The 5 MindKillers: How You're Sabotaging Your Mental Fitness (& the Countermeasures to Stop)
The Full Listener's Guide
🎧 In This Episode
Over the past year, we’ve had retired Navy SEAL Chris Irwin on the show four times to walk through his complete MindKillers framework - a training system for mental fitness that works just like physical fitness.
This supercut brings all four conversations together to cover the five ways you’re sabotaging your mental health without realizing it, plus the exact countermeasures to stop.
Listen Now
Sponsored By
Function Health - Health data platform
LMNT - Zero-sugar electrolyte drink
Momentous - Creatine Lemon Powder
Monarch - All-in-one personal finance tool
One Skin - Skin longevity products
SKIMS - Comfortable men’s underwear
Quick Preview
Mental fitness is trainable. Just like physical health, mental health exists on a spectrum from unfit to fit - and you have far more control over it than you think.
The 5 MindKillers are universal. Oblivion, storytelling, suppression, fear, and stagnation are the specific ways we all sabotage our mental fitness.
Each MindKiller has a countermeasure. Awareness, reframing, regulation, openness, and wonder form the ARROW framework - your direction for mental fitness.
You can’t skip the foundation. Awareness of your thoughts is step one. Everything else builds from there.
❤️🔥 A Deeper Dive
Big Ideas
The Mental Fitness Paradigm Shift
Most people think of mental health as binary - you’re either fine or you’re sick. This puts everything into a treatment paradigm: therapy, pharmaceuticals, hoping you don’t “catch” something.
But Chris reframes the entire conversation: mental health is a training modality. You can assess your mental fitness, identify weaknesses, and train specific capacities just like you do physically.
The MindKillers are the ways you’re making yourself mentally unfit. The countermeasures are your training program.
MindKiller #1: Oblivion → Countermeasure: Awareness
This is the foundation. Oblivion means you have no awareness of the constant chatter in your head - the subconscious thoughts that just show up without you generating them.
Most people think “I am my thoughts” or “I’m the thinker of my thoughts.” But the breakthrough is becoming the observer of your thoughts - treating that chatter like any other information stream (social media, podcasts, music).
It’s just data. You don’t have to own it or take it seriously.
Chris walks us through meditation practices that build this skill: doing nothing, shifting focus, noticing when you get distracted. This is step one because you can’t change what you’re not aware of.
MindKiller #2: Storytelling → Countermeasure: Reframing
Once you have awareness, you start noticing a pattern: you tell yourself stories about your past. Not memories themselves - memories are neutral - but the narratives you build around them.
Chris uses the example of Bill Buckner and the 1986 World Series error. The ball going through his legs is a fact. Everything else - “I’m a failure,” “I cost my team the championship” - is a story. And stories are choices.
The countermeasure is reframing: telling a different, more useful story. Ideally through gratitude, but at minimum, asking “does this story serve me?”
Chris shares his own reframe: a decade of telling himself he was a failure after an operational letdown, until he realized he could just... stop telling that story.
MindKiller #3: Suppression → Countermeasure: Regulation
Storytelling is the intellectual piece of dealing with the past. Suppression is the emotional piece. When something happens, you feel something - sorrow, anger, whatever. The problem isn’t the emotion itself; it’s that we push it down instead of processing it.
Chris talks about this like holding in a fart for 20 years - toxic. Emotions are how we energetically process experiences. When you don’t allow that, the energy gets stored in your body.
Men especially tend to suppress sadness and compensate with anger. The countermeasure is regulation: allowing yourself to process emotions in real time.
Chris’s example: sobbing in his truck after Top Gun Maverick, not because the movie was sad, but because his body was looking for any window to release suppressed energy.
MindKiller #4: Fear → Countermeasure: Openness
The first three MindKillers are about the past. Fear is forward-facing - it’s about the future.
Fear itself is healthy and necessary (it’s a survival mechanism), but chronic fear is destructive. When you’re constantly worried, catastrophizing, living in “what if,” you trigger your limbic system non-stop. This creates real physical symptoms: brain fog, chronic fatigue, digestive issues, panic attacks.
The countermeasure isn’t bravery (you have to be afraid to be brave). It’s openness - the turtle analogy. When you feel threatened, you pull into your shell. That’s resistance. Openness is dropping the armor, not fighting the feeling.
Chris’s practice: when a panic attack hits, he says “so what?” Instead of resisting, he leans in. The bully gets bored. Over time, the attacks stop.
MindKiller #5: Stagnation → Countermeasure: Wonder
The first four MindKillers are common in traditional mindfulness practices. Stagnation is different - it’s about intellectual development. This is where Chris says most mental fitness programs fall short.
You can become really good at observing your thoughts, reframing stories, processing emotions, and staying open... but if you wake up today the same as yesterday, you’re stagnant. Your Ferrari engine is idling in mental traffic.
The countermeasure is wonder - childlike curiosity. The cycle of wonder has two phases: acquisition (learning knowledge and building skills) and application (free play, problem-solving, creation).
This is where you expand your capacity to act. Learn an instrument. Build something with your hands. Read challenging books. The point isn’t just consumption - it’s creation. Bob Ross spent 20 years as a drill instructor in the Air Force, then completely reinvented himself as a painter. That’s wonder.
Chris’s ARROW Framework
The countermeasures spell ARROW: Awareness, Reframing, Regulation, Openness, Wonder. This is your direction. It’s also a weapon against the MindKillers. And at its core, the entire framework collapses into two words: curious observation. Observing your internal world and the external world with curiosity. That’s mental fitness.
Reflection Questions
Which MindKiller is your biggest weakness? Think about the last week. Where are you most stuck? Are you oblivious to your thought patterns? Telling yourself a harmful story? Suppressing emotions? Living in chronic worry? Or intellectually stagnant?
What story are you telling yourself that isn’t serving you? Is there a memory or event from your past that you’ve built a negative narrative around? What would a more useful story sound like? What would a grateful story sound like?
Where are you in resistance mode? Chris says resistance is the problem. Where in your life are you putting on armor, pulling into your shell, fighting against something instead of staying open to it? What would it look like to just let it be?
Are you training your mind the way you train your body? If you spend an hour in the gym, how much time do you spend on awareness practices, emotional processing, learning new skills, or creating something?
What would your personal mission statement be? Chris talks about creating a north star tied to your values. If you had to write a simple, memorable mission statement for this season of your life, what would it be?
Practice Opportunities
For Awareness (countering Oblivion):
5-minute “do nothing” meditation. Sit. Close your eyes. Do literally nothing. See what that feels like. Notice where your mind goes.
10-minute basic meditation. Pick a focal point (your breath, what you hear, darkness behind your eyes). Focus on it. Notice when you get distracted. That noticing is the skill.
Mind priming. Instead of focusing on breath or sound, make your thoughts the focal point. Just observe what’s showing up in your head for 5 minutes.
Journaling after meditation. Write down where your thoughts went. Look for patterns. What stories keep showing up?
For Reframing (countering Storytelling):
Gratitude practice. Morning: write 3 things you’re grateful for. Evening: write 3 highlights from the day. This builds a pattern of thinking in grateful terms.
Story rewrite. Take one story you tell yourself (”I’m not good at X” or “I failed at Y”). Write it down. Now write a different version. What’s a more useful story? What’s a grateful story?
For Regulation (countering Suppression):
Breathwork. Chris mentions resonance breathing (4-second inhale, 6-second exhale) and perfect breathing (5.5-second inhale, 5.5-second exhale). These calm your nervous system and help move energy.
Emotional release practice. Next time you feel something - sadness, frustration, whatever - instead of pushing it down, find a private space and let it out. Cry. Scream into a pillow. Move the energy.
For Openness (countering Fear):
“So what?” practice. Next time you feel anxious or panicked, instead of resisting, say “so what?” Let the feeling be there. Watch what happens when you stop fighting it.
Fear setting. Write down things you worry about. For each one, ask: what’s the actual consequence if this happens? Then what? Keep going until you realize most catastrophes aren’t actually catastrophic.
Consequence tracking. Write down things you’re worried will happen. Track whether they actually happen. You’ll notice 99% don’t.
For Wonder (countering Stagnation):
Learn a skill. Pick something physical: an instrument, woodworking, archery, juggling, a sport. Commit to 30 minutes a day for a month.
Read challenging material. Not just content consumption. Read something that makes you think. Something outside your normal wheelhouse.
Create something. Don’t just consume. Make something: write, paint, build, compose. Create something that didn’t exist before.
Key Takeaways
Mental fitness is trainable. Stop thinking of mental health as something that happens to you. It’s something you train, just like physical fitness.
The 5 MindKillers are how you sabotage yourself. Oblivion (lack of awareness), storytelling (harmful narratives), suppression (pushing down emotions), fear (chronic worry), and stagnation (not growing).
You must start with awareness. Everything else builds from the ability to observe your thoughts objectively. You can’t change what you can’t see.
Thoughts are just information streams. Most of your thoughts are subconscious chatter that just shows up. You don’t have to own them or take them seriously.
Stories are choices. The events of your past are neutral. The meaning you assign to them is a story you’re choosing to tell. You can tell a different one.
Emotions need to be processed. Suppressing them doesn’t make them go away - it stores toxic energy in your body. Learn to move emotions through you in real time.
Resistance makes fear worse. When you fight against anxiety, you reinforce it. Openness - letting it be there without resistance - is the path out.
Don’t stop at mindfulness. Awareness, reframing, and emotional regulation are critical. But mental fitness also requires intellectual development: curiosity, learning, skill-building, and creation.
The ARROW points the way. Awareness, Reframing, Regulation, Openness, Wonder. At its core: curious observation of yourself and the world.
Training is the paradigm, not treatment. You’re not broken. You’re not diseased. You might just be mentally out of shape. And that means you can train your way to fitness.
Chasing Excellence is an audience-supported project. To go deeper & to help us do even more, consider:
Subscribing to get our free posts or upgrading to receive the Daily Chase posts & the ChaseTracker app.
Grabbing one of our books: Chasing Excellence, Unlocking Potential, or The ABCs of Being Happy & Healthy.
Supporting one of our fantastic show sponsors.
This podcast episode was life-changing for me. I was cleaning for hours yesterday and listened. It was exactly what I needed in this exact moment. Thank you!