From Muscle to Mind: Why Men’s Mental Health Needs a Broader Lens

A trauma-informed look at men’s mental health, nervous system regulation, and the role of somatic awareness in workplace wellbeing.

It’s Movember, and conversations about men’s mental health are taking centre stage in workplaces across the world. Awareness is growing, and many organisations are working hard to create cultures where wellbeing is taken seriously. Yet even as support expands, something often still gets missed.

Traditional approaches to wellbeing often begin with talking: naming emotions, sharing experiences, or practising mindfulness as a mental exercise. These tools can be valuable, but they don’t always land for everyone. Many men find it easier to engage with something tangible, physical, and experiential before they can access what’s emotional or abstract.

Not because men are resistant to self-awareness, but because they’ve often been taught to connect through action, not emotion — to stay composed, to push through, to fix. So when stress builds, it doesn’t always show up in words, it shows up in the body.

When Stress Speaks Through the Body

In my practice, men rarely come to therapy saying they feel anxious or emotionally overwhelmed. They come because their body is sending signals: a tight chest, clenched jaws, high blood pressure, digestive tension, back pain, difficulty breathing, or exhaustion that no amount of rest seems to fix. And unfortunately, they often come as a result of advice from a medical professional, when the symptoms have been persisting and increasing for some time.

Through body-based work, we start to connect those sensations to what’s happening beneath the surface: the nervous system’s response to ongoing stress or unprocessed emotion.

When men begin to notice how their breath mirrors their state, or recognise the visceral signs of emotion - a knot in the throat, a weight in the chest, heat in the face - something begins to shift. They gain tangible references for what stress, calm, and balance actually feel like. And then we can start to build a vocabulary around these experiences. This is often the doorway in.

We start to build a language of awareness that begins in the body but soon extends to emotion, thought, and choice.

Why a Tailored Approach Matters

Workplace wellbeing programmes often focus on mental strategies: mindfulness, coaching, talking, or reflective exercises. These can be useful and effective, but they don’t always offer a first step that feels accessible to everyone.

For many men, starting with the body provides a way to engage without pressure or performance. It doesn’t require vulnerability before readiness, instead, it builds safety through experience.

This approach isn’t about treating men as simplistic. It’s about recognising how people differ in the way they access awareness. Where some find insight through dialogue, others connect through experience, movement, breath, or the simple act of noticing how tension, effort, or rest feel in the body.

What Can Help Men at Work

Supporting men’s mental health at work means expanding the idea of what “wellbeing” looks like in practice.

✅ A framework for body-based tools: going beyond learning techniques like breathwork, stretching, or grounding, but understanding why they work. With the right guidance, we can begin to notice the more subtle shifts that occur when we tune in, building both physical & emotional awareness and literacy over time.

✅ Psychological safety: spaces where self-care, rest, and emotional literacy are modelled by leaders, not only encouraged in others.

✅ Tailored entry points: meeting people where they are, offering approaches that respect individual context with different ways of accessing awareness and regulation.

✅ Regular, non-performative check-ins: where connection, introspection and reflection are normal, not only reserved for times of crisis.

✅ Peer connection: creating spaces where men can share experiences and see that strength and care are not opposites. Many men find it easier to open up in environments where shared experience replaces judgment. When conversations about stress, uncertainty, or self-doubt happen among peers, especially in groups that value honesty over performance, it normalises vulnerability as a form of courage. These spaces don’t need to be formal or therapeutic; they can emerge through guided reflection in team settings, wellbeing workshops, or even informal peer circles. What matters most is that men see emotional awareness modelled by others they relate to - colleagues, leaders, or friends - so connection becomes a lived practice, rather than a slogan.

The SETUKA Perspective

At SETUKA, we work with organisations to move beyond one-size-fits-all wellbeing.

Our trauma-informed, body-based approach helps teams recognise early signs of stress, regulate the nervous system, and develop sustainable habits for real-world resilience.

For men, this often means bridging the gap between the physical and the emotional: using tangible practices to access awareness, calm, and balance.

Because when we learn to listen to our bodies, we often find the words, and the confidence, to express what’s happening within.

This Movember

Let’s move beyond awareness and into understanding.

Let’s create workplaces where wellbeing isn’t prescribed, but practiced. Where every individual, regardless of gender, is met with curiosity, respect, and tools that actually fit.

If your organisation wants to explore trauma-informed, body-based wellbeing programmes that meet people where they are, we’d love to connect.

If this post resonated with you, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit too. And if you’d like to keep exploring themes like emotional wellbeing, transitions, and conscious self-leadership, I invite you to subscribe to the blog and join the SETUKA newsletter. You’ll receive occasional updates on upcoming workshops, fresh insights, and practical tools to support you, both personally and professionally, on your journey of growth and self-care.

Thank you for being part of the SETUKA community. Let’s stay in touch, and until then, take gentle care.

Heidi Kempeneer,

Therapist and Founder of SETUKA , a platform for body-based therapies and well-being services for individuals and organisations.

Find out more about me and what I do.