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We’re pretty good at measuring physical fitness. A barbell lift. A mile time. Blood work. A visible, trackable, repeatable number we can chase and beat.
Mental fitness doesn’t offer us any of that. There’s no blood panel for resilience. No leaderboard for self-awareness. And because we can’t measure it the way we measure squat numbers, most of us end up treating it like a binary: either you’re fine, or something’s wrong with you. No in-between, no continuum, no sense that you could actually train for it the same way you train your body.
To say the least, that’s not particularly helpful.
I’m okay knowing we can never perfectly measure our capacity to respond to life’s stressors like we might measure ourselves against a challenge in the gym. I don’t, however, love feeling like a ship moving slowly through a foggy night — hoping I’m on track, hoping I’m ready, hoping I’m moving in the right direction.
That’s why, the last time I had a chance to talk with our friend and frequent guest on the pod, Chris Irwin, I wanted his help to organize myself around an idea I’d been thinking about — that even if we can’t quantify the outcome of mental fitness work, we can absolutely track the process.
See, I’m a big believer in the usefulness of regular journaling, and I know that some of my most insightful sessions have come when I start with a question. So I wanted to present Chris with some questions, framed around his concept of the 5 Mind Killers, to see if we could explore and refine them in a way that would give me a set of regular questions to return to.
The way I figure it, we can’t chart our resilience or our grit or our self-awareness in a spreadsheet — but we can, if we’re persistent, measure today’s answers to a few useful questions against our answers from three months ago or nine months ago or last year.
By charting our answers and examining them over time, I think we give ourselves a chance to lift the fog a little. To see whether we’re moving forward or spinning in circles.
That’s the idea, anyways, behind what follows: Chris’s five “mind killers” — the patterns that quietly erode mental fitness — and for each one, two questions we can actually sit down and answer. Not vague affirmations. Actual journaling prompts, the kind you could revisit every few months to see whether you’re trending toward fitness, or slowly drifting toward the other end of the continuum.
Oblivion → Awareness
Oblivion is the water you don’t know you’re swimming in — the sense of being, more or less, a passenger to your own thoughts and emotions. Something happens, a thought arrives, a feeling spikes, and you’re carried along without ever clocking that the carrying is happening. The antidote isn’t complicated, but it isn’t easy either: awareness. The simple discipline of noticing a thought or feeling instead of just living inside it.
Can you notice the urge to distract yourself — before you give in to it?
Not how long you can white-knuckle stillness. Just: can you catch the exact moment your hand starts drifting toward your phone? That half-second gap, before the habit takes over, is where all the leverage is.
Can you name your primary trigger — the thing that reliably knocks you off center?
Most of us get thrown off by the same handful of things, dressed up slightly differently each time. Naming the pattern is the fastest way out of oblivion and into something you can actually work with.
Storytelling → Reframing
If oblivion is not noticing your thoughts, storytelling is noticing them and believing every word. It’s the narrative we build around a memory, a label, a moment — and repeat to ourselves so often it starts to feel like fact. I’m bad with directions. That conversation ruined everything. Most of it isn’t true. It’s just a story told enough times that it calcified. The fix is reframing: going back and asking whether the story is actually accurate, or just familiar.
How do you respond when you’re criticized?
Here’s the uncomfortable part: if criticism really gets under your skin, it’s usually because some part of you already agrees with it. The question isn’t whether the other person is right. It’s what story you’re telling yourself about what their words mean about you.
How often do you catch yourself complaining?
Complaining is almost always a story about how the world should be, held up against how it actually is. It feels like venting. It’s actually just friction with reality. Noticing how often you do it is a quick, honest gauge of how much energy you’re spending resisting things you can’t change.
Nobody drifts on purpose, just like nobody chases excellence by accident.
That’s why we built the ChaseTracker app. A simple system to identify, track, and chase what matters in just a few minutes a day.
Suppression → Regulation
Emotions carry a charge, and that charge needs somewhere to go. Suppression is what happens when we cap it instead — when we decide a feeling is inconvenient, or inappropriate, or simply too much, and shove it down rather than letting it move. It doesn’t disappear. It waits. The countermeasure is regulation: learning to let the charge move through you without either exploding outward or swallowing it whole.
When something upsets you, do you default to anger, or to going quiet and withdrawing?
Most of us have a default door, and we walk through it so automatically we don’t register the choice. There’s actually a third door — feeling the charge without feeding it — but you can’t walk through it until you notice which of the other two you’ve been defaulting to.
How do you respond to low-stakes, everyday annoyances — slow traffic, a kid not listening, a delayed flight?
These moments are useful precisely because the stakes are so low that any outsized reaction is basically a tell. If you’re regularly more wound up than the situation calls for, something else is feeding that reaction — and it’s worth figuring out what.
Fear → Openness
Fear is forward-facing — the mind bracing against a future that hasn’t happened yet. In small doses, it’s useful; it’s what keeps you from doing something reckless. Left unchecked, it becomes background noise that runs your decisions without your permission. The countermeasure is openness: a willingness to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty instead of letting it quietly steer you away from things.
When was the last time you made a decision mostly influenced by fear?
If your honest answer is “a few minutes ago,” you’re in good company. Fear is running far more of our day-to-day decision-making than we tend to admit, and most of it goes completely unexamined.
Do you ever go back and check whether the things you feared actually came to pass?
This is the simplest, most effective fear audit there is. Write down what you’re afraid will happen. Revisit it later. You’ll find, almost every time, that the actual outcome was nowhere near as bad as the story you told yourself in advance.
Stagnation → Wonder
Stagnation is a quiet one — the sense, usually unconscious, that you’ve basically figured life out. You know what you know, you are who you are, and there’s no real reason to keep growing. It’s comfortable. It’s also how you end up exactly the same a decade from now as you are today. The countermeasure is wonder: staying curious, on purpose, about things outside yourself.
Do you have a personal mission statement you’ve actually written down?
Not a goal. More like a filter — something you can run a decision through when you’re not sure which way to go. Most people have a vague sense of their values. Far fewer have ever actually put them into words they can return to.
When was the last time you dedicated real time to learning something new?
Your body’s physical ceiling is going to come down eventually, no matter how well you train. Your capacity to learn doesn’t have the same expiration date. This question is just a check on whether you’re actually using that.
One question to tie it all together
There’s one more question — it didn’t fit neatly into any single category, because it touches all five at once:
If someone you admire could hear your self-talk during a moment of stress, would you be proud of what they heard — or embarrassed?
Ask yourself if you’d ever talk to a friend, or your own kid, the way you talk to yourself when something goes wrong. Most of us wouldn’t come close. We extend patience and perspective to everyone except ourselves, then wonder why the gap between how we want to feel and how we actually feel keeps showing up.
None of these ten questions will fix anything on their own. That was never the point. The point is the same one that applies to every hard thing we do in the gym: you don’t get mental fitness by thinking about it once. You get it by asking the questions again in three months, and then six, and checking — honestly — whether you’re trending in the right direction.
That’s the whole program. Not perfection. Just the process, repeated.
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