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What to Do When You Are Running Low on Encouragement

Hey all,

There is a common cultural script a lot of men absorb somewhere between childhood and adulthood that says needing encouragement is a sign of weakness. That if you are doing the right things for the right reasons you should not need someone to tell you that you are doing okay. This challenged directly the idea that "real men are self-sufficient".

I have worked with a lot of men who are running on empty in this specific way. They are depleted from going too long without anyone in their corner telling them they have what it takes, they're not in this alone.

Commonly, men do not ask for this. Men push through. Men work. Men overcome and handle failure and all hardship privately. Men perform fine when we are not fine. Men take the quiet stretches as evidence that we need to work harder or want it more or figure out how to need less.

(No wonder why men feel so depleted...)

What Encouragement Actually Is

Before we talk about what to do when you are low on it, it helps to understand what it actually is....

The origin of the word means to empart courage into someone else. Encouragement is what happens when someone who sees you clearly, who knows what you are up against, tells you that you have what it takes to keep going. Encouragement is not flattery of being told everything is great when it is not.

​Research on social support and psychological resilience consistently shows that perceived encouragement, specifically the sense that others believe in your capacity to handle what you are facing, is one of the strongest predictors of persistence under stress and recovery from adversity.

Think of it like fuel. Your car does not run better on empty just because the engine is good. The engine needs fuel to do what it was built to do. Encouragement is can work like the fuel.

Why Men Run Low on It

A few reasons this happens more for men than most people realize.

Sadly, men's social networks shrink significantly after their mid-twenties. Research tracking friendship patterns across adulthood found that men report dramatically fewer close friendships in their 30s and 40s than they did in their 20s, and significantly less emotional disclosure within the friendships that remain. Think of your own for a second... is this true of you? Less depth in relationships means less of the kind of conversation where real encouragement actually lives.

Next, men are less likely to name the need and ask for it. If you do not know you are running low on encouragement, and you have been taught that needing it is weakness, you will not ask for it. You will just feel vaguely depleted and attribute it to everything else.

Third, the places men typically spend their time, work, sports, surface level social settings, are not environments that naturally produce deep encouragement. Praise at work is usually performance-based. Banter with friends rarely goes below the surface. The kind of encouragement that actually fills the tank requires someone who knows you and is willing to say the real thing.

How to Know You Are Running Low

Low encouragement can show up as:

• A general flatness or lack of motivation that you cannot trace to anything specific
• Increased irritability, especially at home with the people closest to you
• Withdrawing from things you normally care about bc your confidence is low
• A growing sense that the effort you are putting in does not matter
• Performing fine on the outside while feeling invisible on the inside
• Grinding through the week without anything that genuinely refills you ... and doing it again next week.

What to Actually Do About It

Here is where I want to get practical because I think most content on this topic stops at "find community" or "talk to someone" without telling you what that actually looks like.

Step 1: Name it to yourself first.

Before you can address a deficit you have to acknowledge it exists. Answer this honestly: when is the last time I felt genuinely seen and encouraged by someone who knows what I am actually carrying right now?

Step 2: Identify your one or two people.

You do not need a large support network or to go join a book club filled with positive people. Research on social support and wellbeing consistently shows that the quality of a small number of close relationships matters far more than the size of the network.

Who in your life actually knows what you are up against right now?

Who would tell you the truth and mean it?

Step 3: Tell them what you actually need.

This is the step most men skip entirely. They wait for someone to notice and offer encouragement unprompted rather than simply saying "I am in a hard stretch and I could use someone in my corner right now." (That sentence takes about five seconds to say).

Step 4: Become a source of it for someone else.

This one sounds counterintuitive when you are the one running low. But think of one person in your life who is in a hard stretch right now. Send them a specific, honest message this week. Something that says I see you working hard handling this and I think you have what it takes.

There is a reason the Scriptures are full of commands to encourage one another. Not suggestions. Commands. Because the people writing them understood something about human nature that we keep having to relearn.

We are not built to keep going indefinitely on our own.

"Therefore encourage one another and build each other up."​
— 1 Thessalonians 5:11

Zach

Clinical Therapist and Founder of Mental Health 4 Men​
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