IT’S SUNDAY NIGHT, and a client I’ll call David has already planned the entire upcoming week. He meal-prepped, got a workout in, and listened to a Chris Williamson episode about discipline. He sat at his kitchen table with his laptop open, seeing an entirely packed calendar. But the sight doesn’t leave him feeling accomplished. It makes him feel dread, and he can’t explain why.
David isn’t just one guy. He’s a composite of so many men I see in my office. By every metric they track—their WHOOP scores, macros, and performance reviews—they are performing. They have a workout routine, morning routine, and an impressive reading and podcast list. They are confident that they’re doing the work.
Except they aren’t.
My clients often arrive during difficult times: A divorce, a layoff, or a struggle with dissatisfaction in their lives. In early sessions, they often talk about everything else. They discuss work stress, conflict with partners, and anxiety about major presentations and meetings. They are articulate, self-assured, and often completely detached from anything that actually hurts. One client going through a divorce rarely brought it up. And when it did come up, he would refer to the frustration about the legal cost and complain about his ex, without any mention of how he was feeling.
That isn’t unusual, and it’s a clear pattern. I’ve become fascinated by how so many men have embraced self-improvement culture, while their feelings of emptiness and loneliness remain as powerful as ever.
What (We Think) Optimization Does for Us
Self-improvement culture has given men a socially acceptable way to stay in motion without ever pausing to look inward. That drive to optimize, perform, and be seen as someone who has it all together isn’t vanity, it’s a sophisticated defense. From the outside, it looks like genuine growth, but on the inside it’s hollow and a subtle form of avoidance.
Men are socialized to see their value in their output, desirability, and the admiration of others. Maximizing health metrics, lifting heavier, and reaching the next income bracket can start to feel like proof that you are enough. And it makes sense why. Being able to receive immediate feedback and data for your own improvement feels good. Things like self-compassion and stronger relationships can’t be measured and tracked.For a while, fixation on optimization may feel like it works. The problem is that the pain being soothed doesn’t go away.
Many of the men I see who are caught in this cycle share a similar story underneath. Somewhere early on, they received a message that something about them wasn’t right. Too needy, stupid, weak, or unlovable. The specifics vary, but many young boys pursue similar paths of self-protection. If only they could achieve enough, optimize enough, and be admired enough, the original wound would stop mattering. It makes all the sense in the world for a child to find this path. But when they grow into men, it can become a cage. If optimization is being used to soothe old hurts, we can become dependent on it.
Many of my clients are eventually able to get curious about what was beneath their intense maximizing. It takes time and care to create a safe space and trust for someone to take a pause from their defenses and notice what might be there. What they find isn’t dramatic. Often, it’s the quiet, ever-present belief that if they stop performing, there would be nothing of value, nothing lovable about them. That realization doesn’t arrive like an epiphany. It usually arrives like grief, which is the key piece that self-improvement culture has no protocol for. Grief comes when a man can look at the ways he has structured his life around performance instead of connection and recognizes what he may have lost in the process.
The path forward is not a better morning routine. In fact, it looks like the opposite. It starts with tolerating the discomfort that these routines are designed to prevent. When you get restless and the urge to pick up the phone or fill space bubbles up, try to sit with it for at least 5 minutes longer. It’s a skill that grows with practice.
Here are a few ways to start taking a pause and seeing what’s there:
- Carve out time each day (even 15 minutes) for unstructured, zero-output time. It’s not about tuning out; this is about tuning in. Do something that feels joyful or relaxing that has you feeling really present. If you have kids, that might look like play, or it could be as simple as a walk in a park.
- Have one conversation every day with a person you care about that has no goal and no transaction. Let it go somewhere you don’t plan. One way to do that could be to open your texting app and scroll back in time. Find someone you care about who you haven’t spoken to in a while and reach out just to check in. No agenda, just connect.
- Pay attention when irritability or anger comes up. Anger rarely happens in a vacuum and there are usually important signals beneath the surface. If you’re short with your partner or coworker, think about what the underlying thought or feeling is. Is it that you aren’t feeling heard or seen? Is it that you are scared about being perceived negatively? Whatever you find is useful information. Keep track of it and take some time in the future to reflect on what you’ve found.
To level up these strategies and give them real staying power, consider giving therapy a shot. It can work best long before you hit bottom; just when you know something isn’t quite right. A good therapist helps you get curious about the patterns you may not yet notice in yourself, not tell you what’s wrong with you. A lot of men I see also find communities or men’s groups where they feel seen and understood through shared passion and vulnerability. Groups grounded in shared interest and caring for one another (not around shared grievance) can help men in this position build the kind of connection that doesn’t require performing, which is usually what they were looking for all along.
This is not a comfortable process. It will not feel like progress, especially at first. There is no metric for the moment you stop needing to track another optimization strategy. But the men I’ve seen who move through it come out on the other side not less successful or driven, just less frantic about it. The improvement is still there, but it belongs to them now, not the other way around.
My clients in this situation still work out. They still track things. What changed is they know why. That’s the difference between growth and self-protection. It’s subtle, and yet it can change everything.
Matthew Willner is a licensed clinical social worker and Certified IFS Therapist practicing in New York, New Jersey, and Colorado, where he specializes in working with men.
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