The 5 MindKillers: How You're Sabotaging Your Mental Fitness (& the Countermeasures to Stop)

The Full Listener's Guide

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

🎧 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.

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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.

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❤️‍🔥 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.