20 Questions That Map Your Mental Fitness (w/ Chris Irwin)

5 Big Ideas, 3 Reflection Questions, 1 Practice

🎧 In This Episode

We explore a practical self-assessment framework for mental fitness with friend-of-the-show Chris Irwin, who's putting the finishing touches on his book Facing the Mind-Killers.

You’ll learn why the sickness-wellness-fitness continuum maps perfectly onto mental health, how twenty questions grouped by the Five Mind Killers can give you a directional read on your mental fitness over time, and why the language we use to describe our struggles — “I have anxiety,” “I have depression” — may be actively reinforcing the very states we’re trying to escape.

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🖐 5 BIG IDEAS

1. Mental Fitness Is a Continuum

The sickness-wellness-fitness continuum from CrossFit — the idea that health exists on a spectrum, not as a binary — maps one-for-one onto mental fitness. You’re not either “fine” or “sick.” You’re somewhere on a spectrum, and that position shifts daily, monthly, and across years.

This framing matters because it gives you agency. Everything we know about physical fitness applies here: it’s impacted by your daily choices, not external circumstances; there’s no finish line; consistency beats intensity; no one can do it for you. The goal is not to arrive somewhere — it’s to keep trending in the right direction.

2. The Binary Trap Is Costing You

When you go in for your annual physical, you’re asked to check a box: mental health problem, yes or no. That binary framing is baked into the culture. Either you’re fine and there’s nothing to do, or you have a diagnosable problem that requires treatment by someone else.

Both poles of that binary erase the middle — where most of us actually live. The goal of Chris’s work is a paradigm shift: from “do I have a problem?” to “am I trending toward fitness or toward sickness?” That’s a fundamentally different question, and it puts the work back in your hands.

3. Your Language Is Keeping You Stuck

When we say “I have anxiety” or “I have depression,” we are framing those states as permanent possessions — things we carry, like a chronic condition. That framing is quietly reinforcing the state every time we repeat it. We’re teaching our brains that the thing is true and fixed.

The alternative isn’t denial. It’s precision. You’re not someone who has anxiety — you’re someone whose nervous system is currently dysregulated around a certain kind of trigger, and that’s something you can work on. Words shape belief. Belief shapes behavior. Start with the words.

4. Questions Beat Metrics for Mental Fitness

With physical fitness, you can measure. Blood panels, mile times, one-rep maxes — the data is external and trackable. Mental fitness can’t be charted on a spreadsheet. But that doesn’t mean it’s unmeasurable. It means you need a different tool: the right questions, asked with the same regularity.

Patrick’s insight is that questions-based journaling creates a qualitative dataset over time. Ask the same questions every three to six months, answer them honestly, and compare. You won’t get a number — but you’ll get a direction. And direction is what matters.

5. The Five Mind Killers Map Your Assessment

The five enemies of mental fitness — Oblivion, Storytelling, Suppression, Fear, and Stagnation — each reveal something different about where you stand. The questions that surface your relationship with Oblivion (awareness and presence) are different from the ones that surface Suppression (emotional regulation) or Fear (openness to risk and hard conversations).

Grouping the questions by mind killer turns a random list of self-reflection prompts into a structured tool. You’re not just asking “how are you doing?” — you’re running a targeted scan of each mental fitness domain, the same way a blood panel checks different biomarkers.

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🤔 3 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. If someone you admire could listen to your self-talk during your last real moment of stress, would you be proud of what they heard?

This is one of the sharpest checks in the whole framework. Our self-talk in moments of stress reveals the operating system beneath the performance. Not the version we present to others — the version that runs when no one is watching. What does yours say about your current mental fitness? Is it getting quieter, kinder, or more disciplined over time?

2. When was the last time you risked failing at something that mattered to you?

Fear — the fourth mind killer — shows up most clearly in avoidance. We stop risking not because we made a deliberate choice, but because avoidance becomes a habit so gradual we don’t notice it happening. Think about the last three months. Was there something you wanted to try, say, or attempt — and didn’t? What was the actual cost of not doing it?

3. How long can you sit in quiet stillness before the urge to distract yourself becomes too strong?

This is the Oblivion check — your baseline awareness of your own mind. The answer isn’t about meditating for an hour. It’s about whether you can tolerate your own thoughts without immediately reaching for a phone, a task, or a distraction. That tolerance is trainable. Where are you starting from?

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🎯 1 PRACTICE

Run the Six-Month Check-In.

Pick five questions from the episode — one from each mind killer — and write your honest answers today. Set a calendar reminder for six months from now to answer the same five questions again. Don’t score yourself. Don’t grade yourself. Just write.

The point isn’t to have good answers the first time. The point is to have a benchmark. Mental fitness is directional, not positional — what matters is whether the answers are improving, holding, or declining over time. You can’t know your direction without knowing your starting point.

This is the minimum viable version of a practice that Chris has spent years developing. You don’t need the full twenty questions. You don’t need a perfect system. Start with five, get honest, and show up again in six months. The comparison is where the data lives.

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