’t begun. That fear was legitimate, and naming it out loud did more good than trying to talk myself out of feeling it.
Once the storm itself passed, physically, the real work started, and this is the part I think gets skipped over in most conversations about resilience, because everyone loves the story of getting through the crisis and nobody wants to sit with the slower, less dramatic aftermath. You assess the actual damage, honestly, without minimizing it or catastrophizing it. You ask what’s been taken and what still remains. You figure out, piece by piece, how to rebuild and how to return to some version of routine, knowing full well it might not look identical to the one you left behind. And underneath all of that sits the one question that actually determines how the whole experience gets carried forward: what did this teach me, and am I willing to let it change anything?
Because here’s the thing about storms, whichever kind you’re facing. The weather itself is not the part you get to choose. Your reaction is the only variable in the entire equation, and it’s the one thing worth putting real effort into. Allow yourself to feel whatever actually shows up rather than performing composure you don’t have. Practice real gratitude, not as decoration but as an honest accounting of what’s still good. Reframe the disruption, where you honestly can, as an opening rather than purely a loss, not because every storm secretly contains a silver lining, some don’t, but because the ones that do deserve to be noticed rather than missed while you’re still busy being afraid. Reach out for real support, professional or otherwise, when the weight of it is more than you can carry solo. And when you make it through, actually let yourself acknowledge that you did. Not with false bravado, just an honest nod to your own capacity to withstand something that could have broken you and didn’t.
I think about that mountain monologue often now, the one I gave a day before everything shifted, without having the faintest idea what was coming. There’s something almost funny about it in hindsight, standing up there thanking the universe for a plan I assumed was locked in, only for that same universe to immediately test whether I actually meant it. But I did mean it, and strangely, the storm didn’t undo any of that gratitude. If anything it sharpened it, stripped it down to something more honest than the version I had before, because gratitude that survives contact with uncertainty tends to mean a great deal more than gratitude that’s never been tested at all.
Storms end. Every single one of them, eventually, does. What doesn’t end, what actually stays with you long after the water recedes or the crisis resolves or the diagnosis stabilizes or the layoff turns into the next job, is whatever you built inside yourself while you were still standing in it. That’s the part worth investing in, before the next one arrives, because it always eventually does. Not to dread it. Just to be ready enough to meet it with something other than pure panic. A little patience, a little grit, a support system you’ve actually maintained rather than assumed would be there, and the quiet knowledge that whatever this particular storm takes from you, it cannot take the fact that you know, now, exactly what you’re capable of surviving.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.
A friend of mine gave me one of the more clarifying answers I’ve gotten in a long time when I asked her, almost as a throwaway question, how much news she takes in on an average week. Her answer was close to none. Not out of avoidance dressed up as denial, and not because she’s uninformed in any broader sense. She’s raising a young son and made a deliberate, considered decision somewhere along the way to simply stop letting the news cycle into her house. Talking to her cracked something open for me, because most people I’d asked before her described the opposite: constant exposure, constant notifications, a kind of low-grade tether to their phone that they’d stopped noticing was even there.
What her answer actually revealed, once we kept talking, wasn’t apathy. It was a thought-through relationship with information, built after years of the opposite. She described being around fifteen when she first started encountering real, unfiltered footage online, back when social platforms had far fewer restrictions than they do now, graphic material with almost no context or warning attached, most of it about things happening in other countries and none of it anything a teenager should have been processing alone. Her parents had no idea what she was seeing. There was no conversation to help her make sense of it, because the adults in her life didn’t know there was anything to make sense of. She just felt sad, and scared, and kept scrolling anyway, because that’s what the algorithm is built to make you do.
That kind of early, unsupervised exposure isn’t rare. It’s closer to the default experience for an entire generation of American kids who grew up with a smartphone in one hand and no real media literacy education to go with it. And it tends to produce one of two outcomes down the line. Either the nervous system adapts and starts treating a certain baseline of dread as normal background noise, or a person eventually hits a wall and steps back entirely, the way she did. For her, that wall arrived during COVID, when the volume of information became impossible to sort through, competing claims about where the virus came from, what was safe, what wasn’t, layered under headlines built to alarm rather than clarify. The world had gone quiet in every literal sense, everyone stuck indoors with nothing else happening, so the news had nowhere else to put its attention except directly on the one thing already terrifying everyone. She stepped away then and never really stepped back.
There’s a term for what a lot of us have been doing instead of stepping away: doomscrolling, the compulsive, repetitive consumption of distressing news even when it’s actively making us feel worse. It’s not a character flaw. It’s closer to a design feature. Outlets and platforms are optimised for engagement, and nothing engages faster or more reliably than fear, outrage or grief. Headlines get built around emotive language on purpose, not because the underlying story requires it, but because a reader who’s already emotionally activated is a reader who clicks through. She put it plainly when I asked about it. If you’re already feeling a certain way about a person or an event, you’re far more likely to tune in and see how everyone else is reacting to it too. That’s not journalism responding to public interest. That’s public interest being manufactured on purpose.
In the American context specifically, this gets tangled up with something else, the near total collapse of any shared sense of a trustworthy source. Ask most people which outlet they actually trust and you’ll get a long pause before an honest answer, because the honest answer, for a lot of people, is nobody, fully. Media coverage here skews heavily toward whichever political current is driving the day’s attention, sometimes in ways that are almost comedic in hindsight, like the sustained, invasive scrutiny into whether Barack Obama’s birth certificate was real, treated with a seriousness that an urgent story happening on the other side of the world often never receives. The imbalance isn’t subtle. An assassination attempt on a major political figure can dominate every channel for a week straight, while an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe somewhere else barely registers as a passing headline. That’s not proportion. That’s a business model, and it teaches audiences, quietly and continuously, which lives and which crises are considered newsworthy.
There’s a psychological term for what happens to people who consume a heavy, sustained diet of this kind of coverage, sometimes called mean world syndrome, the tendency to overestimate how dangerous and hostile the world actually is because the version being fed to you is disproportionately built from its worst moments. Constant exposure to tragedy, conflict and threat, even from a physically safe distance, produces real physiological stress. It shows up as anxiety, low mood, a persistent hum of fear that has nowhere useful to go because most of what’s being reported sits entirely outside any individual viewer’s control. And sensationalised coverage doesn’t just distort how frightening the world feels. It actively reshapes how people understand each other. She also brought up how a movement like Black Lives Matter got reframed by parts of the media into something almost unrecognisable from its actual message, twisted into claims about which lives were supposedly being valued over others, until the resulting anger and division became almost self-sustaining. That’s the quiet damage sensationalism does to marginalised communities specifically. It doesn’t just misinform. It reinforces exactly the stereotypes and biases that were already sitting underneath the surface, giving them a headline and a news cycle to hide behind.
What I found refreshing in her approach was how she handles the gap that comes with stepping back. She’s not under any illusion that she knows everything happening in the world, and she’s made peace with that trade-off in a way that felt strikingly mature. When I asked whether she ever feels guilty for not knowing about a major event, her answer was honest rather than defensive. She doesn’t, because not knowing also means not speaking with false confidence on things she hasn’t actually taken the time to understand, and that, to her, is worth more than staying current for its own sake. There’s real wisdom tucked into that. A huge amount of the noise clogging public conversation right now comes from people who absorbed a headline, skipped the nuance entirely, and ran straight into an opinion. Choosing not to participate in that particular cycle isn’t ignorance. It’s arguably a form of discipline most of us could use more of.
None of this is an argument for total disengagement, and it’s worth saying clearly that staying informed still matters, particularly for anyone with the capacity to act on what they learn. But there’s a real difference between being informed and being marinated, and most of the American media landscape right now is built for the second, not the first. What her approach points toward, and what a growing number of media researchers have started calling for too, is something closer to solutions-oriented reporting, coverage that doesn’t ignore hard truths but also doesn’t treat every single story as an opportunity to maximise alarm. She said something toward the end of our conversation that’s stuck with me since. She hopes the next generation, her son’s generation, gets to see more of the good than the bad, not because the bad doesn’t exist, but because right now it’s almost the only thing being shown. The quiet, local, human stories, the ones about people showing up for each other, used to have space in the news cycle too. Somewhere along the way they got crowded out by whatever performs best in the algorithm, and that loss is worth naming as its own kind of harm.
Protecting your peace, in this context, isn’t the same as burying your head. It’s an act of discernment, choosing where your attention goes with the same care you’d bring to any other resource that’s finite. The news was never designed to be consumed the way most of us currently consume it, endlessly, passively, at all hours, without a filter between the world’s worst moments and our own nervous systems. She found her own way back to a healthier relationship with it. It might be worth asking, honestly, what yours actually looks like right now, and whether it’s one you chose on purpose or one that simply happened to you.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.
I spent some time recently talking with two men I’ve known for years, from two very different corners of the world, about mental health. What struck me wasn’t how different their stories were. It was how similar the underlying architecture turned out to be, no matter which continent it was built on. Strip away the specifics of geography and upbringing, and you find the same quiet rule sitting underneath almost every conversation men have, or don’t have, about what’s going on inside them. You handle it yourself, and you don’t make it anyone else’s problem.
That rule gets installed early, and it rarely arrives as an explicit lesson. Nobody sits a boy down and says, out loud, you are not allowed to struggle. It gets absorbed sideways, from watching who gets protected and who’s expected to just cope, from noticing that vulnerability reads as risk rather than honesty in certain rooms. In under-resourced communities, this hardens into something closer to survival logic. If you can’t afford to look soft, because softness actually gets you hurt, then toughness stops being a personality trait and becomes armour you put on before you’re old enough to know you’re doing it. Smiling too freely can get you checked. Talking too openly can mark you as an easy target. So you learn, fast, to keep your inner life to yourself, and you get remarkably good at it.
The strange thing is that this same instinct shows up just as strongly in communities that look nothing alike on the surface. One friend described growing up where the accepted way to manage stress wasn’t therapy, it was a drink or a smoke, something that could dull the noise without ever addressing where the noise was coming from. This is worth naming properly, because it has a term in the psychological literature rather than just being a bad habit. Using a substance to regulate an emotional state you don’t have another way of managing is a recognised pattern called self-medication. It rarely starts as recklessness. It usually starts as the only available tool, something that works in the short term precisely because it quiets the feeling instead of requiring you to sit with it or name it. The trouble is that self-medication treats the symptom and leaves the actual cause completely untouched, which is part of why it tends to need repeating, and repeating, and repeating.
Nobody actively discouraged seeking real help, in either of the conversations I had. It simply wasn’t part of the conversation, because it had never been part of anyone else’s conversation either. That’s the part I think gets missed in a lot of mainstream mental health messaging aimed at men. It’s rarely outright hostility to therapy or emotional openness. It’s more often a total absence of exposure to the idea that there was ever another option on the table.
Part of why that gap is so easy to fall into is that a lot of men simply struggle to identify what they’re feeling in the first place, not just to talk about it. There’s a specific term for this in the research, alexithymia, which describes difficulty recognising, naming and describing one’s own emotional states. It isn’t the same as being emotionally shut down or uncaring. It’s closer to reaching for a feeling and finding the label missing. Some researchers use the term normative male alexithymia to describe how common this pattern is among men specifically, not because of anything biological, but because of how consistently boys are socialised away from emotional vocabulary from a young age. If nobody ever asks you what you’re feeling, and instead asks what happened or what you’re going to do about it, you can grow into an adult with a noticeably underdeveloped internal vocabulary. That matters, because it reframes a lot of what looks like silence or avoidance. Sometimes a man isn’t withholding what he feels. He’s still working out what it actually is.
This also explains why depression in men often doesn’t look like depression at all, at least not the version most people are taught to recognise. Sadness and low mood are only part of the picture. Depression in men more frequently presents as irritability, anger, restlessness, physical complaints such as headaches or fatigue, risk taking, or simply disappearing into work until there’s no time left to feel anything. This is sometimes referred to as masked or externalised depression, and it matters enormously, because a man who is irritable, withdrawn or overworking rather than visibly sad can go completely unnoticed by the people around him, and sometimes by himself. He isn’t performing wellness. He’s often experiencing something real, just filtered through a presentation nobody was taught to screen for.
The stakes of that gap are not abstract. Men die by suicide at markedly higher rates than women in most countries, despite reporting lower rates of diagnosed depression, something researchers sometimes call the gender paradox in suicide. The likely explanation isn’t that men suffer less. It’s that the suffering goes unrecognised for longer, gets self-medicated instead of treated, or simply never gets voiced until there’s a crisis rather than a conversation. This is precisely why the quiet rule matters so much. It isn’t just a cultural quirk or a personality preference for stoicism. Left unaddressed, it can be seriously dangerous, and naming that plainly seems more useful than dancing around it.
Community matters here too, though it cuts in two different directions depending on where you land. In tightly bound communities, mental health support often happens ambiently rather than formally. Everyone knows everyone’s business, and when something goes wrong, the response is instinctive and collective rather than clinical. That has real protective power. It also has a ceiling, because ambient support built entirely on proximity and shared history doesn’t always transfer cleanly to formal treatment, and it can leave serious struggles unaddressed simply because everyone assumes someone else is already handling it. Move into a more individualised environment, the kind many men encounter when they relocate for work, study or opportunity, and the formal access to mental health resources often improves dramatically, therapists, hotlines, campus counselling, real infrastructure, while the ambient, communal safety net that used to exist by default disappears almost overnight. Neither model is complete on its own. The healthiest version, from what I can tell, borrows the openness and infrastructure of one and the instinctive, unconditional showing up of the other.
What actually filled that gap, in both of the conversations I had, wasn’t nothing. It just rarely got labelled as mental health work at the time. Sport came up again and again, not as a vanity project but as one of the only socially sanctioned spaces where men are allowed to feel something intensely and have somewhere physical to put it. Discipline based practices like martial arts offer something even more specific, a structured, repeatable framework for regulating yourself, built around principles like sincerity, effort, etiquette and self control that quietly double as emotional training even when nobody’s calling it that. Reading did similar work for both of the men I spoke with, giving them real, unmonitored time alone with their own thoughts, which is a properly rare commodity for anyone raised with constant noise and constant company, let alone boys raised to believe that solitude looks a lot like weakness.
It’s also worth understanding why sport and shared activity work as emotional outlets specifically for men, rather than assuming it’s simply a preference. Research into male friendship consistently finds that it tends to be organised side by side rather than face to face, built around doing something together, playing, training, fixing, working, rather than sitting across from each other and talking directly about feelings. That isn’t a lesser or more avoidant form of connection. It’s a different architecture for the same underlying need, closeness and support communicated through shared activity and presence rather than direct verbal disclosure. Understanding that helps explain why some of the most meaningful emotional processing in a man’s life might actually happen on a pitch, a mat or a long drive, not despite the lack of direct conversation, but partly because of it.
Race adds its own layer that can’t honestly be separated out from the rest of this. For men navigating a country that isn’t the one they grew up in, mental health isn’t just an individual project, it’s tangled up with identity itself shifting underneath them. A racial category that meant one specific thing at home can mean something entirely different somewhere else, carrying a different history and different assumptions attached to it, whether a person asked for that or not. And for men who’ve grown up with generational trauma sitting quietly in the family history, there’s an added layer of vigilance that runs constantly in the background, a low hum of wondering whether a look or a reaction is about who you are or something else entirely. That’s not paranoia. It’s an accumulated, learned alertness, and it takes real energy to carry, even when nothing overtly hostile is happening in the moment.
That generational thread deserves following a little further, because very little of this starts with the man in front of you. Sons tend to absorb emotional suppression the same way they absorb an accent, by watching it modelled, not by being taught it directly. A father who never named what he felt, who managed everything through silence, work or control, tends to raise a son who assumes that is simply what a man does with difficulty. This is sometimes described as intergenerational transmission, patterns of emotional regulation, or the lack of it, passing down through families largely unnoticed until someone in the line does something different. It doesn’t require a dramatic rupture to interrupt. Sometimes it only takes one man deciding to name a feeling out loud in front of his own son for the pattern to actually bend.
When men do eventually find their way to formal support, the actual clinical relationship seems to matter far more than matching demographics on paper. One of the men I spoke with has spent seven years with a therapist who doesn’t share his racial or cultural background at all, and he was unambiguous that it never mattered. What mattered was whether she understood him as a specific person rather than as a category. This connects to something well established in therapy research, that the strength of the relationship between client and therapist, often called the therapeutic alliance, tends to predict outcomes more reliably than shared identity or technique alone. Feeling truly understood, trusted and safe with the person across from you does more of the work than most people expect. That’s worth sitting with, because a lot of the conversation around access to culturally competent care, important as it is, can accidentally suggest that identity match is the whole answer. Sometimes the more decisive factor is simpler, whether you feel properly seen, and whether you trust the person across from you enough to actually say the hard thing out loud.
None of this adds up to a single fix, because there isn’t one. But a few things came up clearly enough, across two very different lives, that they’re worth mentioning. Men need more visible permission to seek help before a crisis forces the issue, not just messaging that therapy exists, but real modelling from other men that using it doesn’t cost you anything real. Physical and structured outlets, whatever form they take, aren’t a substitute for deeper emotional work, but they’re a legitimate and often underrated entry point into it. Community support and formal mental health infrastructure aren’t competing systems, they’re complementary, and the men who seem to be doing best are usually the ones with access to both. Recognising depression’s less obvious presentations, irritability, withdrawal, overwork, risk taking, physical complaints, matters just as much as recognising visible sadness, because the quiet cases are often the ones that get missed longest. And the specifics of someone’s background, their race, their history, their family’s story, aren’t side notes to their mental health. They’re part of the actual terrain any real support has to be built to hold.
The men I talked with didn’t have a roadmap handed to them for any of this. They built their own, in pieces, out of whatever was available. That shouldn’t have to be the default path. The more this gets talked about openly, the shorter that road gets for the next man walking it.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.
I moved around a lot as a kid, which meant I got very good, very early, at a particular skill: showing up somewhere new and finding my feet fast. Every new place came with a new set of people, and the goal was simple. Fit in, find my footing, don’t be the outsider for too long. What I didn’t understand yet, because nobody explains this to a child moving schools for the third time, is that not every person you let close is supposed to occupy the same room in your life. I spent years treating friendship as one flat category. You were either in or you weren’t. It took getting burned a few times, in the specific way that only over-trusting people can get burned, to realise the problem was never the people. It was my approach. I had one setting for friendship, and it was wide open.
Understanding this properly means starting further back than adulthood, because friendship doesn’t arrive fully formed. It evolves right alongside us. As children, our friendships are built almost entirely on proximity: who lives nearby, who’s available to play, who happens to be standing next to you at the right moment. There’s no real selectivity involved, because there doesn’t need to be. By adolescence, something shifts. Friendship picks up an emotional weight it didn’t have before, tangled up in validation and belonging and the exhausting, universal project of trying to fit in. Young adulthood brings the next shift, where friendships start clustering around like-mindedness rather than convenience, as we begin building an identity distinct from the people around us. And somewhere in full adulthood, the circle tightens for good. Friendships become deliberately smaller, more selective, built on shared values rather than shared geography. The bond gets introspective. Trust, loyalty and emotional support move from nice-to-haves to non-negotiables.
Once you can see friendship moving through those stages, it becomes much easier to understand why not every connection needs, or deserves, the same amount of you. There’s a useful way to think about this that maps almost perfectly onto lived experience: friendship tends to organise itself in layers, from a wide outer ring of people you recognise and greet, down to a small, dense core of people who actually know you. Some researchers have mapped this numerically, showing that most people can only sustain a handful of truly intimate relationships at once, a slightly larger circle of close friends, a wider layer of casual ones, and then a much broader outer ring of familiar faces. The exact numbers matter less than the shape of it. We are simply not built to hold everyone at the same depth, and trying to is where a lot of the exhaustion and disappointment in adult friendship actually comes from.
At the outer edge, you’ve got acquaintance friendships, and I’d argue they get an unfairly bad reputation for being “just” surface level. They’re casual almost by design. A nod to a neighbour, a familiar face at work or school, someone you’ve crossed paths with enough times to recognise but not enough to actually know. The conversation stays in safe, low-stakes territory, usually the weather or whatever’s in the news that week, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no pressure to perform intimacy you don’t have yet, and that low-pressure quality is exactly the point. Acquaintance friendships create a sense of community, a basic, ambient acknowledgment that you exist in shared space with other people. That matters more than we tend to credit it for.
A step in from that sits casual friendship, which starts to have a bit more shape and regularity to it. These are the people tied to a shared activity or a shared context, the gym, the office, a class you’re both stuck in. You see them often enough that a rhythm forms, and the conversation deepens slightly, still light, still easy, but with room for a bit of banter and the occasional exchange over coffee. You might offer advice here, or receive it, without either of you calling it a big moment. Casual friendships are a great way to widen your world and meet different kinds of people without the emotional overhead of a deeper bond, and having a handful running at once is completely normal.
Then things get more serious. Close friendships are where real support lives. These are the people who show up during the actually difficult stretches, who share something closer to your values and your direction in life rather than just your schedule. Your inner circle. The people who will comfort you and also, crucially, tell you the truth you didn’t ask for but needed. A good close friend holds you accountable and still manages to make you laugh about it five minutes later. These friendships take real, ongoing effort, and they ask more of you than the earlier levels do, but what they hand back, a sense of belonging and security, more than earns it.
And then, right at the centre, sit your intimate, lifelong friends. The ones who know your deepest secrets and somehow still choose to stick around. Your day ones. The people who’ve watched you move through every version of yourself and never once treated it as a reason to leave. For me, that’s my group from high school and university, the ones who first showed me what long term, genuine friendship actually looks like, after years of short-lived connections built purely on wherever I happened to be living at the time. What broke my brain a little, in the best way, was realising I could throw anything at these particular people and they simply wouldn’t walk away. That kind of consistency was a completely foreign concept to a kid who’d spent her whole childhood starting over. To this day that foundation hasn’t found a single crack, and knowing it’s there has made me far more comfortable limiting who else gets let in. My cup is already full.
My partner belongs in that same category, though we arrived there sideways. What became a relationship in 2018 started as a deep, unhurried friendship, and it taught me something I hadn’t fully absorbed until then: that friendship was never about how many people you could collect. It was about the quality of the few you actually kept close. He’s someone who holds his own circle with real boundaries and real intention, quality over quantity, no exceptions, and watching that up close changed how I hold my own relationships too.
Knowing which level a friendship sits at isn’t just a nice bit of self-awareness. It does real, practical work. It manages your expectations, so you stop expecting acquaintance-level effort to feel like close-friend-level loyalty and calling the mismatch a betrayal. It helps you set boundaries that actually make sense for the relationship in front of you, because you know where you stand. It pushes personal growth, since nurturing the right kinds of connections tends to pull you forward rather than hold you in place. It reduces conflict, because you’re not projecting expectations onto a friendship that was never built to carry them. And it sharpens communication, because once you know what a friendship actually is, you can be honest about what you need from it instead of guessing.
The mental health stakes here are not small. Genuine, close friendship has a well-documented way of easing stress, anxiety and low mood, and the reverse is just as true. A lack of meaningful connection tends to show up as isolation, as a thinner support network that leaves you more exposed to daily stress, as a narrower view of the world simply because you’re not being challenged by different perspectives. It can quietly erode confidence too, that particular kind of self-doubt that whispers you’re somehow bad at making friends, when really you might just be surrounded by the wrong ones for this chapter of your life. And toxic friendships do active damage rather than passive neglect, feeding guilt, obligation and a slow emotional drain that’s easy to mistake for normal friendship fatigue. A good friend leaves you feeling respected and embraced, someone who brings out a better version of you. A bad one shows up as competition dressed as camaraderie, quietly threatened by your wins, careless with your boundaries, occasionally outright dishonest. Learning to tell the two apart, and to reassess as you go rather than assuming a friendship is fixed forever, is one of the more underrated adult skills.
If you’re looking to build friendships that actually support your mental health rather than quietly draining it, the fundamentals aren’t complicated. Choose quality over sheer volume. Say what you need instead of hoping it gets guessed. Actually listen, rather than waiting for your turn to talk. Root for the other person’s growth as genuinely as your own. None of that is groundbreaking advice, but living by it consistently is rarer than it should be.
What’s also worth accepting, and this took me longer than I’d like to admit, is that friendships are not meant to be permanent fixtures. They ebb and flow. People grow in different directions, priorities shift, life throws in a move or a career change or a new baby, and connection that once felt effortless suddenly requires more than either of you has to give. Sometimes it’s unresolved conflict. Sometimes it’s just distance, physical or otherwise. Sometimes someone is quietly dealing with something you can’t see, and the friendship simply can’t hold its old shape anymore. None of that automatically means anyone did anything wrong. It usually just means the friendship ran its natural course. That’s a strange thing to accept as an adult, particularly if, like me, you spent childhood assuming trust was something you gave freely and kept forever. But protecting your peace sometimes means letting go of people you’re not actively upset with, simply because that chapter has closed. And it means holding onto the ones who somehow keep choosing to stay, no matter what, a little tighter, because those are the ones building your actual tribe. The family you get to choose, and keep choosing, again and again.
Mind Over Matter.
Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.
