Mental Health and FI

What follows is a rough transcript of the talk I gave on Mental Health and FI. I’ve edited it a bit to make it flow better in the written form, and added the source material where appropriate. I left the slides in, because what the hell. This thing took me about 30 minutes to give in person, but took hours to get into written form! But it was fun. The internets say it should take you about half an hour to read as well; which seems super long for a blog post. To help break this up into less ridiculous chunks, I added a table of contents. Hope that helps. 🙃

Ok, here goes: 

Intro

 Hi everybody, I’m JSD(I said my real name at the event). I’ll be giving you a talk about mental health and FI today. This talk is two thirds why you should be proactive about improving your mental health, and one third how-to improve it. Because the  “how-to” portion could be weeks or months long, myself and some other people put together a Mental Health Resources Guide (MHRG). It’s a guide to going deeper on how to improve your mental health, and I encourage you to please check it out. Major thanks to the awesome anonymous people that contributed to the MHRG, as well as to Jillian Johnsrud and Diania Merriam who chipped in too. 

 Why am I giving this talk? I’m hoping that after this you’ll be motivated to use the same mindset for FI to proactively work on your mental health. I believe working on your mental health proactively can help make the journey to FI, and the time afterwards, much more enjoyable. It can also mitigate one more year of syndrome (OMYS), and more importantly it can prepare you for life’s inevitable challenges. 

Why I give a shit.

Why do I believe that?  I’ve seen the worst case when it comes to mental health crises, which motivates me to try and make things better. Before I retired, I was a cop for 15 years.  I spent much of that time on the SWAT team; one of the types of incidents that we responded to were armed suicidal barricaded subjects.  These were people that were armed with a weapon, had threatened to hurt or kill somebody else, were threatening to kill themselves, and had barricaded themselves inside their residence. I went to hundreds of these incidents over the years, and I learned some stuff from them.

One of the things I learned was how false the stigma of mental health is. Most of these people didn’t seem like “crazy” people, and I had to readjust how I viewed mental health. Back before I dove into all of this stuff, my perspective was skewed. If you said mental health, I’d picture some disheveled dude muttering to himself wearing a tinfoil hat. Contrary to this image, most of the suicidal people we tried to help seemed “normal”. They came from all walks of life, and were roughly evenly distributed across the socio-economic strata.  

There were a couple of glaring consistencies about these incidents:

1. Most people who knew the suicidal subjects thought they were fine (at least before shit went south that day). We’d be on scene at these things for hours, constantly trying to talk these people into getting help. While doing this, we’d interview the neighbors, as well as the friends and family that would show up. We did this to learn more about the person so that we could find things to talk to them about that would hopefully steer them towards accepting help. And you know what most of these friends, family, and neighbors said? “I thought they were fine.” “I never thought they’d do something like this.” “Never in a hundred years did I think this would happen”. “ I thought they were so normal”. And yet here we were.

2. All the people we would try to help would say “My family will be better off without me”. Fortunately we were able to talk most of these people into getting help. Occasionally the person might try to hurt themselves, but usually we could use some less-lethal tools to separate them from their weapon. While these interventions may be temporarily painful, at least the person didn’t die, and we would get them help afterwards. 

A few times though, we failed. I was on scene when this happened, and immediately afterwards we’d interact with their family and friends. We would also follow up weeks later to see if there was anything else we could have done that we could try on the next similar incident. And you know what I learned from talking to their family and friends? They were not better off without their loved one. They were much, much fucking worse. 

So yeah, that was pretty extreme there. Again, this is what motivates me to give this talk. But for every person that is contemplating suicide, there are thousands of people who aren’t, but are still suffering through mild to moderate issues with their mental health. And that ain’t great either. 

You know how we talk about the brain-body connection? When you think about that, it sounds kind of stupid and redundant. We never talk about the spleen-body connection, or the foot body connection. Shit no…because of course the spleen and foot are parts of the body. Duh. But the brain? This imaginary separation of the brain and body informs our weird mental health stigma. We’ll get medical care for every other part of our body, but when it comes to our brain……hmmmmm, maybe let’s just not talk about that.

Think about it like this. Say you tweak your knee. It hurts; not terrible, but persistently annoying. After a few months it still hasn’t gotten any better. But it’s not that bad, you can suck it up and deal with it. 50 or 100 years ago that would be your only choice. Maybe get a cane or whatever. But these days, you know you could just go to a physical therapist. Put in 6-12 weeks of strengthening and flexibility stuff a few hours each week, and your knee would be like 90% or maybe even 100% better. So yeah, you could suck it up. But why would you deal with that annoying level of pain for the rest of your life, when you know just a little bit of Physical Therapy would make it drastically better? 

The thing is, most of us with mild to moderate mental health issues are just sucking it up and dealing with it, for our entire lives, when we don’t have to. We now have decades of data showing that some simple self care practices can improve our mental health. And we also know that there are some Evidence Based Therapies (EBTs) that can immensely improve our mental health if the self care stuff ain’t working. These EBT’s aren’t lobotomies or electro-shock, they’re roughly equivalent to physical therapy: most are different variations of talk-therapy, done for only 6-12 weeks, an hour each week, maybe with some homework. Hell, you can even do them remotely from your laptop or phone. Yet most people choose to needlessly suck it up and deal for the rest of their lives. This strikes me as ridiculous. I don’t think most people are stupid; rather I think most people don’t know how to improve their mental health, and/or the stigma against addressing it precludes them from even considering it.

Finally, I believe all this stuff works because it worked for me. And probably saved my life. Which leads us too…

Emotional Appeal

My extremely blatant emotional appeal, and last ditch effort to get you to pay attention! Look everybody, it’s a picture of a cute dog!

This is Clutch; he’s an explosive and ballistics K9, which means he can smell guns and explosives. The last year I was on the job, me and Clutch were assigned together on late shift. When we weren’t trying to find bombs and guns, we were training (which was really just a deliberate variation of fetch). 

One night during the summer of 2021 Clutch and I stopped at our usual city park to train. I went to my normal log to sit down, and something different happened. Clutch acted in a way he never had before. You see, Clutch has exactly two modes:

1. Dead to the world asleep. Like I’d have to literally shake him to wake up.
2. Running around a million miles an hour like a fucking crackhead on fire.

So normally when I sat down on that log, Clutch would be in run around like crazy mode. But this night, he came up to me, put his head in my lap, and kinda just looked at me.

Look, I’m all about dog cuddles and snuggles, but Clutch never did that, and as far as I know still doesn’t with his new handler. This drastic change in behavior made me realize that something was going on. Specifically, something was going on with me. I was having some thoughts that scared the hell out of me, but I’d been in denial about them and refused to even acknowledge them. But when Clutch looked at me like “what the hell, dude?”, I realized I had to stop running from them and take some action. 

The thought that prompted this, which kept running unwanted through my head was “I guess I could just kill myself, and then I wouldn’t have to keep doing this anymore”.

You see, at this point in my life, things were compounding in three directions:

1. Financially, we were good. Found the FI stuff around 2012, and had been hitting it hard. Had achieved FI in late 2019, but was sticking around for a pension I didn’t need. By that summer I stayed 2 years past my FI point, but was planning on putting in nearly another 6 years to get that sweet pension which would destroy any uncertainty and likely provide double what we needed for a good lifestyle.

2. On the flip side, trauma was compounding in a bad direction. While being a soldier in Afghanistan was mostly enjoyable, it had set a shaky foundation on which I’d thrown more and more trauma after getting back and becoming a cop. 

I got shot at way more times as a cop in the city than I ever did in Afghanistan. Had got shot once too, and people had occasionally tried to stab me or kill me in other fun and interesting ways. That stuff wasn’t nearly as bad as the constant misery I was wading through as a cop. Saw dead kids who died from SIDs, or got hit by stray rounds in drive-bys. Constantly responded to people’s worst days of their lives, and everything felt like it was fucked. OD’s, people horribly injured, friends and co-workers shot and/or killed, and more than a few who had killed themselves. Rinse and repeat for 15 fucking years. It was adding up.

3. Luckily, things were compounding in a third way, but in a good direction. I’d been proactively working on my mental health, and that too was building on itself. When I was a rookie cop, a friend of mine told me she had been helped by therapy. She noticed some stuff going on with me (which I was oblivious to), and said it might help me too. She recommended a therapy center, and I went. It was pretty good. Went an hour a week for a few months, then tapered off to once a month for a few more. 

I learned about PTSD, and learned how shoving some shit down and refusing to deal with it had caused things to fester. We worked through that, and I felt a lot better. This therapist also recommended some books, and I started down the rabbit hole of learning more about mental health, as well as self-care. Unlike my coworkers who self-medicated with alcohol, I started self-medicating with meditation, yoga, and working out. It definitely helped temper some of the stresses of the job. 

Having realized the benefits of therapy, I began to be proactive with it. Anytime something major happened (got in a shooting, got shot, friends got shot, etc), I’d take advantage of my Employer Assistance Program (EAP) provided therapy, even if I felt fine. So this was good.

Because of my own self-guided mental health education and work, I knew what to do that night when Clutch snuggled up to me and nudged me into confronting my shit. First off, I had previously made a commitment to never kill myself. This was because of two reasons:

1. I have watched people shoot themselves, and then surprisingly not die. Oddly enough, afterwards they were genuinely thankful they had failed to kill themselves, even weeks or months later, despite being severely physically effected by their suicide attempt. I’d also read about this, and found that this was a common phenomena. This pointed to the transitory nature of the desire to kill oneself. Despite what most people believe, when someone tries to kill themselves, they usually actually want to die, and it’s not a cry for help. But after failing, they’re glad they didn’t succeed. This told me that as bad as stuff may seem, it will get better.

2. I’ve seen the data; the children of those of have committed suicide are much more likely to attempt suicide themselves. This is not believed to be due to some genetic predisposition, rather it’s theorized to be caused by a social factor. The children see that someone they look up to has utilized this method of escape, which then gives them implicit permission to do the same. I’ve got young kids, and I don’t want to do this to them. So yeah, not going to kill myself. No matter fucking what. 

Because of this commitment, I’d already come up with contingencies in case I’d ever experienced suicidal ideation (thoughts of suicide). Like I said before, I’ve had several co-workers form the Cop and Army world commit suicide. I knew the statistics; both groups are three times more likely to kill themselves than the general population. While I’d love to think I’m a magical special unicorn, I’d also learned that one of the common symptoms of repeated exposure to trauma (check) was suicidal ideation, which could possibly spiral into planning and eventually an attempt. While I’d hoped to hell to never have any suicidal ideation, because of this self-education I knew it was a possibility. 

Some fireman once told me “what’s predictable is preventable”. Firemen are really good at rescuing cats, cooking chili, and coming up with platitudes. But they’re annoyingly right about lots of shit too. Since I could predict a possibility of suicidal ideation, years prior to it actually occurring I had made a plan to prevent myself from spiraling down into the darkness. 

I’d made a commitment to myself that if I ever had suicidal thoughts, I’d get my ass into a trauma focused therapy as soon as fucking possible. I’d familiarized myself with the EBT’s associated with PTSD, and had the number to the VA saved in my phone. I knew that it’d be a bitch to get scheduled through the VA, but I also knew that they would could get me into a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT-one of the PTSD EBTs (all the acronyms!!)) pretty quickly once I made it through their byzantine scheduling system. 

Clutch’s completely out of character behavior that night helped kick my butt into gear, and made me realize it was time to follow through with my plan. I called the VA, and continued to call them for about 24 hours until I got a real human to schedule me with a therapist who was trained in CBT. A few days later we had our first remote session, and we continued weekly for a few months, again tapering off as my symptoms improved. 

Going through CBT helped to address some of the root causes of my shit. One of those had to do with fear and insecurity, which I learned I’d been trying to address by overly conservative financial planning. Getting through this stuck point helped me accept the general uncertainty of all things, to include money stuff. Because of this, I realized that I was wayyyy oversaving. I also realized it was absolutely ridiculous stick out another 6 years at a job that I no longer enjoyed, and was in fact compounding trauma and really fucking up my mental health. It was even more ridiculous to do this when I no longer needed the money. About 8 months after this, I retired.

Retirement was great, but it wasn’t all kittens and chocolate (as you regular readers know). Having some dedicated self-care practices were instrumental in making the transition be less weird, and I credit them for helping me to design the mostly awesome post-full time work life I enjoy now.

There you have it, my blatant emotional appeal. Now let’s use the other side of our brains; I’m-a gonna hit you with some data:

Data

Yeah….so like 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 people surveyed report they have mental health issues. Worse, more than half of these people aren’t getting help for it. And even worse is that this is likely a huge undercount. One of the common symptoms across most mental health issues is the tendency to not report their symptoms. 

It takes many people years to admit they’re having mental health issues, and some never do. It’s kind of a logical leap, but if you try to factor this in, then it’s possible that something like half of the people in this country are suffering from some level of mental health issues. 

When it comes to treatment, by definition the people who aren’t reporting their symptoms probably aren’t seeking help. So now you might have up to half the country experiencing mental health issues, yet most aren’t getting help. This is a straight up shit show, when you remember that we have decades of data which suggest that minimally invasive EBT’s are pretty fucking good at helping people in a relatively short amount of time. 

The good news is that…..

Yeah, it’s society’s fault!! Ok, look, I’m mostly saying this tongue in cheek. Before we get into that, please let me remind you about one of the assumptions this whole FIRE thing is based on. Here in this FIRE space we all kinda accept that if you follow what mainstream society and culture are doing, you’re going to be straight fucked when it comes to money.

I don’t think there’s some malevolent force out there driving us to financial wreckage, but that’s what the default path leads us to. You do what everyone else is doing, and you’ll be broke, in debt, and probably working until you die. But we don’t just sit back and complain about this shit and resign ourselves to such a fate. Instead we educate ourselves about finances way more than most people do, proactively take steps to better our money, and help each other out along the way.

There is a similar bleak picture of mental health in the developed world, and specifically in our country. What I don’t want to do is create some pity party where we mope around lamenting how everything is fucked and give all hope. Instead, I hope this motivates you to do the same with your mental health that you have with your finances. 

Let’s get into it. 

According to the NIH, when you look at the relation of GDP to mental illness, they trend toward a statistically significant relation:

Not the most bestest P value, but the main takeaway from this is that it seems that the more developed a country gets the worse it’s mental health suffers (one astute listener asked if this was because our capability to measure mental health in the developing world was limited, thus leading to an undercount; the NIH paper said this is definitely a possibility, but then said if you look at a bunch of other research it would seem that less developed cultures have fewer issues across multiple domains, and therefore the lower count of mental health issues in such regions is likely directionally correct).

Look at the above scatter plot. Who’s in the upper right? Yeah, that’s the US. We are kicking ass at GDP and being miserable. Yay us!

Here’s another scatter plot to throw at you:

Looks like we hit statistical significance on that one! Here we see a strong correlation between Mental Health (mood disorder, which is a good marker for overall issues and generally easier to measure) and income Inequality. As income becomes less equal, mental health gets worse. While we could go deep on the whole income thing, and we could all go fantasize about burning it down or whatever, what I really want to draw your attention to is the y-axis. Unlike the previous scatter plot, all the countries on this one would be considered developed. And who is the best at being the worst when it comes to mental health? Us again. Yayyyyyyy……

But why?

Possible Causes of Why Shit’s Fucked

Here’s some guesses:

Like a lot of social sciences, it’s hard to put a single reason behind what causes a specific result. When it comes to mental health, we can develop some theories about why it’s so bad by looking at cultures where it’s comparatively good and figure out how we differ. One interesting phenomena that can also point to what’s going on is the occasional dramatic improvement in mental health that occurs in the developed world. 

You may not believe it, but this improvement seems to happen when we go through a natural or man-made disaster. Despite what the media, tv, and movies would have you believe, when communities go through disasters, they don’t descend into zombie apocalypse level shit shows. 

Sebastian Junger writes beautifully about this in his phenomenal book Tribe. One example he gives is Britain in WW2. Back before the Nazis started bombing the hell out of wide swaths of the civilian population, the Brits knew it was coming. This was the first time in history where such a huge amount of civilians were going to be exposed to such immediate death and destruction. The British government saw this was inevitable, and freaked the fuck out. They figured that the mass bombings would paralyze their society, and they’d have to greatly increase the capacities of their mental institutions. Experts guessed that most people would be either catatonic or constantly suffering from nervous breakdowns. 

Then the bombings happened. And it was horrible. 70,000 civilians were killed. 

But oddly enough, mental health improved during the blitz (at least in the short-term). The Nazi’s had hoped to break the civilian support of the war, and destroy the will of the people who produced Allied forces weaponry. Instead, they just really pissed everyone off. Instead of breaking, most people reported a stronger sense of community, and greater connection to their neighbors: “…not only did these experiences fail to produce mass mysteria, they didn’t even trigger much individual psychosis….as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals saw admissions go down. ‘Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,’ one doctor remarked” (Tribe, Junger) 

This trend seems to happen in most disasters. People report an improvement of mental health during the crisis. They also say they feel a strong sense of community, and that they now know they can rely on their neighbors. The disaster tends to give most a shared sense of purpose, of which people build a more meaningful identity on top of. 

As we look at this, we can see the factors that tend to improve people’s mental health, and then see what’s missing from our current society. These factors are likely causing our increasing amount of mental issues. Stuff like feeling of isolation, lack of community, loss of social connection all kind of point at the same thing. We feel alone. The sedentary nature of our society doesn’t help, and a lot of people don’t feel they have a sense of purpose with their work being so disconnected from whatever they’re helping produce. 

I should note that there is one disaster in recent history where mental health issues got worse instead of better. This is probably the exception that proves the rule. You’ve likely guessed what I’m talking about; the COVID pandemic really fucked up a lot people’s mental health. And a big part of that was the isolation. Unlike most disasters where people came together and helped each other, during the height of the pandemic we were all trying to stay apart. 

This demonstrates how much feelings of isolation can decrease people’s mental health. People already reported that our culture was becoming increasingly isolated well before the pandemic, and that disaster brought it to a new level of suck. While the post-pandemic increase in remote work has had some great benefits, I’m guessing it hasn’t made people feel less isolated.

So yeah, our culture has some aspects that are likely increasing our risk of mental health issues. I’ll ask you this; left unchecked, could pursuing FIRE exacerbate some of these risks?

I think maybe it could. When you first find FIRE, it’s awesome. You have a way out of this job thing that you think may be causing all of your issues. If you go all in, you start ruthlessly cutting your spending. This means you’ll be doing stuff that the majority of your peers aren’t doing. Do you think that doing things differently than most people would make someone feel more or less isolated?

Furthermore, let’s look at the whole early retirement thing. While the social connection we get at work is tenuous and fraught with issues, for a lot of people it’s all they’ve got. Removing work in such cases could possibly make people feel less connected. 

I know it did for me. Half the cops I worked with were dicks, and I couldn’t wait to get the hell away from them. But look at that glass half full-this means I actually liked the other half of cops I used to work with. I don’t think such a distribution is unusual, and is something one should consider when designing their post FI life.

That’s my data backed thesis. Our developed world increases our risk of mental health issues, and left unchecked it’s possible FIRE could make it worse. 

Hopefully I’ve painted a picture of mental health that is similar to the state of personal finance in our society. It’s fucked. But I’m not blaming society, instead I hope this bleak picture helps give you permission to better your mental health. Just like we are all about getting rid of the taboo of talking about money in the FIRE world, I think we need to do the same with the stigma of working on your mental health. 

How to get more better.

What do we do next? It’s the same process we used for our money. 

First we must educate ourselves about the issue, and the best ways to fix it. Then do what we can to help ourselves. And if needed, figure out the best options of how to get help from others.

When it comes to self-education, you’ve probably already got a good process which has helped you figure out the optimal ways to save and invest your money. You likely already know which format is best for you; be it books, blogs, podcasts, videos, or some combination which helps you learn and take action. The same process which got you there can be applied to the mental health sphere, with a small tweak. 

We all know that the incentives are misaligned with many of the ‘financial professionals’ out there. We all go running when someone tries to sell us advice based on an AUM model or disguises their incentives with terms like “fee-based”. I’d trust what this random JL Collins dude says to do with my money more than some dickhead with a bunch of acronyms behind their name who uses big words and a dubious compensation model. 

The mental health world iis somewhat opposite. The incentives aren’t as poorly misaligned. For the most part, credentialed experts who base their advice on peer reviewed research are a better place to start than random people on the internet (yours truly include, which is why the resource guide is mostly summaries of data backed stuff with links to reputable places to get more information).

You’ll going find some influencer types which straddle the line between having credentials, yet are able to communicate complex concepts in actionable steps. Guys like Huberman and Attia seem to fall in that catagory. There’s probably some other influencers who actually base what they say on rigorous data, and effective communicators. 

Just like the finance world, there’s some weird shit out there. I’d therefore start your education journey with the data backed stuff first, and err on the side of someone who has earned credentials from a legitimate organization. Failing that, look for authors and influencers who base their body of work on actual research.

Next we’ve got self care. 

First off, if you’re not getting at least 7 hours of sleep most nights, the rest of this stuff won’t help nearly as much. Luckily quality sleep has gotten more attention as of late, and there seems to be a consensus of what to do for good sleep hygiene. If you’ve tried that consistently for weeks or months and you haven’t improved, please see a specialist and maybe get a sleep study done. I’ve had numerous friends (yay shift work!!) do this, and they say it’s been life changing.

Then there’s exercise. One meta-analysis found that literally any type of consistent exercise improved people’s mental health as much as prescription level antidepressants or therapy. I’m not saying you should just work out instead of trying those; instead the same research found that the effectiveness of antidepressants and/or therapy increased when coupled with exercise. 

This research did show that  as the intensity of exercise increased, so did the benefits. But really, the main thing was that exercise must be done consistently. So find something you can do, and that you like to do, and do that. Yoga, running, walking, crossfit, whatever. When it comes to self care for mental health, quality sleep provides the foundation. Layering exercise on top of this seems to be the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to actually improving your mental health. 

Next we have mindfulness and meditation. While there’s not as much data backing the positive effects of these practices as there are with exercise, the research still suggests that they can help people quite significantly. The nice thing is they also have a lower barrier to entry than exercise; you don’t have to get all sweaty, you just need to read a book to understand the concept, and then maybe listen to a few minutes of a free meditation podcast (you’ve got to scroll a bit to find it, but she has some 6-10 minute meditations in there) most days. 

Then we have nutrition. It should be no surprise that what makes you healthier also improves your mental health. Remember that the brain is just a part of the body; if you put crap in you’re going to feel like crap everywhere. Stuff here can get really dogmatic, this seems to be partially caused by the wide variation of what is effective for each individual. There’s some broad generalities which apply to most people; don’t overeat, don’t eat crap you know is crap. Outside that, there is some emerging research which suggests that specific diets do have a positive effect for people with certain mental issues.

There’s plenty of other self care practices you can explore out there, but I’ve talked about all of these because they have some solid data backing their efficacy. I’d encourage you to start with this stuff, before you start getting into the healing energy of crystals or some shit 🙄. 

Finally we’ve got therapy. To be clear, I’m not saying everybody needs therapy, or that everyone has to do therapy. Therapy is not without its risks, and pursuing it when not needed may be a waste of time and money or possibly be harmful in some extreme cases. Finally, therapy is not a 100% solution for everyone. Just like any other intervention, it just doesn’t work for some people. 

That said, if you’ve got some stuff going on, even in the mild to moderate range, all the self care stuff I’ve mentioned before will mostly treat the symptoms, but rarely fix the root cause of said symptoms. If you put in lots of time and introspection, you might eventually come to realize the root causes through a mindfulness practice. But an objective third party who’s been trained to identify issues can help you address the root causes of what’s causing such symptoms a hell of lot faster. Better yet is they can also help you build a plan to work on that root cause, and hold you accountable to improvement.

Let’s talk about coaching, as this has become increasingly popular, even within the FIRE community. My personal opinion is that this is partially because it is easier to tell people that you’re going to a life coach to maximize your effectiveness or whatever instead of saying you’re going to therapy. Because saying you’re going to therapy implies something is wrong with you (we really got to get over this-please recall the actual state of shit in our country as I outlined before). Coaching is much easier to talk about, shit, Oprah had a life coach. 

I think there’s some great coaches out there, and if that’s what works for you, well…you do you boo. But I would encourage you to at least start with a credentialed therapist, because:

1. It’s a good filter to make sure the person trying to help you knows what they are doing. Yeah, there are awesome coaches, but there are plenty of others who decided they were going to coach with no actual training or experience. 

2. You may be able to get insurance to pay for therapy, good luck getting them to pay for coaching.

3. Some of the more effective coaches out there either have a clinical background, or are following a protocol that is based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). You may as well just go to a therapist who specializes on CBT if that’s what you’re after. 

When you look for a therapist, I would also encourage you to start with one who practices Evidence Based Therapy (EBT). These are types of therapies that have been heavily researched, and have been shown to be effective in helping most people. We now have decades and decades of research on therapy, and some types have actually been found to be either pointless or harmful. But those which have become EBTs have mountains of data, and accompanying training for the practitioners, which make them highly effective at helping people address the root causes of their shit, and then work to address them. 

The nice thing with EBTs is that there are usually at least 2-3 types that have been found effective for each type of mental issue. No EBT is 100% effective in all people, so if you didn’t get anything out of one type, you can try a different one, and you’ll have a high probability of getting better. 

Most of the EBTs are a version of talk therapy, but with different frameworks and techniques aimed at what they’re designed to address. The great thing about this is that most of the EBTs can be done remotely, which is not only more convenient, but can be just as effective  as in-person therapy while costing less.

Let’s talk about finding a therapist. Long story short, just like dealing with the rest of the medical world, it can be a giant bitch. I highly encourage you to check out the Mental Health Resource Guide which goes deep on this. Three amazing people who wish to remain anonymous put together some great recommendations on how to find a therapist, pay for them, and how to get the most of therapy. Seriously, I wish I had what they said when I first went down this rabbit hole. 

I also encourage you to explore your therapy options available to you now, even if you don’t need it. Look man, shit happens. Life will inevitably throw some stuff at you, and maybe it’ll catch you at a really low point when the shit hits. If you end up wanting to go to therapy when this happens, do you think it will be easier to figure out how to find a therapist when your world is crashing down around you, or right now when things are relatively chill? 

So yeah, maybe check out the Guide now. Maybe even figure out what options you have, and how you’d pay for it. Probably be a good contingency to check in with from time to time. 

Embrace the path, don’t wait for something to save you

Before we wrap up, I want to warn you of something. Just like it’s easy in the FIRE space to think that hitting our FI number will solve all our problems, we can fall into the same trap with this mental health stuff. 

Maybe we think we’ll finally be happy once we get through CBT. Or once we’ve got our mindfulness practice dialed in. And while there’s emerging research that suggests MDMA and psychedelic assisted therapy may greatly improve some people’s mental health, it sure seems like many are banking their future well being on whenever they get to go through that. I’ve seen the same thing with the Hoffman process, as that’s also gotten super popular. Some have said they’ll finally be ok once they make it out to Hoffman. If anything, I have more respect for the Hoffman process because when people come back, they say stuff like this: 

“…I’m happier in daily life as well. I’m calmer, more confident, and everything just seems a little brighter. It’s like the filter with which I view the world has shifted. Again, Hoffman would have been worth it for this alone.

But I still feel myself slipping into patterns I don’t like. It will take work; lots of work. I’ll need to pay attention to myself and work on my bad patterns in all of my waking hours. It could take months, but will probably take years.“- Carl from 1500days.com (bolding done by me/JSD)

Yeah, some stuff can really shift your perspective. But that doesn’t mean the journey is over. The FIRE space has generally accepted that you don’t magically become happy once you hit your FI number, even though that was kinda implied back in the day. We were wrong. Better to embrace the path, and enjoy it when we can. 

The same thing is true of whatever mental health work you do. Putting in the work during a 12 week course of CBT sessions, or tripping balls on mushrooms with some shaman in the rainforest may have some life altering effects. But neither of those things will turn you into some idealized version of yourself. That person you want to be is not some destination you’ll arrive at some day; instead it’s the north star which guides you to keep on taking steps forward.

Conclusion

Let’s wrap it up. My example may seem extreme, but if you’re thinking that, then I want to leave with you two thoughts:

1. Consider me on the Jacob Lund Fisker(the Early Retirement Extreme guy) scale of mental health. You may not want to live on $7,000 a year like Jacob does, but if you apply his overall strategies in a less extreme way, they’ll still get your finances in a much better spot. Same with this; maybe you weren’t in combat, got shot, or did any of the other stupid shit I did. Perhaps then you don’t feel the immediacy of improving your mental health to counter all that crap. But if you follow the same principles I did; learning about mental health, implementing some self care practices, and seeking therapy if you want to, your life will probably be a hell of a lot better.

2. You may be sitting there and thinking “ah, whatever I’ve got going on isn’t that bad, I haven’t had people try to kill me a dozen times and I’ve never had to see a bunch of dead and maimed people”. Please, please, please…do not discount your own shit. If we could objectively rank the severity of traumatic incidents, mine would pale in comparison to others. However, my experiences may seem worse than most people. Neither matters. When it comes to trauma the severity of the traumatic incident is not correlated with the severity of the symptoms. 

You could be in combat or in a car accident, and depending on a variety of still barely understood factors, your response to either incident could be the same. It is so easy to discount your own issues by comparing your life to others. This can become an excuse to not try to better yourself, and bury your own shit with repression and denial (been there, done that). 

If that’s you, don’t beat yourself up; this is a normal reaction that can help us get through stuff in the immediate aftermath of bad stuff. But when it becomes a habit, that shit can fester and you can turn into that mythical frog who slowly gets boiled to death. So again please do not discount your own bad stuff. No, we’re not going to sit around and complain about all the bad stuff that’s happened, but not addressing even mild symptoms seems just as pointless.

What I hope makes you ok with proactively improving your mental health is understanding that while our society has been optimized for GDP, this has come at the expense of our sanity. Shit’s kind of fucked up. With that I hope you also understand that left unchecked, pursuing FI could exacerbate some of the general societal factors which put us at risk of mental health issues in the first place. But we’re not going to blame anybody, instead I hope you use the same FI mindset that you’ve used to crush your finances to improve yourself.

Finally, this talk has been long on describing the issues in the hopes it motivated you, but short on how to improve your mental health. Please take a look at the Mental Health Resource Guide 

where you can go much deeper into any of the methods discussed. Again, huge thanks to the people who helped put that together. Even if you have no interest in bettering your mental health, please at least take a glance at it and save it for later. Maybe someday you’d like to try and improve in that arena, or maybe someone you care about could benefit from it. 

Thanks for listening this long, and I hope you got something out of this. Okey doke-who’s got questions? Nothings off the table; I for sure don’t know everything, but I can at least tell you what’s worked for me and maybe give you a few threads to pull.

Thanks for making it this far. Hope this helps somebody. Please feel free to ask questions about any of the above in the comments below or by emailing me. My apologies, I don’t have any more pictures of Clutch 😉 .