How to manage your mental health

In 2006, I sat on a hillside above Quito and drank ayahuasca with a shaman. For a few hours, my entire reality came apart: dragons, monsters, grudges dissolving into nothing. Not one fact of my life changed that night. My whole experience of it did. That gap between the facts and the story we run on top of them is the idea underneath everything I want to share this week. Your mind works like a news channel, selecting a handful of moments out of billions and spinning a narrative around them. The editor making those calls is your mood. In this episode of Inner Propaganda, I explore the four Ms I use to manage my own mental health: mood modulation, metacognition, mindset, and meaning. I share a UCLA brain scan study on naming your feelings precisely, walk through the cognitive distortions most of us fall into daily, and unpack the mindsets that decide how every difficult moment gets covered before it even happens. What you will discover: Why a negative belief feels like fact while a negative thought can be argued with The precise skill of affect labeling and why vague words like "stressed" do not work The most common cognitive distortions and the questions that dismantle them Four mindsets- agency, growth, antifragility, and solution focus- that reshape how you handle pressure Why the meaning behind your hardest moments is a story you can choose to rewrite In other news, I also want to say a huge thank you for the incredible response to the book since launch. If you have picked up a copy, a quick Amazon review would mean a great deal to me. If you have not yet, you will find it at innerpropaganda.com. Get your copy of Inner Propaganda: https://www.amazon.com/-/he/Owen-Fitzpatrick/dp/1646872444 Visit my website: https://owenfitzpatrick.com/