HealthyGamerGG - Why Breakups Are Harder For Men

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K tackles the hidden reality of why breakups and divorce are often psychologically and physically more damaging to men than women. Moving beyond the "red pill" talking points, he breaks down the statistical disparities in post-divorce mortality, the neuroscience of stress-induced sexual dysfunction, and actionable steps men can take to rebuild their identities after losing their primary emotional support system. What to expect in this episode: The 27% Mortality Spike: A look at the alarming statistics showing a man's all-cause mortality rate increases by 27% after a divorce (compared to 15% for women), and how severe emotional isolation physically manifests as hypertension and high cortisol. Losing Your "Whole Life": How traditional conditioning causes men to view a marriage as their entire built identity, meaning a divorce doesn't just sever a romantic attachment, but shatters the home and life they worked to provide. The Emotional Monolith: Understanding the data showing that up to 80% of men consider their romantic partner to be their only intimate confidant, leaving them with zero emotional support when the relationship ends. Transactional Friendships: Why men severely struggle to lean on their friends during a crisis, driven by a deep-seated conditioning that relationships must be an "even exchange" and asking for help makes them a pathetic burden. Anger as a Shield: How men are socially conditioned to convert vulnerable feelings of grief into anger (the "superhero" response), and why the modern mental health system frequently fails to hold space for this specific male emotion. Post-Breakup Sexual Dysfunction: Why experiencing erectile dysfunction after a breakup is a completely normal biological response to a stressed parasympathetic nervous system, not a failure of masculinity. The "Ugly Cry" Protocol: Why Dr. K gives men explicit permission to process their deep grief completely alone—such as in a closet or the woods—bypassing the forced, societal expectation that they must "talk about their feelings" to heal. Canceling the Friendship Debt: A psychological hack for reconnecting with old male friends you haven't spoken to in years, using explicit appreciation to dissolve the uncomfortable feeling that you owe them for their support. Balancing the Blame: How to avoid falling into the toxic traps of either extreme self-loathing (idealizing the ex) or extreme narcissism (blaming women entirely) by forcing your brain to objectively list the mutual faults in the relationship. Dr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is here! Order now: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. We as men have been taught that in order to be a good man, you have to be independent, you have to be self-sufficient,

and a huge marker of your worth as a man is being able to find a partner, support a partner, sustain a relationship. So when we lose that partner, we lose a sense of identity. Today we're going to talk about how to survive breakup and divorce as a dude. My name is Dr. Alok Kanoja. I got interested in male mental health issues back in 2015 when I was still training at Harvard Medical School. And over the last 10 years, I've helped dozens of men go through breakups and divorce.

And I'd love to boil down to you how you actually survive these processes and ideally thrive afterward. The first thing we got to ask is why are we making a video about men instead of surviving breakup for men and women or making a video for women? We have a ton of amazing women in our audience. Thank you for being here. And the reason we're making this video first is because there are actually fewer resources for men available when it comes to break up and divorce. There's a lot less emotional support. and there's even evidence that there's bias from clinicians. Clinicians, mental health workers, therapists are actually less likely and less able to help men go through divorce and breakup than they are with women.

So we're making this because we actually feel like there's fewer resources for men. And the second reason we're making this video, and this is going to be a hot take, but there's data to support this, is that breakups and divorce are potentially more harmful to men than women. Now, I know that we have this belief in society that everything is equally harmful for everyone, right? And that women can really struggle with divorce or breakup. And I'm not saying that they can't struggle, but there's actually good data that shows that breakup and divorce is more damaging to men. As a simple example, in the aftermath of a divorce, a man has a 27% increase in all-cause mortality. So that means that the likelihood of dying for a man after a divorce goes up by about 27%.

It goes up by about 15% for women. Now, this is a significant amount for both of these groups of people, and yet the number is still way higher for men. There's another scary statistic, which is that 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Now, y'all may think, does that mean that 30% are initiated by men? The number is actually even lower than that. 15% of divorces are mutual, and 15% of divorces are initiated by men. So if we're not careful here, we can slip down the toxic masculinity rabbit hole of blaming women

for divorcing men. Oh my God. it's so unfair. But we need to take a step back and understand if a man is less likely to initiate divorce, why is that? What is a man gaining from the relationship that they are likely to lose if the relationship goes away versus what is a woman likely to lose? And this is where things get really interesting because a man loses way more in a relationship than a woman does. Now, I know that this sounds very toxic masculinity, but bear with me. I'm just sort of saying this from a scientific perspective, okay? So I think this has changed a lot in the last 50 years because in the past,

what would happen is that, you know, a man would provide for their family and all that kind of stuff. So they would provide economic stability and a woman would be the caretaker of the home, provide emotional support. So this was sort of a situation where a woman was not, could not pay her own bills and a man could not provide their own emotional support so there was somewhat in exchange. What we know now is that women are, this is a good thing, by the way, I'm a father of daughters. I'm really glad that we live in a world where women can be financially independent. I think this is a good thing.

This is not evil, okay? But as women have become more financially independent, they don't rely on a man for money anymore, which is like a big part of feminism and I'm all for it and things like that. The problem is that men have not developed in terms of emotional support and emotional stability. So what's responsible for the discrepancy? So why don't men initiate divorce as much as women? And it's because, frankly, they stand to lose a lot more. Now, this may sound crazy because we'll say, well, in a divorce, doesn't everyone lose the same amount of stuff?

And statistically, scientifically, the answer is no. We're not just talking about money here. So if you look at research on women's experience of divorce, what they primarily lose is a relationship. Right? So they say, this is a disruption of attachment. Now, you may say, well, hold on a second. Isn't a divorce a disruption of attachment on both sides? If you look at the research on it, actually it's a lot more for men.

Men don't just lose a relationship. They lose their whole life. So as men, we are conditioned to be providers. We are conditioned to be independent. We're conditioned to be caretakers. And if you ask a man, if you do research and qualitative research on men and you ask them, what do you enjoy about your marriage? They don't see it as a marriage.

They see it as a part of their life as a whole. So if you ask a man, you know, what do you lose in a divorce? you lose the home that you've worked really hard to provide, you lose the workshop that you've built, you lose your whole life. And now this may sound kind of crazy because you will say, well, women lose that too. But if you really look at the research on it, men are more emotionally damaged by divorce than women are. Motivation comes and goes, but sometimes it isn't about pushing harder. It's about finding the right support. That's why we developed HG coaching. Coaches will help you turn thoughts into actions, actions into habits, and how much.

habits into a different life than the one you're living right now. People who go through our coaching program experience, on average, a 58% improvement in the sense of direction and purpose in life, and also experience reductions in feelings of stress and anxiety. Real change doesn't happen overnight, and it rarely happens alone. So if you all are interested in getting unstuck and moving forward, check out the link in the description below and give H.G. Coaching a shot. Let's take a look at a couple of interesting statistics.

So even clinicians may perceive men to benefit less than women from emotional interventions. So there's a lot of beliefs that family is less central to men's lives than to women's, even where the women pursues a career, and that men tend to be more separate from or less connected to their families and women, and family is more integral to the self-identity of men than women. But these are actually false assumptions. As many scholars point out, the marital relationship is more likely to be the sole source of emotional

for men than women. Men are much more prone than women to direct their emotional needs for connection and intimacy almost exclusively to their partners. In divorce, men are thus more likely than women to lose their only confidant and source of intimacy. So as Arndel describes, men are the unrecognized emotional victims of divorce. And if we look at the actual research, we'll see that not only do men compared to women tend to believe that a romantic relationship is more central to their well-being, they are also more likely to believe in love at first sight, idealize their partners, and believe that no barrier is too strong to get in the way of love. For example, 61% of men rank getting into a relationship is a really important thing for them, and 38% of women rank it as

being really important to them. So we find that men are more likely to want a relationship. Being single is much more painful for them than it is for women. Now, the question becomes why. And that's because we as men are not taught how to form emotional, emotionally supportive relationships and intimate connections with people outside of our romantic partner. Whereas women are taught from a young age, there's even evidence that suggests that the oxytocin level in women that's different in girls, causes them to form or enhances their ability to form intimate relationships, even in childhood or in adolescence. whereas the way that men's biology and brains are wired as well as conditioning makes our relationships a lot more transactional. So it appears that when a man gets divorced, they lose more than a woman. So a woman may lose a relationship, but a man loses more than just a romantic relationship. They lose the life that they've invested in. So men are much more likely to invest in a marriage

as part of their life as a whole. So we're taught, for example, that we should be providers. So what is my contribution to the marriage? I'm going to work really hard. I'm going to buy a house. We're going to have a family together, right? So we have a home. And when you sort of do qualitative research on men and you ask them, you know, what are you happy about with your marriage?

It's not the marriage itself. It's the life that you've built. So it's the home that I bought. It's the workshop that I have. It's going home and seeing my kids. And when you sort of ask men and women after a breakup or a divorce, you know, what are you losing? What women will say is that I've lost a relationship.

And what men will say is I've lost my whole life. Frequently dads move out of the house. There's a custody differential between men and women as well. So mothers are usually the primary caretakers. Men are, so men sort of get sidelined in terms of like being caretakers, oftentimes, even if you do 50, 50% custody. That's not as common. So men have sort of been taught in condition to invest so much in their relationships.

and also we have been sort of conditioned to have our marital partner is our only source of emotional intimacy and confidant. You know, there are many women who will say, my husband is my best friend and they're my husband. But for a lot of men, it's not just that your wife or your girlfriend is your best friend. It's your best friend. It's actually your only intimate connection. So once we start to see that men are actually more emotionally isolated, they lose their whole lives when they go through a breakup, as opposed to just lose a relationship, we can see why men are more likely to try to stick to a relationship, value a relationship. They're more likely to initiate a relationship. They're more likely to feel like their sense of identity depends on a relationship.

So for a woman, you just lose your relationship. And for a man, you lose your life, you lose your sense of identity, you lose your best friend, you lose your only emotional connection. And I'm not saying that that can't be true of women as well. But frankly, this is like, statistics we're talking about here, right? So these are scientifically research studies that show that there's a discrepancy. The other really interesting thing is that when we look at like the impact of divorce, it also appears that divorce is literally more harmful to men. So even if we, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but what I just said, you can argue, right? You can say that, okay, qualitatively like men and women like maybe they are the same, maybe they don't stand to lose as much.

Oh, Dr. Kay, you're saying that women aren't as hurt by divorce. You don't understand my life in my experience. Whereas I may not understand your life and your experience, but if we look at population level data, we also find that men have higher all-cause mortality after divorce. So the likelihood that a man will die after a divorce, or the all-cause mortality increases by about 27%. It increases by about 15% for women as well. It's significant for both cases, but the damage is way worse. we also tend to see that the risk of suicide post-divorce or breakup is higher in men than women. And we also see that while both groups, and this is what can be really confusing, while both men and women will experience the same amount of grief after a divorce,

the duration of the grief, and the impact of the grief is way higher than men. So in the first month after a breakup or a divorce, men and women will feel equally grieved, equally sad. but then women tend to bounce back faster than men do. And part of the reason for that is because when women go through a breakup or a divorce, the likelihood that they have more intimate emotional connections, the likelihood that they can sort of get emotional support and sort of ride out these negativities is way higher than men. I think the other interesting thing here is that if we sort of look at the way

that relationships used to be, let's say, 50 or 60 years ago, a man was the sole source of financial support for a woman, and the woman was the sole source of emotional support for a man. The problem is that there has been a lag time in men developing emotional support for themselves. We've invested a ton of time and energy and money in helping women become independent. We have programs that make STEM more acceptable to women

because STEM is really scary for women and I think it should be a safe place for women. I've worked with a lot of investment banks that will have programs where if a woman decides to have a child and takes three or four years out of her career to be a stay-at-home mom. They actually have accelerated return programs at places like investment banks

where women can kind of show up four years after being out of work. They will receive mentorship. They will receive guidance. And they can sort of get back on track with their peers. We have no such programs for men who are emotionally stunted

and have difficulty forming emotional relationships. So I think that there's actually scary evidence that suggests that divorce and breakup is more harmful to men. And a huge part of that, harm is because there is a lack of emotional support. So for example, in one study, 49% of men said that their female partner was their closest confidant, whereas only 20% of women said that their male partner was their closest confidant. More recent numbers suggest

that it's closer to like 80-50, so 80% of men consider their wives or their girlfriends to be the person they're closest to, whereas 50% of women consider their husbands or their boyfriends to be the person that they're closest to. So we also know some of the mechanisms of this all-cause mortality. So middle-aged men, for example, have higher levels of inflammatory markers with an increasing number of romantic breakups in a longer period of living alone. However, none of those associations are found for women. This is a study from 2022. Moreover, the risk of developing hypertension is twice as high for men who have never married than it is for married men, but marital status is not associated with women's hypertension risk.

So we see that it's not just all-cause mortality, but literally the physical effects of being alone are physically, like, more damaging to men than they are to women. Increased levels of stress hormones, increased risk of hypertension, increased cause, all-cause mortality. Now, as a psychiatrist, I've helped both men and women go through really nasty breakups and really nasty divorces. I'm not saying that just because you're a woman, divorce is easy for you by any means. I've seen terrible situations with abusive husbands, abusive ex-husbands, abusive boyfriends.

So we're not trying to say that your life is any by easy. by any means if you're a woman, and at the same time, what we have to acknowledge is that sometimes there are gender-based differences. So, for example, if we look at victims of sexual assault, they are more likely to be women, and pretending that that isn't true doesn't help us actually solve the problem. Now the question becomes, why is it that breakups or divorce seem to be more damaging to men than they are to women? And if we understand the nature of why they're so damaging, What do men actually lose with a breakup or a divorce? It will give us a roadmap to how to actually move forward, right?

So if I get critically hit in a particular part of my body, I need to know where the healing needs to go in order to recover from that. So let's start with relationships. So generally speaking, boys and men are taught to be independent and self-sufficient. And also, boys and men tend to be punished for expressing their emotions. So what this results in is sort of a situation where a man is an island, except for one or two people that tend to be mom or wife or girlfriend. Okay. The first thing that men lose is emotional intimacy in emotional support.

When men lose their girlfriend or their wife, they lose their primary source of emotional support. They lose their primary source of being able to be emotionally vulnerable. They also lose oftentimes their best friend. And the reason we lose that is because if we look at it, at the way men form relationships, they're largely transactional. So as a dude, I tend to form relationships with other dudes when I can give you something and you can give me something back. So for example, like, I like playing football and you like playing football. Therefore, we get together, we play football and we both enjoy. I get to be, you know, on team A, you get to be

on team B. So it's sort of like this even Stephen kind of approach to it. We also tend to, and this is also what makes it hard for men to form relationships, with other men when they go through a breakup or a divorce? Because when you're struggling with divorce and you ask another dude for help, what are you giving them in return? Right? The amount of help that they give you when you're struggling because your life is falling apart, there's nothing you can do to repay that unless they go through divorce. And the way that we are conditioned is as men, it feels deeply uncomfortable.

it feels wrong or unfair or pathetic to ask someone for help and be unable to give them anything in return. Because the way that we are conditioned is to be independent, to be self-sufficient. And if someone is doing you a favor, you need to do them a favor back. You don't want to be dependent on anyone. A man who is dependent is a man who is weak, is a man who is pathetic. And the last thing that we want to be is a pathetic friend who does nothing to enhance. the lives of the people that are helping me. If I want to be your friend,

that means that I'm going to enhance your life through my friendship. So we tend to be very emotionally isolated. The second thing that tends to happen is we have a huge blow to our ego. Now, this doesn't mean that ego like men are all, oh, we're so egotistical. What I mean is that we as men

have been taught that in order to be a good man, you have to be independent, you have to be self-sufficient, and a huge marker of your worth as a man is being able to find a partner, support a partner, sustain a relationship. So when we lose that partner, we lose a sense of identity. This is absolutely true of women as well. A lot of the stuff applies to women, but it is more, I don't even know if it's more acute.

This is an example where I think it's actually pretty even, but the damage is there. The third problem we have is men is that we're not taught how to manage or regulate our emotions. So when we feel a particular way, we generally speaking have one person in our life who manages the emotions for us. Right. So one of the biggest complaints that I hear from women is that they do a lot of emotional labor for their male partner. And they're like, I'm done doing this emotional labor for this man child. Honestly, fair enough. I'm not saying that you should do that emotional labor. I'm not saying that it's fair.

And if you want to piece out of doing emotional labor from your man child of a boyfriend, Fair enough. At the same time, what we are left with is a generation or generations of men who are never taught how to do that emotional labor for themselves. Men, boys are actually punished not only by other boys, but by women as well for expressing emotional vulnerability. There's plenty of research that kind of backs this up. So what happens with boys who are growing up is we are punished by boys and girls alike, but girls who express emotional. are not punished in the same way. And so we as boys and men learn to restrain our emotions. We don't learn how to work with them. We don't learn how to deal with them. We don't learn how to express them. We don't learn how to regulate them. And so we grow up as emotionally immature men, which then become

dependent on women to manage our emotions. Is that good? Is it fair? I'm not saying either of those things. What I'm saying is that as a result, if the woman is no longer doing the emotional labor, we've essentially, you know, had a boy or a man who's grown up using floaties in the pool and we're suddenly taking away the floaties, what's going to happen? The man is going to drown. And that's what we see. That's why suicide increases, all cause mortality increases, cortisol levels increase, hypertension increases because we don't know how to deal with these emotions and they end up coming out through our body. So now the question becomes, okay, what is the way in which we survive this, right? So as a psychiatrist, over the last decade, I've worked with tons of men.

And I've tried to help them, and I think I've sort of figured out a formula, which may be very different from what a lot of people expect. So the first thing we're going to talk about is sexual dysfunction. Because we haven't even mentioned that, right? So why is part of the solution sexual dysfunction? So it turns out that sexual dysfunction is one of the most concerning things for men. It is a source of our pride. It is a huge problem for our ego if we can't get it hard and we can't sexually perform. So oftentimes after a breakup or a divorce, a man will have a lot of difficulty with their libido.

They'll have a lot of difficulty with sexual dysfunction. And what I tend to find is that, first of all, like, acknowledging this for dudes is huge. And helping them overcome it is huge for restoring that confidence, for helping them feel like a man again, which is not a bad thing. I don't think we should demonize feeling like a man in a healthy way. Okay. So how do we address sexual dysfunction? There's a whole video that we have or will be coming out with soon on rectile dysfunction. and strongly recommend y'all watch that because it gives you all a bunch of details.

But here are a couple of things to understand. The first is that sexual dysfunction and erectile dysfunction are incredibly common post-breakup and divorce. This does not mean that you're a wimp. It doesn't mean that your balls are too small. It doesn't mean that you're a loser. What we know is that developing and maintaining an erection involves being relaxed. So I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but, you know, when you're a dude who's being

chased by a tiger in the jungle, you're not like running around with a gigantic erection, right? So literally what happens when we are in a state of stress, that stress, that cortisol level in our body, reroutes, from our testes and our penis to our skeletal muscles to other systems in the body, and it becomes difficult to maintain, develop and maintain an erection. Second thing that tends to happen is when we are stressed out, it disables our parasympathetic nervous system. So the parasympathetic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that has to activate in order for us to get an erection. So a good example of this is you may have noticed if you're a dude

that you wake up every morning with morning wood. Like, why do you wake up in the morning with morning wood? Are you horny when you wake up with morning wood? No, not usually. Like usually you're like, oh my God, what do I have to do today? And you've got like this boner, right? And the reason for that is anytime the body becomes relaxed, we develop an erection.

This is also why I used to have raging boners in biochemistry class. It's not because, like, I'm turned on by biochemistry. it's because I'm bored as hell, I'm sleepy, and anytime you're bored and sleepy and relaxed, you will develop an erection. So the opposite is also true. If I am going through a breakup and I feel grief, I feel isolated, I feel lonely, I feel angry, which we'll get to in a second, I feel like a loser, I've lost everything that I've worked towards.

My body is going to be in a high stress state. If I am in a high stress state, developing an erection is going to be hard. The good news is that as our stress improves, so we don't have to be a high stress. fix the erection directly. You don't need Viagra or syldenafil or anything like that. What you really need to do is focus on the stress and we'll sort of teach you all how to do that next. And as we sort of deal with that stress, the sexual function will naturally return. You'll start to feel horny again. It'll be great. It'll be good. So don't worry about it. It is a common thing that happens and it will resolve by itself over time if you fix the other stuff. Don't get hyper fixated on it. The second thing

that we're going to talk about are emotions. So the primary emotion that men deal with is anger, post a breakup or post-divorce. This is also why I think toxic masculinity is on the rise, because the only place that really, the only corner of the internet that really embraces that anger and channels that anger is the toxic masculinity. The anger, which is a healthy emotion,

gets transformed into hate, which then becomes unhealthy. Why do we feel anger is the primary emotion? For a couple of reasons. The first is that men are raised to feel anger. So if you sort of think about it, if I get bullied, what am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to get angry and fight the bully back, right? So anger is the

emotion that men feel. If you look at any superhero movie, what you will find 100% of the time is that the male superhero, this is true of female superheroes as well, at some point we'll get pissed. And when they get pissed, they dig really deep and they solve their problems and they save the world. Anger is the way that we are taught to respond to our problems. It gives us energy. It gives us motivation. We're going to set things right. And a man who went when the evil villain in a superhero movie hurts the superhero.

The superhero doesn't cry and start going to a corner and say, oh my God, he hurt me. And then the movie ends. If that was what happened in the movie, we would call that superhero, not a superhero. we would call them fucking pathetic. So we are trained to feel anger and we are punished for expressing anger because in modern society, it's okay for men to feel their feelings unless it's anger, in which case you become a predator. There's even evidence that shows that clinicians and mental health professionals have

difficulty sitting with a man's anger post-breakup or divorce. So what does everyone say after a breakup or divorce? get into therapy, bro. And when you go to therapy, there's a 70% chance that your therapist is a woman. And when you get angry in the session, there's a really good chance that the clinician you are sitting with is not going to be able to handle that anger and says, hey, I don't feel safe. I think you should go see someone else. This story happens so commonly.

There's a ton of data that suggests that even therapists have difficulty sitting with a man's anger in therapy. The other reason that we tend to have anger is because anger protects us. from the other emotions, like sadness and grief, right? So if we feel sad, if we feel grieved, we feel pathetic, we don't do anything about it. So what is the toxic masculinity approach? What is the alpha approach? This woman dumped me. I feel hurt. I am traumatized. I'm going to take all of that trauma, all of that sadness, all of that grief, and I'm going to turn it into anger. I'm going to turn it into hate. I'm going to start hitting the gym. I'm going to fuck bitches. I'm going to become successful. I'm going to make her regret it. We chance.

that anger to bounce back, but we do so in, I think, generally speaking, an unhealthy way. So the primary emotion that you're going to have is going to be anger and it's hard to deal with. Now, the next thing that we have to talk about is a loss of a sense of identity. So as we said before, men basically develop a sense of identity based on their romantic relationships. So even though the first in-cell was a woman, we as men do take things that women develop and we colonize them, right? That is the masculine, phallic approach of invasion and claiming something as our own, as feminist scholars will say. So now, why are the majority of men in cells? What is going on with an in-cell? An insol is a human who defines their identity based on their

sexual ability or their romantic ability. So these alpha males are men who define their identity based on their sexual conquests, right? So you can say that that is healthy, unhealthy, whatever. The truth of the matter is that this is a pervasive problem. This is a systemic problem in society. And any time you have a systemic problem, there is a system that creates it. So if you are a man, it is going to be very, very, very common.

Post-breakup or divorce, you just don't view this as, I lost my girlfriend. Women, remember, when they go through a breakup or divorce, they lose an attachment. it is a rupture of an attachment. But for a man, it is a rupture of your whole identity and your whole life. So be prepared for those thoughts, and we're going to teach you how to deal with those in a second, okay? So we're dealing with negative emotions.

We're dealing with a loss of identity, and we're dealing with immense isolation. So how do we fix these things? The fourth major problem is isolation. So we've talked about how men form transactional relationships. And so after you lose your primary emotional support, we have to develop ways to manage our emotions and form connections with other people. So now we're going to walk through how to fix all of these things, okay? The first thing we're going to talk about is emotions.

So this is where what I strongly recommend for men who go through a breakup or divorce is you find an isolated place like a closet or out in the woods and you have yourself a good, ugly cry. What I'm talking about so men don't feel comfortable crying in front of other people, but you go, I'm giving you license, okay, this is permission. You go to a place where no one else is around and you just have yourself a really, really good ugly cry. This is another bias we have in our mental health system

where we assume that talking about our problems and talking about our problems with people, being vulnerable with other human beings, is the way to solve them. This is women's way to solve them, right? This is because women have oxytocin. They have this approach of tending and befriending. They take care of each other.

That's not the way that we are raised. And there may be a biological component to that as well. This may not just be societally, condition. So the key thing is that you need to express that sadness. You don't need to talk about it. You need to let it out, but you don't have to talk about it. And you sure as hell don't have to talk about it with someone. Is that healthy? Absolutely. I say this as a psychiatrist. I love it when men come into my office and talk to me about their emotions. Love it. Absolutely love it. Is it healthy? Yes. But it may be impossible for you right now, which is okay. So part of the reason it's

impossible because the sadness is so big that you don't know where to start, you don't know what to say. You don't want to feel pathetic. So what we're going to do is we're going to go have an ugly cry. okay out in the woods or in a closet all by yourself you can curl into a fetal position you can take a box of Kleenex you just have just let out the emotion along with the ugly cry other emotions may come out so i've seen awesome like anger ceremonies out in the woods with like men that i've worked with where we go out there we grab a stick and we like hit a tree we scream we throw boulders we do all kinds of things the emotion needs to come out and for men that emotion needs to come out in a very physical way oftentimes, which is very scary if you're a therapist in an office or if you're a

friend of someone, but we need to let that anger out in some way, let that sadness out. Just go out there, whatever emotions come up, let them come up. Second thing that we need to do, honestly, is get physically active. So I think that men manage their emotions through their body way more than women do. So a lot of people will say post-breakup, what should you do, bro, red pill bros, alpha pill bros, even like healthy pill bros, green pill bros, call them whatever you want to, we'll say hit the gym. So I think going and exercising is a really, really good way to work out your emotions,

to let stuff out, get off some of that excess energy to start to build confidence. I seriously think hitting the gym is a great, great, great idea for your mental health. You're going to go there, you're going to feel pathetic, whatever, it's totally fine. Hopefully if you see other dudes there, they will help you out. And by the way, if you're a dude at the gym, we'll get to this in a second. You should also talk to other dudes. Like give people fist bumps. Introduce yourself.

I do this all the time when I go to the gym. And it's like awesome. Like you just make small talk with people. We don't need to have as men, we don't need to have deep emotional conversations in order to feel emotionally connected. I don't know if this kind of makes sense. But like if you're walking down the street and a dude like meets your gaze gives you the bro nod and gives you a fist bump, you feel fucking amazing.

It feels good to do and it feels good to receive. We don't need to talk about your traumas. We don't need to talk about your history. We don't need to have a four-hour conversation. We as men can communicate as men. You can give them a hug. You can give them a fist bump. It's all it takes, okay?

Third thing that we're going to talk about, fixing your emotional relationships. So this is what's really hard for men because we view relationships as transactional. So what you need to do, though, is reach out to friends of yours that maybe you haven't even seen for years. Any friend that you have been close to, who is a dude, you can reach out to years later and say, hey, bro, I'm going through some shit. Do you have some time to talk? That is literally the text message that you sent. This is what is so confusing to my wife. So I had a really

good friend in residency. And we were like tight, dude. We were tight. He was great. When I got sick with the flu, this bro came over to my house and like took care of my kid for me for like three days. Would feed my kid. Like it was amazing. Like this dude was absolutely solid bro. Then I didn't talk to him for like four years. I managed to visit. I visited the city that he was in. I hit him up. We hung out for like a day. It was great. I crashed at his place. We went and grabbed coffee. We had four hour conversations about psychedelics and psychoanalysis and all this kind of stuff. I come back and my wife is like, oh yeah, how's he doing? Like what's he doing? Like, you know, what's going on with this and this? She's like, ask me all these details about his life. And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know. I need

this like important stuff. Like, or his parents alive or his parents dead? Is he doing okay? Is he getting pro- And I was like, I don't know. We didn't talk about that stuff. And she's like perplexed. that I can see this guy after four years, we can like hang out for eight hours, have a great time, and I know nothing about him. Like I know some stuff, because I saw his kids and things like that,

and I saw his wife and his wife's great. But she's really confused by that. So here's the key thing to understand. First of all, time in relationships, if you haven't talked to someone for a long time, I think that matters more to women. Maybe it doesn't. I don't really know.

But dudes can pick up where they left off without too much difficulty, generally speaking. So even though it feels embarrassing, reach out to your bros, because here's the crazy thing. There's a really good chance that your friend from five years ago that you haven't seen has gone through a breakup and divorce as well. But the problem is they're not reaching out to you because they don't want to burden you,

and you don't want to reach out to them because you don't want to burden them. And so neither of you wants to burden each other. And if your friend reaches out to you after five years, think about it this way. If a friend reaches out to you after five years, and they're like, hey, bro, do you have time to talk? I'm going through some shit. Are you going to be like, fuck you, man. You haven't talked to me in five years. Like, that's what I honestly, like, I'm not trying to be.

fucking sexist here, but I hear that shit from the women in my life, right? I don't hear that from the men in my life. Maybe it's unfair, but like when I think about dudes, right? So I'm willing to admit that that observation is completely wrong, random chance or cognitive bias. Maybe I'm a sexist asshole. I've got to be in some way, right? I was a dude who got raised in the 80s in Texas. Key thing, though, is that if a bro reaches out to me like five years from now, like after five years and is like, hey, do you have time to talk? I'd be like, sure, man. Like, it doesn't bother me at all to, like, listen to what is going on in this dude's life.

So reach out to someone, be a little bit direct, recognize the tendency to want to reciprocate in some way. And so here's what we're going to do. If you are a man who feels like there is an imbalance in a relationship that you need to repay, there's one psychological emotional technique that you can do to correct that imbalance, even if nothing is wrong in their life. Okay, you ready? I'm going through a divorce. You are not going through divorce. You helped me out a lot. Now I feel indebted to you and I don't know how to pay that back. So what do I do? Crazy. Something that we were never taught. Appreciation.

Hey man, last couple weeks have been rough for me. I just want to say like I feel indebted to you. I feel like you've given me something that I can't repay. I really appreciate that. Like, I don't know, like, you know, I felt like my life was falling apart and even talking to you. I know we're like not even talking about much. It means a lot to me and it has helped me immensely to have you back in my life. I know we were like separated for five years, but it's been awesome to reconnect. And I appreciate you, bro. Thank you so much. So something cool happens when you express appreciation. The feeling of debt goes away. So it's kind of weird. Like there's a healthy amount of repayment, which will remain. You will be there.

for your homie, right? That loyalty will remain, and the loyalty will allow you to repay when they go through hard times. But the sense of obligation and debt will go away. So we're so burdened by debt and obligation, and we can transform that into loyalty, which feels really good, right?

I'm there for you if you ever need anything, bro. That's what we need to do. So reach out. Don't hesitate to reach out. Recognize that you're going to feel the sense of, like, I'm not going to be able to repay. This person doesn't want to hear from me. I'm feeling vulnerable. I feel like shit. That's why what we're going to do is we're going to have the

ugly cry first so that you're not a pathetic POS when you actually talk to them on the phone and they're like, what the hell is going on? What's wrong with this guy? Right? So we're going to have our ugly cry. Then we're going to reach out. You either blame yourself a ton and idealize your partner. I'm so pathetic. I'm such a loser. My partner is so great. Why didn't I ever see this? They're so perfect. Oh my God. I'm such a loser. Please take me back. Please take me back. I promise it'll change. You're perfect and I'm a loser. Or the opposite.

Oh my God. She's such a biotch. I can't believe she did this to me. And now I'm going to be an alpha and I'm going to teach her a lesson. And I'm going to have hoes and I'm going to have bitches and, oh, all women are evil. So in both cases, there is a very black and white thinking. Either you're a loser or all women are pathetic. So what we're going to do is not give in to that because both of those are damaging in different ways.

One leads to a sustained level of low self-worth. The other one leads to an unhealthy level of ego and narcissism. We don't want either of those. We're going to talk about the good or list out the good and list out the bad. What are the things? So oftentimes what men will do is idealize the good parts of the relationship. And literally what we do in therapy is when someone comes in, I'm like, yeah, so tell me about the good. And now tell me about the bad.

What we want to do is create a sense of balance. So if your mind goes to the good things, then you need to make a list of the bad things. What was wrong with the relationship? What were the warning signs? What did you not like? And if your mind goes to all of the negative things in the relationship, then you need to think about the positive things. Even if the relationship was toxic for so long, one party gets the majority of the blame.

Either you blame your partner for doing this wrong and doing this wrong. Oh, she took me for granted and she didn't really respect who I am and she doesn't respect my alfiness. You blame your partner, blame your partner, blame your partner. or you end up blaming yourself, blaming yourself, blaming yourself, blaming yourself. So what we need to do is add blame to both sides. What are you responsible for and what is your partner responsible for? So this is really healthy because when we blame our partner, I don't know if this makes sense,

men are much more likely to get remarried after divorce, by the way. So what tends to happen is, right, sometimes people will get remarried and then they'll get divorced again and remarried and get divorced again. I've worked with several men who have been married like three times. So, when I asked, you know, a patient came into my office. And I was like, are you married? And he said, I kid you fucking not, occasionally. That was his answer, right?

Absolute. I don't know if that's Chad move. Here's the thing. If you blame your partner fully for how the relationship fell apart, you're not recognizing that you may have made mistakes. And if you don't recognize that you made mistakes, you can't fix those mistakes. And if you can't fix those mistakes, you can't have a healthy relationship in the future or it becomes harder to.

Right? So it's like when you talk to someone who's narcissistic and they go on blaming everyone, they're like, oh, this person is mean to me and this person is mean to me and this person is mean to me. They continue encountering people who are mean to them. They like continue having messed up relationship after messed up relationship because they're not looking at where the problem really lies, right? So you are carrying your problems with you. So you have to look at how you were to blame for this.

And it could be something like, did you miss some red flags? did you believe so much in this person that you ignored information? They were telling you who they were, but you were so enamored with the idea of being in love. Were you so afraid of being pathetic and alone that you willingly put up with stuff that you really shouldn't put up with? So you should think about blaming them. And you should think about blaming yourself. What were your contributions to the relationship? And if you were someone who has incredibly low self-worth and I'm pathetic and things like that,

you have to think about, okay, well, what did they do wrong? Right. So even if you have certain problems, they contributed to this relationship. So you need to do these three things. Okay. Have your ugly cry. Reach out to a bro and talk about the good, talk about the bad. Blame yourself and blame the other person. Hit the gym. Start expressing yourself in a physical manner. And these are the most important point. So when I look at, let's say the 50 people I've worked with who have gone through breakup or divorce, who are men, maybe higher, what I sort of find is that there's a lot of individual things that you need to do. do, but these are the three primary components. Manage your emotions, manage your relationships, and really do some good self-reflection. The good news is as you do these things, your capacity to engage in another relationship will improve. Your erections will come back,

and hopefully you will end up in a healthy relationship that you can feel really good about and lasts. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.