Bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Mark Manson discusses the self-help industry, his no f*cks approach and his go-to practices to enhance self-awareness.
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Oh hello, welcome to Extra Healthy Ish. You are tuned into the big sister podcast to Healthy Ish from Body and Soul. I am your host of Felicity Harley. We are joined today by let's call him the Godfather of modern self help, Mark Manson. Yes, he's the guy, the dude who wrote that book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F bomb and warning. There are a lot of those types of words in this episode. Today Mark joins us to talk about well, the current state of the self help industry, He's no Fox approach to life, and the important practices he uses to enhance his self awareness.
Mark.
Nice to have you on Extra Healthy Ish. Thank you for joining us today.
From La thank you, Thank you.
To be in Australia. Now, I do have to ask you a question that I ask everyone who comes on this podcast.
How do you stay extra healthy ish in your life?
Accountability is honestly the biggest and most important thing I've found. If I don't have people and things keeping me accountable to my behaviors, then things go off the rails.
And what does that look like? How does that show up in your life? Because you recently went through a big health and fitness overhaul. As we discussed on healthy Ish, So what does that actually look like? The accountability bit.
The two biggest things. So I would divide these up into like I guess people and then I guess tracking. So the people one is kind of self explanatory, like having the people in your life that know that your health matters, know that you're trying to lose weight or quit drinking or you know, be healthier, work out more frequently, and they're willing to call you out if you're screwing up. So I have a health coach. He helps me a ton. My wife is very health oriented and you know, she keeps me on track. If I'm screwing up, she'll like, she'll let me know. And then I just I try to surround myself with people with good health habits and so just kind of utilize social pressure in a positive direction, work out with some friends when I can. And then what I've found in terms of the other form of accountability is just being very diligent and actually knowing and being honest and knowing what I'm actually doing, what I'm actually putting into my body. One thing that I learned, you know, it took me five years to kind of like get my shit together and on. One of the biggest things I learned in that process was that you lie to yourself, Like I lie to myself frequently. I tell myself, you know, that wasn't that big of a piece of cake, and I worked really hard today, so I deserved it.
Right.
Well, if you actually pull out an app and you like put in you measure the cake slice and you actually put in like what you ate that day and where you went and everything, you realize like, oh no, that was like six hundred calories and uh yeah, I'm just full of shit, like this is not I didn't deserve anything, Like I just I'm just that is the truth. Yeah, I'm totally I'm just totally uh being you know, being a monkey, so diligent with tracking, knowing like knowing what I'm putting into my body, and being very conscious with my workouts making sure I'm progressed, progressing and pushing myself. That was huge for me, just because the numbers don't lie you. It forces you to be honest with yourself.
Yeah.
Absolutely, metrics win every time. Now on this podcast where big fans of self help, it's it's kind of what we what our listeners love. You almost changed this whole genre ten years ago with a single book.
How would you describe your brand of self help?
Uh, I've at various times I've called it negative self help, anti self help. I used to joke that I was a self hating self help guru, which I always thought was very cheeky. Americans don't get that type of humor, but I feel like Ozzie's do. Yeah. But when I was starting, I strongly believe that the self help industry in general maybe got a little bit too positive. It got a little bit too fluffy and feel good and you know, you're amazing at every happiness. Yeah, everything is incredible and you're so special and you can be happy all the time. And there was just a lot of unrealistic and empty promises within the industry, And so I really wanted to take the opposite take and ground things in reality a bit more and be like, look, life is going to suck sometimes, suffering is normal. Nothing is going to solve all your problems all the time. Basically bring people's expectations back down the earth. And I really think the how contrariant it was is a big reason for why it was so successful. It's funny because these days there's actually a lot of there's like almost like a whole subgenre of self help that is very grounded and realistic and almost negative. You know. It's like a lot of the stoicism stuff. And you know, now there's a twenty books with fucking the title. So I've kind of found the last few years, you know, people people kind of they're like, well, you know, what's so special about this? It just seems like all these other self help books. But I think the fact that it was one of the first is what gave it such impact when it came out.
I agree.
I've always thought that there's a real undercurrent to stoicism, even to your philosophy, your modern day philosophy is and your thinking and your work. How do you think social media has plied into this as well, particularly in the last say five years, And do you.
Think it's changed this self help landscape? And if so in a good or a bad way?
I would go with both. I think it's social Media's absolutely influenced the self help industry massively, and I think there's a positive aspect to it and a negative aspect of it as well. I would say the positive is that it is simply expanded awareness. I think more people than ever are aware of basic personal development principles, you know, developing self awareness, talking about your emotions, being vulnerable, like all these things that you know, when I was when I was young and reading these books, they were kind of I don't know, you didn't talk about them. You didn't want to be caught read in public reading one of them. These days, they seem they're pretty commonplace, they're pretty mainstream, So I think that's good. The part that's bad is I feel like there's maybe been I think social media has really maybe probably unintentionally encouraged people to overidentify with their mental health issues or their self personal development issues. You know, you kind of you almost get this like celebration. You know, people will say like, oh, I'm I'm an anxious person, and they'll like make all these posts talking about how anxious they are all the time, and then they get validated for it. And I think that's actually a really dangerous thing to do. Like it's great that you share your issues publicly, like there is an empowerment in that, but when you are doing it to be validated by others, you're actually very subtly reinforcing those issues. There's like an encouragement to be anxious and to identify as an anxious person and to experience more anxiety. That happens, And so I think it there's a little bit of a backfiring that happens at a certain point.
What do you think will happen in the future, I mean, are we getting a bit of a backlash? I mean, I agree with you. I think if someone's validating you about something, you're more likely to lean into those feelings.
But where will we get to with self help? Where do you see the future of the self help industry dare us?
Yeah, I mean I hope it corrects at a certain point. It definitely feels like we have You know, if you go back twenty thirty years, people didn't you had the opposite problem. People didn't talk about their feelings. They weren't willing to expose their issues, they didn't want to be vulnerable, they didn't want to identify themselves as having any any problem, And like, obviously that's not healthy either. So there is like a very careful balance that needs to happen of an awareness and acknowledgment of something, but also not not socially identifying as it or reveling in it or seeking to be validated by it, And and that's like a it's kind of a tightrope to walk. And I just I kind of feel like social media is probably not predisposed, Like I just think of social media is just like very fundamentally constructed in such a way that it's not it's not predisposed for people's mental health and so at all. Yeah, So like sometimes I worry too. I'm like, I'm posting all this shit and people are sharing it, and I'm like, am I contributing to the problem? Like should I be posting this stuff all the time? Like, I definitely do worry about it, But I don't know. As the decades have gone on, every generation eventually figures things out a little bit better in the previous ones. So I just I try to stay optimistic.
We'll be back after the short break with more from Mark. One thing I do think that you have done, and perhaps social media has done as well, is made us more aware of self awareness, you know, and your advice is very much about bringing a deeper level of personal self awareness, peeling the onion.
I think I've read that in one of your.
Books before how firstly, how can we become more self aware?
Is this is? If this is something that we are seeking, and what do you do? Some practices you do.
So self awareness? I think there's kind of three popular main practices that can help you with it. The first one is therapy, the second one is journaling, and the third one is meditation. And those sound like three completely different things, but I actually think the core, the psychological mechanism that's happening beneath all of them is the same, which is any practice that forces you to take your thoughts and feelings and put them outside of yourself in a way that allows you to observe them as if they're not your own is going to be very useful and help you gain a better understanding of yourself. So therapy does that through you know, a trained professional asking you insightful questions, getting you to introspect, getting you to think about how you feel and think about certain things. Journaling does the same thing. You get a prompt you write out your thoughts and feelings, and as you write those things out, they become separate from you and you can actually kind of look at them more objectively and be like, wow, that's a crazy thing, Like why do I think that that's weird? And then meditation is a similar training where you are trained to observe your thoughts and feelings as if they are just, you know, something that's happening outside of yourself. And I think all three of those things are incredibly useful and fundamental, but they're obviously not the only things. You know, there are others as well.
What do you do you have a go to?
You know, when I was younger, I was really into meditation, and I was really in the Buddhism, and I used to go on meditation retreats. As I got older, I kind of got away from that a little bit. And actually these days I do a lot more journaling than I used to. And then I've done therapy on and off pretty much my whole life.
Are you a daily journaler and what sort.
Of I'm more of a crisis journaler.
Like that definition.
So I will often go weeks or months without journaling anything, but then as soon as like a really sticky problem arises in my life, I will basically just go all in. I sometimes I will journal for hours. Wow, you are right, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's it's yeah, I do it as as needed.
What about for inspiration when it comes to life? Obviously we talked about soicism. We had run holiday on this podcast a little while ago. You know, he goes to the old school philosophers. Who do you go to for Dare I say spiritual guidance or life guidance? Uh?
I do. I am a fan of reading history. I'm a fan of reading non fiction books unrelated to my own field. I actually strangely find a lot of inspiring ideas reading books on economics or political history or sociology things like that. I also just you know, the nature of my work is I hear from literally hundreds of readers and fans every week. Like people just send me tons of life problems, and so sometimes, you know, you get a question or a story from somebody that's really interesting or unique, and you know, it kind of forces me to think think about things a little bit differently, or take a different perspective. So, you know, a lot of a lot of it just comes from the audience itself.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
I mean you'd obviously say patterns of or trends and patterns of behavior and how people are responding to real life events and in real time.
And it's I mean, honestly, it's it's like, it took me a long time to realize this because I think, you know, when you when you build a big audience online, there's a certain there's a certain amount of stress and pressure, and you know, you worry about what people are thinking about you or whatever. But after after a number of years, I started realized that it's it's like such an incredible position to be in simply to have the sample size of people across the world. Right, So if you think about like a really experienced therapist, you know they'll across their career, they'll have a few hundred clients. But let's say they're based in Sydney, right, like ninety nine percent of their clients are probably people within a an age range based in Sydney, and they're probably gonna have similar life experiences, similar life histories. It's it's wild, like I hear from teenagers in India, from middle aged women in the Middle East, from old men in Europe to like college kids in the United States, and it really is incredible because then you you really do see what the commonalities.
Are, what are they at the moment?
Uh, Well, it's it's really funny because it's the thing that you learn is that everybody basically wants the same things, which is it's it's it's essentially Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like people, people want to feel safe and secure, they want to feel like they belong, they want to have good relationships and uh, and they want to do something useful and productive with their life. And what changes is the culture and the context. So you know, a sixty five year old retiree in in Melbourne is going to have a completely different situation. He'll have this it's essentially the same problem as say a twenty year old in New York City, but the context is completely different and so the stories around it are completely different and and you actually end up with completely different answers, and so.
It's it's really fascinating.
Yeah. I mean for me, it's just as somebody who loves human nature and trying to understand it. It's it's it's it's a joy too to engage with it.
There's your next book right there, international best seller. I'm pulling all the themes and creating the answers. Yeah, right, anyway, tell us a bit more about your trip to Australia.
You talk, what can we expect?
So I'm coming down. I'm doing a speaking tour across is it six or seven major cities China? Okay, I think the six major cities and yeah, it's six six major cities in Australia. I'm basically so I'm coming down. I'm giving a talk and a presentation. It's some of the new ideas that I've been working on. It might be some of it, might be a content of that makes its way into the next book. It's a similar I would call it like an evolution of the philosophy of the stuff from subtle art, just new ways of interpreting it and new ideas that I've developed in the years since. And then we will also have an extensive Q and A session, So anything audience members want to talk about, any problems they're going through, any advice that they want, or anything, any opinion they just want to hear from me, will have plenty of opportunity for that as well. And then there'll be meet and greets afterwards. And yeah, it would just be fun. It's like I don't like to do like big stuffy keynotes and presentation, like I try to be on stage the way I am in my books, which is just very personal and relatable and tell stories and just give people like little nuggets that they can use and go home with. So I'm very excited to come back to Australia. It's been about five years since I was there, but I'm looking forward to it well, well.
Looking forward to saying you and thank you for joining us on Extra Healthy.
Thank you for having me.
Friends, listeners. I hope you enjoyed this chat with Mark. You got something out of it. It's very interesting, wasn't it to hear how he well gets letters from all around the world, all emails, not letters from young kids to older grandfather types. Anyway, make sure you catch Mark. He's coming to Australia in a few weeks. His tour kicks off November four in Sydney. He goes around the major cities. I will leave a link to all of well all the info in the show notes and also if you have any ideas for an upcoming up for Healthy Ish Extra Healthy Ish ant before Christmas, you can dm me on social media at Felicity Harley, head to Body insoul dot com dot you of course follow Body and Soul on socials. Grab our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay extra fucking healthy ish