Hey,
I'm Manu.
I'm a doctor specialising in mental health, writer on Substack, LinkedIn and Psychology Today, and mental performance coach for young athletes looking to break down every mental barrier to peak performance.
I'm a doctor specialising in mental health, writer on Substack, LinkedIn and Psychology Today, and mental performance coach for young athletes looking to break down every mental barrier to peak performance.
Your quality of life is determined by your quality of mind.
Your mind is the lens through which you experience and respond to life.
As Epictetus wrote:
People are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.
Every feeling, thought, and behaviour happens through your mind. The purpose of my professional life is to figure out how we can create the healthiest possible conditions for the mind to flourish. Then, we set ourselves up for a life of presence, peace, and fulfilment.
I study how minds become the way they are, with a subspecialty focus on childhood and adolescence.
Understanding these underlying structures of our psyche is one of the highest leverage strategies to improve your mind because they reach far back into the past and reconfigure the patterns that shape us.
Most people exist somewhere between two extremes — mental illness at one end, and flourishing at the other. The vast majority of us spend our lives in the middle: languishing. Not unwell enough to seek help, but far from the fullness of what's possible.
I operate across this entire spectrum — helping young people recover from mental illness, working through the precise problems that keep people stuck in languishing, and unblocking the final barriers to flourishing.
Working with people at every stage gives me a unique range of expertise in improving the health and performance of the mind. For example, enabling people to discover their own answers as a coach enhances my ability to empower patients in psychiatry, and my scientific understanding of our biopsychosocial needs enhances my ability to facilitate insight as a coach.
I do not share insights about the mind from having arrived at some sort of finish line — but from ongoing self-inquiry.
I am lucky that there is an overlap between my own personal journey through life and the professional contribution I get to make to others. Then again, how can there not be when what I am pursuing is common to us all: self-understanding, self-development, and self-fulfilment.
This personal investment is what led to The Mind, Explored. Here, I research to discover what is true, and write to clarify how this can be useful.