Episode #166: We Need to Talk NOW: Men’s Mental Health Emergency! Featuring DR. JODY CARRINGTON!

The Dylan Gemelli Podcast

In this episode, Dylan Gemelli hosts Dr. Jody Carrington to discuss the escalating mental health crisis, particularly among men. They explor

Key takeaways

• Dr. Jody Carrington highlights that middle-aged white men face the highest suicide rates despite being a highly privileged demographic.
• The concept of 'co-regulation' is presented as essential for human survival and emotional stability.
• Social media creates a 'highlight reel' effect that exacerbates the gap between our digital personas and our actual nervous system states.
• Dr. Carrington advocates for shifting psychological inquiry from 'what is wrong with you' to 'what happened to you' to foster empathy.
• Dylan Gemelli shares his personal experience with 'soul surgery' and breathwork to resolve deep-seated traumas and eating disorders.

Main topics

• Men's mental health crisis
• Neurobiology of connection
• Impact of social media on trauma

Notable quotes

We need each other to co-regulate.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how reclaiming authenticity an

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Highest rate of suicide in your country and mine is middle-aged white men. So if you check these four boxes, white, straight, able-bodied, male, you have access to the most privileged on this planet, full stop. That exact same cohort by a landslide is killing themselves at a much faster rate than any other on the planet. It is estimated that our great-grandparents looked at their children 72 % more of the time than we look at our babies today. We need each other to co-regulate. We need somebody to show us how to be kind and confident and empathic. Many of us experience... significant amounts of trauma, some of us worse than others, that has resulted in us coming very protected and closed off. Speaker 1 (0:35) I had things inside of me that I didn't know were there, that I never think about, that were killing me and making me turn into a completely different person. Can you give me an example of that? Certain things that happened with... 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So when the capsule dissolves in your gut, the bitter botanicals activate those receptors. Same signal, same response, zero. Speaker 1 (2:12) Right, everybody. Welcome back to the Dylan Gemelli podcast. I have been waiting for this conversation ever since I met my guest and we talked from the moment that I was a couple minutes late and her reaction made me absolutely love her on impact. And I mean impact. She speaks my language to the highest extent and she is literally one of a kind. So she's a powerhouse speaker and she's a fearless champion for authentic human connection. And she's highly sought after for her expertise, her energy, which I absolutely just love, along with a genuine approach. She speaks my language, like I said, because she's authentic, she's sincere, she's direct, and she does not pull punches. She's the founder and principal psychologist at Carrington and Company, and she's written three bestselling books. And she speaks on hundreds of stages globally each year and hosts the widely celebrated podcast Unlonely. So my friends, welcome Dr. Jodi Carrington. Speaker 2 (3:14) Is that where you have like a big cheering, like people go wild and shit in the background? For Speaker 1 (3:20) my intros and I just get lucky here and there and I get people cheered and that's all I'm good for. Speaker 2 (3:26) Oh my gosh, I love it. Dylan Jameli. Ladies and gentlemen, let's tell me, tell me everything. What are we going to talk about today? You need a little sesh, a little therapy sesh. Speaker 1 (3:37) I, oh, well, shit. Do I need a therapy sesh? That's the understatement of the year. You don't want to start psychoanalyzing me or we're going to have. These are only an hour. These are only an Speaker 2 (3:49) hour. These are only an hour. Speaker 1 (3:51) I think I think my bill by the time I got it back from you, I don't know if I'd like to see it. Speaker 2 (3:57) Goodness. Isn't that the truth of us all, though, these days? Right. Is like, you know, I think this is you and I chatted a little bit about this before, but it's like everybody appears to be OK. And this is, I think, when you get the highlight reel of social media. We're the first generation of leaders, of parents, of caregivers to have access to social media, and we're not talking about it. And so we have so much input from everybody else telling us they've got their shit together. And so the dichotomy of what it appears online that we get fed constantly to what it feels like is happening inside our nervous systems have never been this unmatched. And it's leaving so many of us feeling like goddamn disasters. Mostly because we are. Speaker 1 (4:41) Yeah. Let me ask you this. I'm just going to get right into it. I don't want to do all the background and all the bullshit nobody cares about that everybody does all the time. I want to get into the nitty gritty of this. I think your background speaks for itself. But here's what I'd like to look at first, because this bothers me a lot. And I've been talking about this and I want your thoughts on it. I know. For me, it took me 44, it took me 43 years to get over myself and stop worrying about what everybody else thought and put up this facade of a life online where I just try to show you inside my life, my family, you know, struggles, good times, bad times, whatever. Why do you feel that people do what I do and try to show it's more? perfect life when in reality people want to see that you're human and want to see the realities of life? What what what are some of the interpersonal issues that cause that? Speaker 2 (5:35) That's a big question. I see. I don't think any of us arrive. I think we are all, you know, balance is bullshit. I think we are all in states of being I mean, doing things beautifully, getting things right, achieving our goals. And failing and messing it up and, you know, being horrific to our kids, our partners, and then being fantastic. I think that the idea is two rules to this human race. OK, so as you said, you know, I'm a clinical psychologist by training and I practiced for many years on a lock psychiatric inpatient. I was actually trained in the world of police psychology because I'm a huge lover of trauma and organizational stress. And then I did a postdoc in child psychiatry where I really wanted to dive into sort of like the deep neurophysiological reasons behind what makes us great as humans. And Speaker 1 (6:25) the Speaker 2 (6:26) only thing that I think I know for sure after doing this work for 25 years is there's two rules to the human race. So number one, whoever created us, and I don't care what you believe in, Jesus or Buddha or Yahweh, the great big bang, whoever created us said, number one, you're all way more alike than you are different. Race is a social construct. Gender identity is a social construct. We all start in exactly the same place. We all end in exactly the same place. Okay? So whoever created us said this. Rule number one, I'm going to make you neurobiologically wired for connection. You disconnect from an infant, they die. No matter how good we get at the AI, the only AI that's going to matter, I promise you, particularly in this next generation. is authentic interaction. When you are good at that, people will skate through walls for you. And my favorite hockey coach, we talked about this because we both have a love of hockey and I grew up in Canada where I basically, you know what I mean? I still think I'm going to make the PWHL and I'm 51. But anyway, my favorite hockey coach, actually, I'll tell you this backstory real quick and then I promise you I'll circle back around. But I grew up in a little town called Viking, Alberta, Canada. Okay. Home of the Sutter brothers. Seven boys. Six make the NHL. Two of them won cups with the New York Islanders. They're six brothers. They all played in it. I tried to marry one. Didn't work out. So I had to make it on my own, which is fine. But one of my favorite of the six said this. You should see how fast I can get a kid to skate when I know the name of their dog. Speaker 1 (7:46) Wow. Speaker 2 (7:47) You should see how fast I can get a kid to skate when I know the name of their dog. When you want to talk about feeling seen, authenticity, it's because we are neurobiologically wired for connection. That is the first rule of this human race. If you want to get the best of me, you will see me. You will know me. Like, what is the name of my dog? What is my favorite color? All of those things that you can't hide behind. Number one, that's the first rule of the human race. Speaker 2 (8:14) The second rule of the human race is a curveball. And whoever sort of created us has this sense of humor that said, I'm going to make you number one, neurobiologically wired for connection. But the second rule of the human race is this. Despite the fact that you're neurobiologically wired for connection, the hardest thing you're ever going to do as humans is look at each other. And we've never had so many opportunities to look away. We've never had so many exit ramps. And I mean, you just think about this in your own life. You know, I know your audience, so many of us pride ourselves on creating community and connection and, you know, doing things right for our bodies, making our communities healthy, our bodies healthy. And so we, many of us are like, oh, we're good at connecting to people. No, we're not. I mean, think about how many times you start a connection in an elevator. How many times when you're walking your dog or going for a run that you say to people like, hey, hey, how you doing? You know? It is estimated that we looked at our grand, our great grandparents looked at their children 72 % more of the time than we look at our babies today. If you think about the square footage of the house that your grandfather was raised in Speaker 1 (9:17) and the square footage of the house in which we raise our babies. Yeah. What's the difference? You Speaker 2 (9:21) know, I know we were talking about this. You have family coming together. You know, it's summer still obviously here for us in Canada. And so we're spending a lot of time together. And I just think about how often now we're the first generation of parents and leaders, educators that have access to social media, our phones. And the only thing that has not been updated is the human operating system. We need each other to co-regulate. We need somebody to show us how to be kind and confident and empathic and caring. You can't tell anybody how to regulate emotion. You have to show them. I mean, never in the history of anybody saying, Dylan, calm down. You know, when your wife says to you, relax, do you go, no, never in history. Okay. We need people to show us how to do it. And if we've never been this disconnected, it makes sense to me that we are craving our worth. We are wondering if we're good enough now more than ever. And so this uptick in do I matter? Do I matter? Do I matter? I got it all together. I got it all together. The pressure for that is only significantly increased. And the result, unfortunately, is we've never seen levels of anxiety and depression this high. Highest rate of suicide, which is why I love your audience so much, highest rate of suicide in your country and mine is middle-aged white men by a landslide. By a landslide. And the most privileged among us, okay? So, and I'll argue this any day. People, you know, this is an interesting conversation to have as a white woman. But the highest rate of suicide, okay? So if you check these four boxes, white, straight, able-bodied, male, you have access to the most privileged on this planet. Full stop. That exact same cohort by a landslide is killing themselves at a much faster rate than any other on the planet. Why? Speaker 1 (11:04) Well, my assumption would be that people are so alone right now. And I feel like people feel like because they hide. so much behind their screens and their phones and they don't have this connection with people that really disturbs me and bothers me that I think that they feel like they're not loved and there's nothing there for them is my assumption. Speaker 2 (11:28) And you are absolutely correct. Men in particular. Finish the sentence for me. Boys don't cry. And here's the interesting thing. Anxiety and depression will not kill you. They're emotions. Not talking about emotions. Speaker 2 (11:40) And you have to name it to tame it. And historically, we've done a much better job of giving women opportunities to describe emotions. Not Speaker 1 (11:48) because we did this by design, Speaker 2 (11:49) but sort of this is how historically we've evolved. And now, I mean, I have two sons and a daughter. I think about this all the time because I think we've done a massive disservice to 50 % of the population. Men, namely, because we haven't provided emotional language. to the spaces where you have to figure out the hard stuff. We all feel the same things and we have nowhere to put it. It'll sometimes eat you from the inside out. Speaker 1 (12:13) a couple of things that you said that really brought my mind around. Language has changed. So the way that you talk to people to get them to comprehend and understand where you're coming from, it's different. And I see that throughout generations, which is common and normal, but it makes me understand why Jesus had to speak in parables to people to really get them to grasp and understand because people take things either in a literal sense or a way that doesn't relate to them. So you said about. updating in ourselves. Well, we sit here, we update our phones, we update our browsers. Everything's got to be updated because there's something new that has to be fixed. There's an error that has to be corrected. And it's the same for humans, except at a much deeper level. And I think that like when I was telling you, like I went through a nervous system reset, well, I have never done that. And I think that was 40 some odd years of built up everything. that you put away and you hide and you don't know. And if you don't hook yourself up to that little connection like you do with a car to see what's shooting off here, how do you even know? It gets put away and hidden. And then before you know it, you're a mess. That's where stress, anxiety, stuck in fight or flight comes into play. And I think what you're saying that I can relate to is. about the emotion side. And you tell me, because this is what I find. It's so extreme on everything. In my world, it's like the diets are extreme. And then you've got the political extremism where they're either so far one way or so far the other way that you get lost and you don't know what the hell to do. And you don't know what's right or left or down the middle. And so I think what you're saying is. You got one side telling men to not be men and it's terrible to be men. And then so the other side is like, you got to be the hardest core motherfucker in the room and there's no in between. And it's like, man, how do we live? How do we show emotion and how do we give what's needed but not show too much? And I think and I'm wondering how you feel. How big of a battle is that and why is it becoming ever more so difficult? Speaker 2 (14:18) That it's exhausting. And even as you say that, I mean, like, let's think about what happens to our nervous systems when you talk about that. Like, be the toughest motherfucker in the room, but tell me how you feel. And nobody ever talks to me and you even know what's going on. So think about even physically in your body what happens when that goes on. So wherever you are listening to this right now, take a look at where your shoulders are. Because right now we've got all of those messages coming with us. You've got three screens open. We've all got our phones right beside us. We are constantly getting inundated with data. I've got a ring on that's measuring everything. I've got to, I have to take my watch off because I have to take the notifications off. Otherwise, I'm not going to stay connected to you, Dylan, because everything else around me is just too sexy. And so my nervous system is firing. My cortisol is going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That same cortisol told our ancestors that a cougar was coming over the hill. Speaker 1 (15:10) And so Speaker 2 (15:10) I'm believing that I'm like this all the time. So guess what happens when I'm this jacked up? I'm going to go to the nth of one degree. I'm either right in this or really mad. Where you get the best of me