HealthyGamerGG - The Real Reason Men Don't Ask for Help

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

In today's video, we explore why men struggle to ask for help and share some methods on how to seek support effectively. Check out more mental health resources here! https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're a boy or man, you kind of understand what I'm talking about, that we are raised to be independent. We are taught that independence and dependence are at two opposite ends of the spectrum. And the more that you ask for help, the more dependent you become. Whereas in actuality, help seeking can foster independence. Today, we're going to talk about how to ask for help. Now, this may sound a little bit strange because there is so much in the world that is rapidly evolving. There's AI. There are designer strains of THC and marijuana. And of course, there's all these.

these neuroscience changes with the way that technology is interfering with our brain. And there's dopamine, the evils of dopamine, and the gluten. Watch out for the gluten. There's so many problems in life. But today, we're going to talk about something that is so simple and yet so difficult for especially half of the population, especially men, which is asking for help. And it is crazy, but a lot of men out there don't know how to ask for help. And a lot of the problems that we face today, I think, are due to a fundamental inability to

ask other human beings for support. It turns out that asking for help is not just a natural thing that we do. There's actually a social and cognitive skills expertise involved with asking for help. Much like making friends or learning to apologize properly or even things like flirt, asking for help is actually a social skill that most men lack. And today we are going to focus a little bit more on men because it turns out that the literature shows that especially when it comes to help seeking behavior, men are at some sort of disadvantage. And this sort of makes sense. If you're a boy or man, you kind of

understand what I'm talking about, that we are raised to be independent. And as independent and capable men, the last thing that we want to do is ask for help. Now, this is a huge problem because help seeking is actually a critical human skill of communication, just like something like flirting or how to interview for a job properly. There are particular ways to ask for help. And today, we're going to dive into that. Now, some of the research that we're going to be looking at is specifically towards men, because this is more of a masculine problem. But one of the things that I'm seeing as a clinician is that the gender divide between men and women when it comes to mental health is actually shrinking. So I've seen more and more women recently who struggle

with the same problem or non-binary persons. So my hope is that this will be helpful for everyone who watches it. Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose-your-own-adventure format.

So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So let's start with some basics around help-seeking. So it turns out that there are two ways to ask for help. One way to ask for help is actually goal-directed and leads to independence over time. It is the acquisition of, a skill which then allows you to do it without someone else's help. On the flip side, everyone is afraid of asking for help because of the downsides of it. Well, if I ask for help, I'm dependent on this

person. I don't want to be dependent on this person. I should learn how to do it myself. And if we're not careful, help seeking can actually lead to dependency. So we're going to tease these two apart. So let's start by understanding bad help seeking. So when we seek help for negative reasons, it turns out that it fosters our dependence and keeps us from being independent. And bad help seeking has a couple of qualities. The first is that bad help seeking is characterized by trying to avoid the task in some way. If I don't feel like doing something, I can ask for help so that someone else messes with it. Related to this, if you look at themes of sort of negative help seeking, sometimes when we want to put

something behind us, we will lean into bad help seeking behaviors. I'm tired of dealing with this crap. I want to just get it behind me. I want to avoid the task. I don't want to bother with it. So I will basically dump this responsibility on someone else. So anytime you're asking for help, really stop and think a little bit about why are you asking for help?

Are you doing it for the reason of avoidance? Are you trying to avoid a particular thing? There are two other reasons that read to bad help seeking. So one is avoidance of criticism. So the other reason that people may ask for help is because they're afraid if I do it myself, what will people think? What will people say? Will I end up being criticized? So help seeking can be a form of ego protection. And that leads us to the last bad reason to ask for help, which is actually to avoid comprehension or mastery. Some human beings will take a particular skill and end up saying,

you know what, I just don't want to learn how to do this. I don't want to organize the pantry. I don't want to learn how to put together a presentation for a group project. This does not seem valuable to me. So instead, what I'm going to do is dump this responsibility on someone else by asking for help. Now, if you all have been paying attention to these reasons, you'll notice a couple of common themes. A big one is avoidance. This is something that I'm not interested in learning, not interested in growing, not interested in exposing myself to the task. And the second big thing is a shifting of responsibility. So instead of taking responsibility for this task, I'm essentially dumping it on someone else, which is exactly how we move to healthy help seeking. So if you look at studies from the

1970s, this was super cool, but they took a group of teachers and they asked them, what do you see when you see kids asking for help? And these teachers basically notice the same dichotomy. They said that actually the kids who ask for help are more likely to be goal oriented and more likely to be independent over time. And that teachers are very supportive of kids asking for help. And that's because help seeking is actually a problem-solving strategy to gain independence. So in medical school, we have this very, very simple saying that we say, which is see one, do one, teach one. So in med school, when you're working in the hospital, the first thing that you do is you learn from someone else.

I'm going to learn how to, I'm going to watch someone put in an IV line. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to do an IV line by self. I'm going to be observed while I insert an IV. and then hopefully I will teach someone else how to insert an IV after that if I've been paying attention. Now, with something specifically like putting in an IV line or a central line, we have to be observed a couple number of times and it's not quite that easy. But that really captures a certain attitude of help seeking, which is that help seeking can be used to foster independence. And this is what we see on studies of children, is that some kids will ask for help, right? They're like, I don't know how to do this thing.

will you help me do this thing? And once the teacher shows them how to do this thing, then the child then engages an independent behavior. I no longer need your help. So if we pay attention, what we'll find is that some help seeking is simply a step to independent mastery. And there's a great example of this that we're all familiar with, which is mentorship. So even when I was starting Healthy Gamer, I went to a lot of my mentors, like the chief of psychiatry at Mass General Hospital, the chief of psychiatry at McLean Hospital, the president of the American Psychiatric Association. I went to a lot of these people and I said, will you help me?

I have this concern that technology addiction is a huge problem and I want to do something about it. Will you help me figure out what I can do about it? And this is what's really interesting about mentorship. If you really pay attention to what it is, it is asking for help almost preemptively. You are proactively asking for people's help and guidance while you garner in And this is critical to understand, especially if you're a dude. So when we're growing up as boys and men, and a lot of women, like I said, I've seen this a lot more in women recently as well, is that when we're growing up, we are taught that independence and dependence are at two opposite ends of the spectrum.

And the more that you ask for help, the more dependent you become. Whereas in actuality, help seeking can foster independence. And it turns out that even if you study teenage children, what you find is a very interesting dichotomy. So if you ask teenage kids, is asking for help okay? The answer is, it depends. If you ask for help from your parents, then that is not okay. Now you're a noob. Now you're someone who's always running to mommy and daddy for help.

We actually view that negatively. But teenagers who ask other teenagers for help are actually viewed positively. So even though we all sort of think that help leads to emotional dependence or dependence, it turns out that many people, teachers and teenagers see help seeking in a potentially positive light. So now let's get to some of the more concrete stuff. So what is it that makes asking for help difficult? It's not just this issue of, okay, if I ask for help, I'm independent. But if you look at studies on men specifically, it turns out that there are a couple of reasons why it is very difficult for men to ask for help. And this also creates a cycle because if it is difficult for us to ask for help, that means that

we don't practice asking for help. And if we don't practice asking for help, then what ends up happening is finally we're desperate, we're unskilled, and we are forced to ask for help. And since we don't know the skill of it, then when we end up asking for help, it doesn't go well. People don't give us the help that we need. We're not even able to articulate what kind of help we need. And even the amount of help that they give us seems to not be enough or makes us feel really bad about ourselves. So this is something that's so critical, but we sort of don't really, we're not really taught how to do it. And then when we finally give it a shot, it doesn't end up working well. And when it doesn't end up working well, we do not reinforce that behavior. Then we sort of realize,

and this is the experience of a lot of men, when I ask for help, I just get burned. It's a waste of time. It doesn't end up helping anyway. So I'm not going to bother. In order to reverse that, we have to understand the things that make it difficult to ask for help and then sort of set up a system to successfully ask for help. So let's start with a little bit of research. Why didn't you just ask? Underestimating the discomfort of help seeking. So the first thing that we've got to understand is that asking for help is not easy.

In fact, it is very hard. There are a lot of internally, emotionally, difficult things that keep us from asking for help. And until we understand what those are, we cannot successfully ask for help. So now let's take a look at some of the things that cause problems. So this is a paper called the role of masculinity in men's help seeking for depression, a systematic review. And then what is the impact of mental health-related stigma on help seeking a systematic review

of quantitative and qualitative studies? So some of this is men-specific. Some of this applies to everybody. So the first thing, difficulty communicating, recognizing, or understanding depression. The notion that men are socially conditioned not to engage in emotion-based communication and consequently experienced difficulty employing such language was a recurring theme. in 82% of studies. Okay?

It was suggested that help seeking is often hindered by a limited emotional vocabulary in men, which is maladaptive in therapeutic contexts. We don't do very well asking for help because we don't know how to communicate. So I'll give you all a classic example. When I talk to my male friends or when I talk to my male friends and I'm talking about the help that I need or I'm listening to them ask for help, they use very limited vocabulary. They'll say things like, oh, I'm stressed. I'm frustrated.

I'm overwhelmed. Now, here's the crazy thing about that. I want you all to think about that. When someone says, I'm stressed, what are you supposed to do? Is this person asking for your assistance? Do they want help with the stress? What part of the stress do they want help with? What is the ask for you?

You don't know. I don't know. They're just stressed. Are they just venting a negative emotion? Are they looking to just say, I'm stressed and then we're going to talk about it for a little while? Do they want a shoulder to cry on? Do they want an ear that listens to them?

Like, what are they looking for when they say stressed? And especially for men, oftentimes when we say stressed, what we're really looking for or what we're asking for is someone to distract us from our stress. I actually don't want to talk about my problems. I don't need your help in it. I need a buddy to go get hammered with or I need a buddy to go play video games with. Let's go dumpster some noobs. So this is the first problem when it comes to help seeking, especially if you're a man,

which is that oftentimes we don't know how to communicate effectively. We're incredibly vague with our language. We ourselves don't realize what kind of help we need. And so it puts people in a very difficult situation where when you say I'm stressed and overwhelmed, what is that person supposed to do? They have no idea. And what that sort of means is it's kind of really tricky because if they have no idea what to do, you're not giving them a frame to help you.

It makes it difficult for them to help you. And the harder you make it for someone else to help you, the less likely you are to ask for help. And if you don't ask for help and they don't know how to help, then you end up saying this is absolutely a mess. It's never going to work. Nothing good comes up at anyway, so I'm done. And then we lead to a life of loneliness, isolation, and eventually getting crushed because life is a multiplayer co-op game. Human beings have evolved to help each other out. And as a man, if you don't know how to get help from other human beings, you are playing at a huge disadvantage. The second problem that men run into is that they oftentimes try to limit their discontal.

So this is where if someone, if I'm asking for help from someone, what I usually want to do is show them the tiniest amount of whatever I need help with. Because if I need help, that is incredibly embarrassing. It's pathetic that I wasn't able to fix this on my own. And now I'm such a loser for needing your help. So instead of asking for the full range of help, what I will actually do is I will limit my disclosure. I will try to ask for the tiniest little thing. instead of telling people, oh, I lost my job three months ago and I've been living off of my savings, I will ask for the tiniest little loan, right?

I will try to protect other people from everything that is going on in my life. Hey, bro, can I borrow a couple hundred bucks? And that I don't tell them that the problem is actually a lot larger because I feel embarrassed. And if I don't tell them that the problem is a lot larger, even if they help me, that help will be insufficient. Right? So this means that I'm asking for a couple hundred bucks. And then what happens a couple weeks later? I need a few hundred more and then a few hundred more and then a few hundred more.

Because instead of actually telling them the scope of my problem, I don't want to feel bad for burdening them. So I try to limit my disclosure as much as possible, not give people context. And therefore, even if they do give help, it is insufficient. So it is a strategy that ends up failing before it even begins. So we need to be a little bit better about not limiting disclosure quite as much. Okay? And we'll teach you all how to do that too. Then we get to the third basic problem that men have when asking for help, which is that they use help as a last resort.

So I'm going to try to fix this problem on my own. I'm a do it myself. I'm a man. I'm an independent. I don't need no one's help. So I'm going to fix it on my own. I'm going to fix it on my own. Problem gets worse, worse, worse, worse, worse.

And then since I've tried everything while the problem is getting worse, then when I have nothing, no options left, then I will finally ask for help. But this two is a self-defeating start. Because by the time you ask for help, things are such a mess that your friends don't even know where to start. Now I'm, I've been jobless for three months. I'm about to be homeless. I got dumped by my partner. I'm addicted to this substance. Everything is falling apart.

And you don't know where to start. And if you don't know where to start, you break down and you tell your friend, everything is going wrong. I'm suicidal. And then your friend is like, I don't know what to do with this. We don't have a focused ask because your life is such a mess sometimes. because you waited until the last minute to ask for help, that it creates a situation that seems unsolvable. So now that we know what the problems are, we're going to teach y'all a strategy to successfully ask for help. Now, this strategy involves a couple of key components. The first is that

the strategy should feel good to you. Remember that we have all these ideas about how asking for help makes me a loser. These problems are too big to start or to fix or whatever. So we need something that is going to be emotionally okay for you to ask. The second thing that we want to do is provide enough context to prevent that limited disclosure to help people understand what the scope of this is without sounding pathetic. And then the last thing is to ask in a strategic way so that people are actually more likely to help you. So this involves actually just three to six sentences that are broken down into three categories,

okay? So the first category is a little bit of context. Let people know in just one to two sentences you don't need a trauma dump about what is the scope of what you're dealing with? So let's say we're looking for a job. So I can go to my friends and I can say, hey, I've been out of work for about three months. I really would like to get a new job and I was hoping that you could help me a little bit. So this is where you're starting off with just offering some context. Okay, I've been out of job for a couple of months. I need some kind of help. Second thing that we want to do is actually take responsibility and share

with people what we've done. This is critical. Okay. So the second sentence is going to be something like, I've applied to 400 jobs over the last three months. And I've also tried going to one job fair. But despite doing all of this work, I have not been able to find a job. So now you are signaling to this person that you are taking responsibility. And by the way, if we look at likelihood of someone else to help you, the more that you take responsibility for your situation, the more likely someone else is to help you. So when I'm working as a psychiatrist and the patient comes into my office and then They're like, Dr. Kay, I've been addicted to pornography for so long.

I've tried this. I've tried this. I've tried this. I've tried this. Please, will you help me? I'm much more likely to say, absolutely, because I can see that this person has put in a lot of effort. And we as human beings, we've evolved to help humans who are not lazy. So in our second to third sentence, what we really want to focus on is this is what I have

done so far. Now, if you have done nothing, what you want to do is take a moment to try to do something so that when you ask for help, you can tell someone, hey, this is where I've started. Okay? So you want to own up what you've done. The next thing that you want to do is then we get to the actual help seeking where you want to be very, very specific with your ask. So context is, I've been out of a job for three months, taking responsibilities, I've

applied for 400 jobs, I've been to one job fair. And then we need to be specific with our ask. So what do we want this person to do? I was hoping you could review my resume and let me know if I'm missing something, because I've applied for 400 jobs and I haven't gotten really any hits. Can you please take a look at my resume? And the next thing is you can even ask something else. Can you also introduce me?

Let's say I'm applying for jobs as an underwater basket weaver. Can you please ask anyone in your community if they know of any openings? Right. So we're asking for two particular pieces of help, reviewing your resume and checking your network for someone who may be able to help me in some way. Do you know anyone that I could talk to that may be able to help me? Right. So you can ask that very specific thing.

And if you break these three things down into this format, right, where you add some context, so we don't need to limit our disclosure. We don't need to hide, but we also don't need to trauma dump. Then what we want to do is take responsibility. This is what I have done so far. But it's not working for these reasons. And then the last thing is this is the help that I am asking you for. Can you help me do these two things?

So when you structure things this way, first of all, it's like a total of five to six sentences, right? So it'll take you like a minute or two. they sort of understand what the point is, and you're asking for a very particular ask, so it makes it actionable for them. And then once they act upon it, that'll also help you feel good because now they're helping you out. You're not quite as alone, but you're also not becoming dependent. You're not asking them to find you a job for you, right? You're doing the bulk of the work, and then they are helping you in some way. And even when we go back to this research on kids and teachers and things like that, this is exactly what we see, that a lot of people who ask for help are actually

striving for independence. And if you ask in this way, if you ask them to review your resume, and then they review it and you're like, okay, I see you made these, these changes. Now you've increased your competence some, so you won't need their help quite as much in the future. Now, there's one last thing to consider when it comes to help seeking, which is another psychological trick, which both increases your ability to ask for help and someone's ability to give you help. It makes it easier on both sides is to be new. So anytime we have a novice, If you just look at the science of help seeking, anytime someone is new at something, it makes them more comfortable asking for help. And it makes other people more comfortable giving them help. So even if there's something that you don't feel new about, try to approach it in some sort of new way. Hey, I've been working in this field for six years, but I'm trying a new, slightly different take on a job role. I've been working in human resources and benefits management. But now I want to move more into the HR, and like executive coaching realm.

And if you frame things to yourself that way, right? So I've, I've gone, I've applied for 400 jobs online, but I've never visited a job fair. I've never done networking before. So going to someone else and saying, hey, I've done this before, but I'm trying something new. I'm trying networking for the first time. Can you help me?

So if you literally use those two statements, if you do something, if you frame something is new, it'll make it easier for you to receive help without your ego getting in the way. And people are more likely to help people who are new at something. And they're novices. Right. If a friend of yours comes to you and says, hey, I'm trying to learn this new game, will you teach me? How would you respond to that versus someone who says, hey, will you, you know, we've been playing together. Can you give me some pointers?

Like, there's a, there's a subtle but important psychological difference between the two. So it's kind of sad. But one of the biggest problems that men run into is that we're socialized against asking for help. And the less that we ask for help, the more are help seeking skills atrophy, which is absolutely a social skill. As we get worse at asking for help, then the rare occasions when we are desperate and we finally end up asking for help, we end up asking in a way that's way too vague, where we don't tell people the full story because we're so ashamed of ourselves. And we don't even have a clear ask so they don't really know what to do with it. Then that results in, I mustered up all this courage to ask for help and I didn't even get anything. That then negatively reinforces me asking for help. I decide I'm never going to ask for help. I'm going to do it myself, right? And so we don't want to do that. So in order to change that around, in order to take advantage of the help that other human beings will offer you because life is a co-op multiplayer game, right? Like that's how it works.

We need to understand these factors. And hopefully if you'll adopt this structure of context plus responsibility plus specific ask, you will be able to get some help in life and stop playing this MMO as a single player RPG.