Look Beside Her
What’s really happening to midlife men and why no one is checking on him
We finally started paying attention to women in menopause. After decades of being dismissed, gaslit, and handed an antidepressant for what turned out to be plummeting estrogen, women are getting their moment - the research, the language, the movement, the doctors who actually listen. I have spent many years of my life advocating for attention to this and interviewing some of the greatest thought leaders in the wellness space.
But I want you to do something for me. The next time you’re celebrating the women in your life finally being seen, look beside her.
Because there’s a man standing right there, and nobody is looking at him at all.
Not the optimized one. Not the guy with the cold plunge and the continuous glucose monitor and the $200-a-month supplement stack he heard about on some podcast. That guy is fine - he’s got Bryan Johnson and Huberman and a whole industry built to talk to him. And here’s the thing almost no one realizes: that guy is rare. The loud, biohacking, blood-panel-every-quarter man is a tiny, affluent sliver. The wellness world just makes him look like the norm because he’s the only kind of man it photographs.
I mean the other one. The regular guy. Your husband. Your brother. Your dad. The one who’s tired, a little heavier than he used to be, sleeping badly, drinking a bit more than he should, and has not had real bloodwork in a decade. The one who would no sooner call himself a “biohacker” than fly. He’s not optimizing anything. He’s just getting through the week.
And here is what breaks my heart about him, and it’s the opposite of what you’d expect.
Here’s the science, and it’s almost unfair. A woman’s midlife hormonal transition is a cliff and a rollercoaster at the same time - estrogen and progesterone swinging wildly and then dropping off, dragging her sleep, her mood, her sense of safety, her whole nervous system along for the ride. It is genuinely complicated. It deserves specialists, protocols, and patience.
He isn’t like that. Andropause is a slow, gentle slope - testosterone drifting down about 1% a year. No cliff. No rollercoaster. His physiology has far fewer moving parts. Which means the things that would actually turn his life around are almost embarrassingly simple: sleep like it matters. Lift something heavy a few times a week. Drink less. Get the bloodwork. Have one true close family member or friend who isn’t his wife. Learn to say one true thing about how he feels.
That’s it. That’s most of it. A little attention, a few basics, and the regular midlife man gets dramatically better, fast.
So sit with the cruelty of that. It’s not that his problem is enormous and overlooked. It’s that his problem is small and overlooked. He’s the one who’d need the least to be okay, and he’s the one getting nothing. The simplicity doesn’t make the neglect more forgivable. It makes it sadder.
The decoy
I think part of why we skip him is that the loudest version of “men’s health” has quietly erased him.
When men’s wellness shows up in the culture, it looks like optimization. Biohacking. Performance. Testosterone clinics and longevity influencers and a language of upgrades. And the regular guy takes one look at all of it and thinks, that’s not me. I’m not doing all that. And he opts out of the supplements, sure, but also of the doctor, the conversation, the whole idea that his body and his mind might be worth a little maintenance.
The optimized man sucks up all the oxygen, and the regular man disappears behind him. We’ve made men’s health look like a sport for the rich and the obsessed, when what the average midlife man actually needs has nothing to do with any of it. He doesn’t need to be optimized. He needs to be noticed.
Attention is the intervention
And this is where the science hands off to the soul, because the deepest thing I can tell you about the regular midlife man isn’t clinical at all.
He was raised to be the one who notices everyone else and is noticed by few. To need nothing. To ask for nothing. To be the steady thing the rest of us lean on, and to do it silently, because that’s what we told him a man was. So, of course, he isn’t raising his hand. We trained the raised hand out of him forty years ago. He will not come asking for attention. He doesn’t have the language for it, and he was taught it was weakness to want it.
Which means it has to come the other way. Someone has to turn and look at him first.
That’s the whole thing. Not a protocol. Not a stack. Not a movement with a ribbon. Just somebody in his life turning toward him and asking and meaning it - how are you, actually? And then staying in the room long enough to hear an answer he’s probably never practiced giving.
The most radical, healing, science-backed thing we could do for the regular midlife man is almost insultingly simple: pay attention to him. He’s the easy one. He always was.
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This week’s episode goes all the way in - what’s actually happening in his body and his nervous system after 40, how an entire generation of men got built to feel nothing, and how the regular guy starts to come back. The part I couldn’t fit here is the part that matters most: not just that he needs attention, but exactly why he can’t ask for it and how that changes everything once you understand it. It’s on YouTube now, and everywhere you listen on Monday.
Science and soul, always. Sandy xo.