Testosterone's Role in Men's Mental Health and Motivation

Testosterone. Testosterone's effect on the mind. So, there's this brutal whipping contest in northern Nigeria called sharo. First, young Fulani girls bring bare-chested unmarried men to a center ring. The men raise their arms to expose their ribs, and then they receive a brutal flogging in front of everyone they know. If they wince or cry out or do something to show openly how much pain they're in, this apparently brings great shame to themselves and to their family. This is meant to be a test to determine whether a boy deserves to be called a man. In other countries, we have a similar test, except it's a lot simpler. It takes about a week. You go to a clinic, you get your blood drawn, and you wait for

them to tell you what your testosterone level is. Okay, my point isn't that we all need to measure our T to see who's the manliest manly man. My point is that testosterone actually has a lot of psychological effects that each would help these young men get through this brutal whipping ordeal. The major effect of testosterone is to make effort feel good. First, in this particular culture, getting beaten with sticks grants you some social status. So, you would need to have high motivation to get social status, and motivation for social status is probably the best-known psychological function of testosterone. Second, one of the fruits of this ritual is gaining the right to marry a woman. So, you need high

motivation to put effort into attracting a mate. This is another well-known function of testosterone. Third, since everyone is literally watching your manliness be challenged, you need high resilience to social anxiety. The research suggests that testosterone can have potent anti-anxiety effects, and it especially reduces social anxiety. So, I bet that testosterone has something to do with that stat finding that 45% of Gen Z, age 18 to 25, have never approached a woman in person for a date. Fourth, this is a high-risk, high-reward activity. If you do well, you get honor. If you chicken out, you're an embarrassment. Testosterone, of course, makes people less afraid to take risks.

Lastly, of course, you need a very high pain tolerance, and testosterone even plays a role in reducing your sensitivity to pain. The tough reality about testosterone is that your brain could raise your testosterone right now, but it doesn't feel like it because it thinks you're a loser. Low T has been linked to everything from loss of energy, muscle mass, and sexual function. The effects of testosterone almost sound like magic. We've all heard that testosterone makes you look good. It increases muscle mass and reduces body fat, but it can have significant mental effects as well. The research suggests

it can increase confidence, energy, and mood. Testosterone may reduce overthinking and make you more persistent, so you work harder before you give up. It even has an antidepressant-like effect, and again, it makes you less anxious. The anxiety-lowering effect of testosterone could lead to less procrastination. We've all heard about supplements, nutrients, foods, herbs, and exercises that are supposed to increase testosterone, but not enough people are talking about your psychology and how simply the behaviors you choose to do can affect testosterone. There are moments in our life that can significantly raise our testosterone, and there are moments that can lower our T. So, about 13 years ago, I was sitting in an office in the financial district

of Tokyo, and a man in a suit was saying to me, "You've got the job if you want it." I definitely did want that job, considering at the time I was working 2 hours away from Tokyo in a town where nothing ever happens. Leaving his office with a job offer, I felt amazing. Probably how those people in those '90s Mentos commercials felt. After that, I went to the station, and as I got off the stairs, I noticed a really hot woman waiting around, and she seemed to be glancing my way. At this point in my life, I had next to zero game. Even with plenty of beer in my system at the bar, I would often think a girl glancing my way was just looking at something behind me. But on this day, I quickly assumed

that her brief eye contact was probably longer than what's normal, and without thinking, I started walking towards her. I said, "Hi." And a couple minutes and laughs later, she gave me her number. We met up for drinks the next week. So, what exactly happened here? How did a job interview give me more courage and game than beer? So, here's the thing. Winning actually significantly changes your body chemistry. Winning raises testosterone. When men win a competitive task, their testosterone is kind of goes through the roof. Goes up big time. It doesn't have to be at sports, either. Research has found testosterone increases even in people who win at chess. Actually, men only have to think

that they won to get this testosterone boost. Anthropologists at Cambridge rigged some rowing machines, so a winner would be randomly decided. For the men who were competing, winning had nothing to do with performance, but the winning rower still got a testosterone boost. We brought men into the lab, and we had them play a video game task against an unseen male opponent. When men won the video game task, their preference for feminine women were higher than when men lost. So, this tracks the testosterone pattern. So, what happened with me and the woman on the train platform? Well, testosterone increases risk-taking in men, which makes sense, as it's also well-known to reduce anxiety and

especially reduce social anxiety. So, maybe if someone is less anxious about social situations, they'd be more extroverted, right? Well, yes. This study found that in one group of people, the most extroverted men had 30% higher testosterone levels. Other studies have shown that low testosterone links to social anxiety. What's more interesting is that this study on 350 college students found that in people with higher testosterone, they more quickly went to approach and talk to people when entering a room. Yet another study suggested that men put more effort into attracting women when their testosterone is higher. So, putting all this together, it makes sense that on this particular night, I was more

extroverted, less anxious, ready to put in effort in attracting women, and didn't hesitate when I went and talked to her. All this merely because my brain gave me some testosterone because it just thought that I was a winner for acing that job interview. But here's the big thing. Yes, testosterone makes it easier to put on muscle and lose fat, and increases confidence and mood, but it also changes your psychology and perception. High testosterone makes you see the world as a place to get more testosterone. It makes you more ambitious. Movie director James Cameron, whose films have earned over $8 billion

at the box office, claimed once that testosterone is a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system, which is interesting considering he made that remark after ambitiously pursuing his career, which earned him several hundreds millions of dollars. The scary thing is that testosterone levels have been declining for decades. Just between 2000 and 2016, the testosterone of men in their 20s declined about 100 points. Meaning the average testosterone level is likely even worse today. This can't be good news for men's motivation, mood, anxiety levels, social skills, and even personalities. There are all kinds of great points about food, toxins,

plastics, air pollution, an epidemic of bad sleep, and exposure to blue light, and so on to worry about, but we don't hear often about how your psychology affects your testosterone and how testosterone affects your psychology and what to do about it. So, we need to talk more about the testosterone momentum effect. That is, increasing testosterone makes you want to do more of the things that raise testosterone. So, back to my story. After the woman's train was completely out of sight, I really didn't want to go home. I had a bunch of energy, and I had a very clear and strong urge to look for a bar or something and talk to more women, because apparently, I had superpowers today. Testosterone comes into play here

again. So, testosterone raises men's interest in women, but it's been found that a 5-to-15-minute conversation with an unfamiliar woman can raise a man's testosterone. Of course, stimulating your muscles in the gym is very important for testosterone levels, and this study suggests testosterone increases your motivation to work hard in the gym. And remember how competing and winning raises testosterone? Well, higher testosterone usually makes men want to compete more. So, it's easier for the winners to keep on winning, and the winners probably want to and try harder to win more. The flip side of this is also true. If you're doing things that wreck your testosterone, it's going to be easy to get into a

downward spiral. Last summer, I discovered the best way to absolutely crush your testosterone. I didn't eat anything for 5 days, and then still without eating, I ran a marathon. I checked my testosterone before the fast and right after the marathon, and in under a week, my testosterone dropped 90%. 840 to 82. That's a 758-point drop. With levels like that, I'm surprised my doctor didn't ask if I got some kind of surgery. The following 2 days, I was extra irritable, anxious, and just in a really dark mood. I felt like everyone was against me. When I was hanging out with my friends, I'd be twisting the most innocuous comments in my head, thinking, "What the hell does he mean by that?" We'd have a very normal interaction, but afterwards, I'd

be scared that they hated me. It was a very weird headspace, and if you want to do a 5-day fast and a marathon, don't do it before any important business meetings or hot dates. Luckily, as I demonstrated in another video, your testosterone may actually bounce back even higher after refeeding after a fast. So, I expected that at least my testosterone levels would bounce back to normal. I felt better each day, and by the third day, I was feeling sore, but mentally totally normal. But if I had low T like that regularly, I'd probably get barely any work done. I'd have no motivation to go to the gym, and I'd be stuck in a low-mood, low-confidence, high-anxiety, high-irritability state.

That would definitely put a strain on my relationships. Racking up all these losses would probably make me feel like a loser and reduce my testosterone even further. That's because the flip side of wins raising testosterone is that losses lower testosterone. One study on rugby players found that their testosterone reduced a whopping 40% after losing a big match. But if they lose a competitive task, it just plunges through the floor. This has actually been shown in multiple contexts. You win, your testosterone goes up. If you lose, it goes down. seems to be acting like some sort of mental leaderboard. When you win, you move up the leaderboard and you get all the benefits associated with that. When

you lose, you move down the leaderboard and you feel like crap. It's almost like all the human male brains and hormones are cooperating to negotiate where everyone goes in the social hierarchy. In fact, animal research has found that the easiest way to guess which male has the highest testosterone is to just check their position in the social hierarchy. The winners have higher T and the losers have lower T. Being higher in the social hierarchy means you likely have more testosterone. This is the case in rams and primates and yes, within humans, there's data that a man's status within an organization correlates with his testosterone level. For example, a CEO would have higher testosterone than

a manager. But there's a side note, other studies have investigated status and testosterone in organizations and it wasn't so cut and dry like this. This is likely because humans aren't monkeys. A high-ranked monkey is basically high-ranked in all aspects of monkey society. But a human might not care that much about his job. It's just a way to make money. How about I give you the finger? What he really cares about could be his status within his family or his status as a crossfitter, a chess player or an artist. And of course, the flip side of this is true, too. Yes, having high status links with higher testosterone

depending on the context, but the most well-known function of testosterone is again to promote status-seeking behavior to make people want to get more social status. Okay, so what can we do with all of this information? Well, let's dig a bit deeper. You're probably familiar with the placebo effect. Researchers at a Stanford took this one guy's terrible burning pain in his arm from a crush injury from a seven out of 10 to a three out of a 10 simply by telling him that they put a powerful pain reliever in his IV drip. In reality, there was no pain reliever. Brain scans of his brain even reflected that indeed he must be feeling dramatically less pain even though the pain reliever was all in his mind.

Significantly less activity in the brain and all of the areas involved with the processing and perception of pain. The placebo effect is really widespread. Studies on fake sugar pills, placebos, have found that fake pills can make people more drowsy or stimulated. Fake placebo injections provide relief for Parkinson's, but the placebo injection that they say is more expensive works even better. Fake placebo pills even provide relief in irritable bowel syndrome even if the people are straight-up told it's a placebo. In depression drug trials, about 35 to 40% of patients improve on placebo alone.

Even fake knee surgeries provide lasting relief. There's even placebo sleep. In this one study, researchers asked people about how they felt their sleep quality was the night before. Then they ran some tests using a bogus machine that the researchers claimed could accurately tell how good their sleep quality was. This was a lie. Then they did some cognitive tests. How good the people said their sleep was didn't even matter. Only the fake test results linked with cognitive performance. The people who were just told that they had really high sleep quality did better on the cognitive tests and the people who were told that they had bad sleep quality did

worse on the cognitive tests. Their actual reports of sleep quality didn't matter. Since good quality sleep is the most important first step for keeping your testosterone levels high, it would be interesting to see if being lied to about your sleep quality could affect people's testosterone. Speaking of placebos, as we already discussed, to get that winner's boost in testosterone, you only have to think that you won. Now, this isn't all some big argument for manifesting, daily affirmations or for visualizing yourself as some kind of 20-ft tall high testosterone man in the sky. But your mentality and perception are important. Testosterone benefits

your mind and your mentality benefits your testosterone levels. So, is the way your life is set up making you feel like you just keep losing or do you feel like you're racking up wins? Do you have a job? No. You got money? No. You got anything on the horizon? While writing his book about testosterone and psychology, Professor of psychology James McBride Dabbs noticed he was feeling quite dejected and pessimistic about his book when his wife gave him feedback that the draft for one of the chapters really wasn't that good. So, he thought to check his testosterone. The next day after a good night's sleep, he found himself feeling much better and much more optimistic and he checked his testosterone again.

According to him, his testosterone was about 30% higher on the day that he was more optimistic. The point is you won't do yourself any favors by staying up all night listening to sad music and reading the hyper-pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer or reading depressing articles about how the world is about to end because of AI and global warming. Again, because in general, the physiology works on psychology and vice versa, if you do all the physical things like fixing your sleep, fixing your diet, working out, getting plenty of sun and stop drinking so much alcohol, you'll probably find yourself more optimistic and just not even interested in pessimistic philosophers. Going further, if your relationship has

devolved into endless bickering, your brain and HPG axis are probably going to see you as kind of a loser and it'll be stingy with the testosterone. If your job feels completely meaningless and your work is under-appreciated, that's probably not good either. If you've got no new goals and you're stuck in the same safe routine, you don't even have things to win at. On the flip side, if you have some solid goals that excite you, you'll have more chances to feel like a winner as you make progress and rack up indicators that you're hitting closer to your goals. Now, James Dabbs also reports that one of the characteristics of high testosterone males is that they like to or need to be

around people a lot. I mean, sometimes we have to lock in alone to get our projects done. I do that a lot. But I really don't buy this trend of trying to make being a sigma male cool. A sigma male is often described as a lone wolf who grinds in solitude. That kind of sounds like a fancy way of saying a loner. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger argues that primates and humans show a clear evolved tendency for males to bond and form groups that cooperate on a common goal. Now, don't mistake this video for some pitch to get you to inject testosterone or do some TRT protocol. That comes with its own complications. What I am recommending you to do is to naturally raise your T however you can. The big point up here is that your physiology and psychology

are very closely linked. It seems nowadays some people can get too focused on fixing their psychological issues, healing their trauma or just healing in general and they get more and more caught up in trying to find the best therapy modality or psychedelic retreat. Now, all that stuff can be helpful and kind of fun. But depending on the person, optimizing health and hormones might just be a lot quicker solution. Also, testosterone levels are fantastic indicator and a rule of thumb, but it's not only about how high your T is, of course. Androgen sensitivity, levels of free testosterone, DHT, cortisol, estrogen, prolactin and so on all come

into play. I recently put out a video on keeping your balls cool to protect your testosterone because balls simply don't operate as well when they're too hot. But the two most basic first steps for raising your testosterone are optimizing your sleep, losing weight and lifting weights. Particularly squats, but sprints are also an excellent exercise for testosterone. But when you're doing those sprints, you might be leaving some energy on the table by not replacing the sodium and electrolytes you lose through sweat. Testosterone is of course great for energy, but something I've been doing for years to keep my energy levels up is simply taking electrolytes. That's where this video's sponsor,

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