What We Talk About When We Talk About Mental Fitness

The CAFG Framework

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Take as good of care of your mind as you do your body.

Six months ago, I had an idea for a project.

At the time, my outside life felt fine, but my inside life – my thoughts, emotions, outlook – that stuff was a fucking mess.

I was anxious, angry, exhausted. It felt like my head was running away with me. Like I was the backseat passenger to a very sketchy Uber driver.

Wtf? This is literally my own mind we’re talking about. Why can’t I get it to do what I want? Why does it feel like it’s always working against me?

So, I pulled out a notebook and proceeded to spill my guts. Every thought, complaint, and question fell out of my head and onto that page.

I had no idea what I was doing, but by the end of it, the next step was crystal clear: I had to write about this stuff in public. I had to start Bending Pink Steel.

Since then, I’ve talked to ~100 guys about this idea, about their own struggles, and about what they’d find helpful. Each conversation sanded off more of BPS’s rough edges. It’s how we came to focus on men, why we added a podcast, and the reason we’re aiming to be a reader-supported (instead of ad-supported) project.

Now we just have one more thing to do. It’s time to address the elephant in the room.

What the hell is mental fitness?

Between Survival and Performance

The spectrum of mental health resources on the internet kind of looks like this.

On one end, you have mental health stuff that caters to folks with heavy challenges who are best helped by professionals and medications. The purpose is to get them back up to a stable baseline. It’s insanely important work, but not my niche.

On the other end, you have high-performance-focused stuff that helps the top 10% become the top 1% — in their careers, sports, bank accounts, etc. I love this stuff (a lot of people do), but it's also a giant waste of time for most men. Why? Because most of us don’t have the basics in place.

Bending Pink Steel sits in the middle of this spectrum.

The ideal reader has a healthy baseline but isn't aiming to be great at just one thing. They want a life, a good one, and understand that that's a complex goal. 

This is why mental fitness had to be a holistic term.

It had to represent the whole person – and offer them a logical, systematic way to meaningfully improve their minds so that those improvements could be seen in their real, everyday lives.

Not just in the gym or the therapist’s office but at the dinner table, in the car on the way to work, and when they're alone, in bed, falling asleep. These are the moments that make your life. And so these are the moments I wanted my brain to be on my side – and for others to have that experience, too.

All of this, coupled with SO MUCH reading and research, led to the 4-part framework that’ll act as the foundation of BPS going forward.

Here’s what it looks like.

The 4 Pillars of Mental Fitness

These are the four elements of mental fitness:

• Condition

• Alliance

• Fortitude

• Gain

Condition concerns the physical health of your brain. It’s the foundation beneath every other element, because if you’re not sleeping well, or eating right, or taking care of the body that holds your brain — nothing else is going to work like it should.

Alliance represents the partnerships that make it easier or more difficult to achieve the life you want. These are the relationships you have with others and yourself, as well as the environment you find yourself in. When you take care of your alliances, they return the favor tenfold.

Fortitude is the heart of the mind. Its focus is our emotional resilience, grit, flexibility, and adaptability. A person with fortitude stays on the path with minimal wear on their energy, zero complaining, and a generous amount of compassion (for themselves and others). By the way, you can't have fortitude without self-worth.

Gain pertains to our desire for growth. A healthy mind aims for things. It has direction and goals and is willing to risk to attain them. A gainful mind has hope, which empowers the creativity and confidence required to problem-solve its way forward.

Together, these four elements form a mentally fit mind.

Every series on BPS will fall under one of these four categories. For example, the F-Words was about Fortitude and Body Body Body is about Condition.

Change is an Inside Game

To be honest, I’m as much a student in this as you. But what I’ve learned, even in just the last few months, has fundamentally changed my life.

I’m a clearer, calmer thinker. I’m more aware of what’s driving my thoughts and empowered to steer them accordingly. My default approach to a situation is becoming optimism, self-belief, and trust. Not perfectly, of course. But miles away from where I used to be.

And people are noticing the change, too. My wife has — and that means more to me than pretty much any external win I could think of.

This framework will help you do the same. It will put you back in the driver's seat of your own story because you'll finally hold the steering wheel to your own thoughts.

That's not only something you're capable of doing; it's something you must do. Your life literally depends on it.