What is RARE SENSE?

Uncommon mental fitness

Everybody knows the importance of physical health. The more capable, robust, and resilient your body is, the more enjoyable, fulfilling, and longer your life tends to be. We also intuitively understand that it exists on a spectrum driven by three pillars: diet, exercise, and recovery. Eating right, working out, and getting enough sleep with intention and consistency lead to fitness. It’s a training paradigm.

Conversely, we tend to view mental health as something binary. You are either fine or have “problems.” If you’re not suffering, there’s nothing to worry about or do. If you face challenges, they’re best addressed through medication or therapy. We surrender our personal agency regarding the fitness of our minds. Someone or something needs to fix us. It’s a treatment paradigm.

It’s also wrong. Mental health is a continuum, exactly like physical health. Not everyone who suffers is “ill.” And you don’t have to be in crisis before you start working on it.

The good news is that no matter how difficult an internal struggle feels, it falls into one of five recognizable patterns, which I call the mind-killers: oblivion, storytelling, suppression, fear, and stagnation. Building mental fitness is about learning to recognize and counteract them.

• Oblivion enables all the others. When you’re oblivious, you mistake the chatter running through your head as deliberate creation. You identify with it completely, unable to generate any separation between yourself and raw cognitive energy. This state extends to your feelings as well. Most people are disconnected from the emotional energy in their bodies, so they behave in detrimental ways without understanding why.

• Storytelling is your mind’s compulsion to construct narratives around memories, turning raw events into unhealthy interpretations. With trauma, you replay scenarios endlessly, wishing they had been different. Throughout everyday life, you make statements about your limitations that harden into self-fulfilling prophecies. These aren’t facts. They’re the stories you’ve chosen to believe.

• Suppression is your resistance to uncomfortable feelings. Emotions are the way your mind and body process energetic reactions to experience, but you often push back against the ones that feel unwelcome. That energy doesn’t disappear. It acts like pressure in a sealed container and eventually finds other ways out, through outbursts, breakdowns, or physical symptoms.

• Fear is how you interpret your most primal survival reaction. Your nervous system can’t always distinguish between a genuine threat and something you’re merely imagining. When this happens repeatedly, you create a chronic state of alertness that was never meant to be permanent. You gradually build a shell of emotional resistance and can even start fearing stress-related sensations themselves, creating a loop where anxiety feeds on itself.

• Stagnation is being the same today as you were yesterday. Early life brings rapid intellectual growth. Then you plateau. You trade curiosity for routine, avoid the discomfort of being a beginner, and gradually accept limitations as immutable features. Mental development has no natural ceiling, but stagnation will impose one if you let it.

You can train to overcome these mind-killers by practicing five corresponding countermeasures. Each is a trainable mental capability, like strength or endurance in a physical fitness program, built through specific exercises. Together, they form the Mental Fitness ARROW, an acronym pointing you in the right direction and giving you the tools to get there.

• Awareness overcomes oblivion with conscious attention.

• Reframing rewrites storytelling with new narratives.

• Regulation diffuses suppression with emotional processing.

• Openness conquers fear with bold vulnerability.

• Wonder unlocks stagnation with consistent curiosity.

I developed this framework over years of working through my own mental health and chronic illness struggles. What I learned, more than anything, was how much of the solution was within my own power. RARE SENSE® is the structured application of that lesson to build uncommon mental fitness.

A former teammate of mine once said, "Ya know, common sense ain't that common. They oughta call it rare sense." That idea applies to mental health. A practical understanding of how your mind works and what to do about it is rare. You can change that. Because most people who are struggling aren't sick. They're mentally out of shape. If you're ready to train, let's get to work.