Bear Grylls wants to help men like me – but can his wellness plan lift my winter blues?

Why is TV’s most famous outdoorsman trying to get men like Josh Burt to sit in their sheds and manifest a successful day? Blame it on the new trend of action heroes moving into the wellness space...

Mettle guru: inner peace could be just one wellness app away – no more strange health spas... (Josh Burt )

Here’s something I’d never done last year. I’d never sat in an empty shed repeating life-affirming sentences out loud and it wasn’t something I ever thought I’d do this year either. Yet here I am, cross-legged on the floor in my garden office telling the universe: “I am capable of this success, today is going to be a great day”. (I know, right...?)

But, somehow, I am managing to completely mean it. I’m even grinning like a Cheshire cat throughout – not because I’m being arch in any way but because saying it is making me feel really, genuinely happy. And I have one man to thank for that. Bear Grylls. 

But what on earth could TV’s most famous outdoorsman have to do with me manifesting a successful day from my shed? Blame it on the new trend of action heroes moving into the wellness space.

Last year, Arnold Schwarzenegger published a self-help book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, swiftly followed by a self-betterment newsletter Arnold’s Pump Club. Former Royal Marines commando Ant Middleton published bestseller Mental Fitness: 15 Rules to Strengthen your Body and Mind in 2021, and now Grylls has just launched an app called Mettle, specifically designed to help men with their mental health.

“In life, you find things that work for you,” Grylls tells me when I ask him why he felt the need to do this. “For me, it’s getting outside and getting sun on my face in the morning, having a cold shower, doing meditation, finding time to walk with bare feet outside. I’ve stumbled across things that work over my life, and I wanted to equip others with what might work for them in an efficient way.” 

My challenge for this year was set then: to see what the app was all about. To test “my mettle”. 

 The challenge: ‘Be Mettle’

As a man in his late forties, I’m part of a demographic that notoriously needs to take better care of their mental health. The statistics around male suicide make for pretty shocking reading and within my own circle of male friends, we’ve already lost one mate. I dare say the majority of us have endured tangles with our minds over the years, we just haven’t spoken about it as much as we should.

Ice cold: the man himself in an episode of ‘Running Wild with Bear Grylls’ (NBCU/Getty)

“We don’t teach men to take care of themselves,” confirms Dr Andrew P Smiler, author of Is Masculinity Toxic? A Primer for the 21st Century. “Even if you watch sport and a player gets hurt, there’s never a conversation around being worried about him, the talk is how quickly he’ll recover – where’s the male model of health in that?”

There have been many attempts to shine a spotlight on male suffering, and debates around how we can redefine what it is to be a man today. These are big questions with no easy answers but there must be ways for us to be better served. I’m keen to discover whether Grylls and his team of experts (acting as my mountain guides) will lead me to the elusive peak of inner peace. Would I discover the wellness tools I need to thrive? And, most importantly, would it be a bit like a luxury spa but with less need for strange paper underwear?

So many questions. Here’s how I got on…

Week one: Getting into the groove

Normally around this time of year, I’d start making monastic lifestyle choices that I can’t possibly stick to (Dry January, Veganuary, or worse, Dry Veganuary) so already a trip into the digital wellness space where you can “optimise yourself in just a few minutes a day” feels like a lazy float down the river in comparison.

Two things strike me straight away. Firstly, rather than “mental health”, Mettle talks about “mental fitness” – presumably, to remove any stigma that might deter the less enlightened from trying it out. And secondly, many of the sessions available on the app – from an array of “daily mind fuel”, meditation, breathwork, and “mind-hacking” – clock in at less than a few minutes long, making it an intriguing mix of bite-size mental exercises all in one packet.

Successful days start off with a plunge in an outdoor bath (Josh Burt)

“The app is built around breathwork, meditation and mind hacks,” Grylls explains. “And, just like physical fitness, if you do them consistently enough for a long period of time, you’ll build up your mental fitness.”

I enjoy a little taster of everything over the week. A few minutes here and there of basic meditation, a sturdy introduction to breathwork, and then a segment where the celebrated hypnotist Paul McKenna tells me to project a vision of my perfect self onto a cinema screen. Somehow, 1980s Tom Selleck appears in my head.

So far: enlightening.

Week two: Finding my inner scout

Forget doing early morning yoga silhouetted by the rising sun, I’m all about breathwork now. There’s something about regulated, prescriptive breathing that really works for me. Studies show that controlled breathing reduces stress, lowers your heart rate and lessens your blood pressure, and steers you into your “parasympathetic nervous system”, which is where clear heads and mellow vibes live. 

Could this be the key to whatever alchemy turns innocuous ideas into great fortunes? Probably not, but it seems to be changing my physiology for the better and, apropos of nothing, I splash out on a portable ice bath for the garden. Not because anyone on the app suggests it but because I’ve decided I’m a breathwork guy now – I need to start channelling Wim Hof (aka “The Iceman”).

Could this be the key to whatever alchemy turns innocuous ideas into great fortunes? Probably not, but it seems to be changing my physiology for the better

I’m also hooked on another element of the app – the gamification of it. By now I’m fully in a routine of morning runs and I obsess over not missing a day; racking up a trophy cabinet of virtual badges with names like “Explorer”, “Binge Listener” and “7-Day Streaker” while I’m at it. I feel like this is very much speaking to my inner cub scout. And also, I suspect, to the area of the male psyche that will turn anything into a competitive sport, even something as meadowy as wellness.

“We found that most of the people using wellness apps were female,” says Neil Smith, the founder and CEO of Mettle, “so in order to get men to do something, we figured you have to stop them feeling vulnerable… and we also found that they respond better to gender-specific health interventions.”

As I close in on my “Peak Performer” trophy, looking healthier than usual for this time of year and feeling fantastic, I can confirm that Smith is probably not wrong there.

Week three: Indulging in quiet time

Just as I used to pepper my day with cigarette breaks during the “glory years”, I now visit the Mettle app for regular fixes. Interestingly, many of these “quick hits” allude to personal excavation of one kind or another – whether I’m “unleashing” my inner strength or “unlocking” my “happiness”.  The suggestion, I suppose, being that we’ve all been shackled by draconian notions of stoicism and masculinity for far too long, and that these other emotions are buried within us all.

Burt on one of his mid-afternoon meditions (Josh Burt)

I’ve taken to having mid-afternoon meditations. It feels nice to just stop what I’m doing and concentrate on myself for a bit. Getting away from the noise, even just for a few minutes, really helps.

When I speak to Grylls at the end of the week, I mention how much I’m enjoying the positive affirmation elements of the app; how amazed I am that just telling myself that today is going to be a good day seems to shift something in my head.

“I’ve known for years that we are our words, that words have huge power,” Grylls enthuses. “Our tongue is the strongest muscle in the body.”

Week four: Going full Mettle

I’ve gone full Mettle. I’m on a regular diet of 10-15 minutes a day on the app, and I’m starting to feel a genuine sense of balance. I suppose at some level, I’d never really taken time to check in with myself with any regularity. Now, instead of disappearing down pointless YouTube wormholes, I’ll meditate or do some breathwork instead. Has my wife noticed any changes in me? I wonder. “You’re less fretful than normal, more upbeat,” she decides. “But are you a better person? I don’t know about that… you’re definitely no worse.” Compliment accepted!

The future

There are so many reasons why I wouldn’t have seen myself as Mettle material. My default setting is cynic and there are too many analogies about boardrooms (I’ve been a freelance writer for two decades, I don’t know what a boardroom is) or about how daily meditation is like fine-tuning your car (I can’t drive). But somehow this has worked for me.

At a time when middle-aged men are struggling, when you don’t have jobs for life, when the economy is in perpetual “rope and rickety stool” territory, and when the world feels about as bad as it’s ever been, I think we could all do with being a bit more Mettle. It calls itself “the only mental fitness toolkit built for men”, and that’s precisely what it has become for me. “It’s easy to take care of yourself, men just need permission to do it,” says Smith.

I’ll drink to that.

Mettle is available to download now on both Apple App Store, and now also with Google Play Store. Users get a 14-day free trial, thereafter subscriptions are available for £12.99 a month, £99.99 annually