Introduction
Alex Holmes spent his 25th birthday at his desk. Grey hairs were coming in early. His joints had started to ache. A doctor told him he was on track for rheumatoid arthritis if he didn't get his stress levels under control. He broke down at work three times. And through all of it, the feedback from his editors was never specific enough to act on, just a blanket "it's not good enough," delivered again and again until he stopped trusting his own work.
That's the cost of carrying shame in silence, and it's the starting point for this conversation between Sope Agbelusi and Alex Holmes, a mental health consultant, hypnotherapist, psychotherapist and author of "Time to Talk: How Men Think About Love, Belonging and Connection." Alex has spent years researching how men experience shame, worthiness and masculinity, and why so much of it stays buried until it comes out sideways, in the body, in relationships, or in the decision some men make to end their lives in a way that looks like an accident.
This isn't a conversation about toughening up or softening up. It's about what happens when men stop asking what masculinity actually means, and start asking what they're using the word to avoid saying.
Growing Up Between Two Definitions of Manhood
Alex describes himself as a child who did everything. Martial arts, swimming, art, music, drama, dance, singing, basketball, football, rugby. He was physical and he was cerebral, deeply into reading and writing from an early age, teaching himself French from a bilingual children's book before anyone sat down to explain it to him. He was introverted, comfortable in his own company, and happiest when he was inside a story.
That changed at ten, when his aunt, his mother's older sister, died. The family took in his cousins. The household expanded overnight, grief moved in alongside them, and Alex was "elevated": house keys, a phone, responsibility for walking siblings to school and picking them up. The space he'd had for himself disappeared. He describes it as his curiosity being "massaged out" of him, not through cruelty, just through the sheer speed everyone around him suddenly had to move at.
He points out that this kind of shift, a personality change triggered by loss or disruption around age nine or ten, isn't unique to him. It's something he now recognises in the research and in his own clients. What got him through it, and what he now sees as the thread running through his whole career, was story. Books like "Through the Looking-Glass" and Harry Potter weren't an escape from being a boy who didn't fit the mould. They were the mould he built for himself.
What Masculinity Actually Means, According to Alex Holmes
Ask Alex to define masculinity and he won't give you a checklist. He calls it a mask, a facade, a word people reach for so they don't have to name what's actually happening underneath it. When someone says "my masculinity is being challenged," Alex's response is to ask what they actually mean. Is it their sense of self? Their beliefs about a situation? Because "masculine" on its own explains nothing.
He traces this partly to his own background studying linguistics: English is an ambiguous language, and words like "masculinity" and "love" carry centuries of unresolved meaning. Rather than trying to pin the word down, Alex defines masculinity as energy, the same way he'd define femininity, and argues that holistic people carry both. A man can be nurturing and protective. So can a woman. So can anyone. The behaviour isn't gendered. The willingness to protect what you care about is just human.
He also talks about growing up Black in a peer group where masculinity had a narrower script than it did for his white or East Asian classmates: football and rap were "in," swimming and art were treated as unusual. Redefining manhood, for Alex, was never about rejecting those things. It was about refusing to be limited to them.
The Manosphere and Why It's Winning Some Men Over
Sope and Alex talk directly about the pull of figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, and why schools are now actively warning students against that messaging. Alex's view is that young people deserve more credit than they're usually given. Many can see straight through it. But some are genuinely persuaded, and Alex doesn't think that happens by accident.
His read on it comes from marketing language: pain points. Certain words, violence, threat, dominance, power, "masculine energy," land specifically with men who don't feel like they're allowed to express their real masculinity, whatever that means to them. The manosphere doesn't invent that pain. It finds it and speaks directly into it.
Alex draws a distinction using an old idea: it's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. Learning to defend yourself and stay capable is mindful. It sits alongside nurturing and growth. The alternative, the "fight, fight, fight" framing that dominates a lot of manosphere content, isn't really about strength. It's about fear dressed up as strength, and it thrives because so many men have been taught to devalue their own bodies and disconnect from themselves.
Shame: The Word Men Are Taught Not to Use
This is where the conversation goes deepest. Alex works with a five-part framework touching on courage, vulnerability, worthiness, imperfection and shame [CHECK: exact framework labels and sequence, transcript audio was unclear in places], and he's specific about why shame matters enough to build a framework around.
Men hit certain milestones they've been told they should hit. When they can't, when they don't know how to put up a shelf, install a washing machine, or varnish a banister, the reaction isn't "I'll learn how." It's shame. Alex recounts a conversation with his own father about exactly this: his father assumed not knowing how to do a task at home should be embarrassing. Alex's answer was that not knowing isn't the problem. Refusing to learn is.
He's clear that shame isn't only self-generated. It gets used, sometimes deliberately, by partners or family members to keep someone in a particular role or relationship. Whether that lands depends on what you already believe about yourself. Someone with a strong sense of self-knowledge can hear "you can't do that" and shrug it off. Someone without it internalises it, and Alex connects that directly to the poor self-esteem he sees repeatedly in the men he works with.
What Broke Him: Five Years in a Newsroom
Alex is direct about what happened to his own body during five years as a journalist, first at the Daily Mail through a diversity scholarship with the Steve Lawrence Foundation, then at Metro.co.uk. He describes being one of very few people in the newsroom without an Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge background, and being treated accordingly: work quietly reassigned to colleagues, bylines split without explanation, feedback that was never specific enough to act on, just repeated versions of "not good enough."
He pushed for a men's health section, pointing out that men read Metro too. The paper wasn't interested. He'd already been running a column on men's health, covering breathwork, diabetes, penile cancer, multiple sclerosis and suicidality, and even that eventually lost its space. The resistance, as Alex describes it, tipped into gaslighting: being told he hadn't done something he had clear evidence of doing.
The physical toll was real. Breakdowns at work. Early grey hair. Joint pain serious enough that a doctor flagged a risk of rheumatoid arthritis tied to unmanaged stress. When his contract ended in 2019, Alex chose not to renew it. That decision led directly to writing "Time to Talk" and rebuilding his podcast, first called "What Matters," then "Time to Talk," and now in its third iteration as "The Mindful Man."
Worthiness and the Devaluing of Men's Lives
Alex separates worthiness from money early in the conversation. Plenty of men with financial security and professional status still don't feel worthy. The real question, as he frames it, is whether men feel worthy to themselves: worthy of love, of connection, of being valued as sons, brothers, fathers, cousins, uncles and mentors, not just as providers.
He's blunt about where that gap leads. Men are more likely to die at work than women. Many avoid medical checks until cancers are caught too late. And in the starkest example in the conversation, Alex describes men who take out life insurance and later take their own lives in ways designed to look accidental, because a payout keeps that policy valid, and because they've come to believe they're worth more to their families dead than alive. He also suspects reported suicide figures understate the real number, because some deaths are deliberately made to look like something else.
Alex ties this back to his own family: his maternal grandfather, who worked hard and became ill, died at 69, a fact that reads differently to Alex now that his own parents are approaching 60. The pattern he's describing isn't abstract to him.
Learning to Listen to the Body
Alex's route into this work wasn't a straight line. He trained first as a health coach, wanting to understand what stress had actually done to his own nervous system after his time in journalism. That led him into hypnotherapy, then psychotherapy, driven by the same question each time: what happens in the body when men suppress everything for long enough.
He connects this to a wider pattern Sope raises in the conversation: how often physical and mental health are treated as separate systems, when the body frequently keeps score of what men refuse to name out loud. For Alex, the answer isn't therapy-speak. It's mindfulness in the practical sense, learning to notice what triggers you, pausing before you generalise a single comment into "this is what everyone thinks," and asking what a person actually meant before reacting.
He's currently building workshops aimed at giving men space to have these conversations with each other, split between high-performing men in senior roles and what he calls "the everyday man," because, in his words, status doesn't change how similar the underlying struggle is.
Redefining Leadership as Wholeheartedness
Asked to define leadership, Alex doesn't reach for hierarchy or output. He calls it a wholehearted approach to a common goal, whether that goal is running a team, raising a family, or simply leading yourself. Leadership, in his framing, isn't about managing other people. It's about guiding, mentoring and building community, and the approach doesn't change depending on who or what you're leading.
It's a fitting place to land. The entire conversation is really about the gap between the man someone believes he's supposed to be and the man he actually is when nobody's watching, and what it costs to keep pretending that gap doesn't exist.
