Mind the Body Podcast

Lost Boys - Why So Many Young Men Are at War With Their Bodies : Episode 23

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 23

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🎧 Episode 23: Lost Boys - Why So Many Young Men Are at War With Their Bodies

Why are so many young men struggling to feel at home in themselves? Why are increasing numbers turning to the gym, self-optimisation, or the online world in search of confidence, identity, and belonging?

In this episode of Mind the Body, I explore the growing crisis in male body image through the lens of psychoanalysis, attachment theory, and developmental psychology. Drawing on the work of Alessandra Lemma, Donald Winnicott, Angela Connolly, Jean Knox, and Peter Fonagy, I examine why so many young men become disconnected from their bodies, and why shame so often finds expression through appearance.

Ultimately, this episode explores why so many young men feel lost, how the search for identity becomes expressed through the body, and what it takes to truly feel at home in yourself.

In This Episode:

  • The psychology of the "Lost Boy" and why so many young men feel left behind
  • How shame, body image, and identity become deeply intertwined
  • Angela Connolly's concept of the false body-self and what it reveals about male body image
  • How social media and online masculinity shape embodiment and belonging
  • What helps young men feel at home in themselves

A Question to Sit With:

When you're trying to change your body, what are you hoping your body will change for you?

References:  

Connolly, A. M. (2013). Out of the body: Embodiment and its vicissitudes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 58(5), 636–656.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization and the development of the self. New York: Other Press.

Knox, J. (2011). Self-agency in psychotherapy: Attachment, autonomy and intimacy. New York & London: W. W. Norton.

Lane-Godfrey, G. (2026, June). Homeward Bound. Men's Health.

Lemma, A. (2010). An order of pure decision: Growing up in a virtual world and the adolescent's experience of being-in-a-body. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 58(4), 691–714.

Movember Institute. (2025). Young Men, Masculinity Influencers and Mental Health.

Office for National Statistics. (2025). Families and households in the UK: 2025.

Winnicott, D. W. (1958). Collected papers: Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis. London: Tavistock Publications.

Take a breath, stay curious, and explore what it truly means to Mind The Body.

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Hello, and welcome back to Mind the Body. Something is happening with young men right now, and I wonder if as you listen, you might notice the ways it echoes in your world or in someone you care about. I don't think we're talking about this nearly enough. Almost thirty-five percent of men aged twenty to thirty-four in the UK are currently living with their parents, and that figure is still rising. We know that the housing crisis is real. The cost of living is real. But I keep sitting with something else, something that shows up in my consulting room, in the way young men I work with think of their bodies, in the way they talk or don't talk about how they feel. Because the young men I see aren't just economically stuck. They're stuck in a deeper way, and it shows up in their body image, in their relationship with food, in the way they move through the world or can't quite bring themselves to. Job anxiety, body image distress, binging or restricting food, an addiction to porn or technology. They're walking around with a distinct kind of flatness, like life is happening to them, and they just go through the motions. That's what I want to talk about today, what's underneath all of that, and why I think the male body image crisis, because that's what it is, is one of the most underestimated stories of our time. And I want to give these young men a voice. So here's what we're going to explore today. First, we're going to look at what I'm calling the lost boy, a term that appeared in a recent Men's Health article, and what's really going on developmentally for so many young men right now. Second, we're going to look at what happens when a young man can't quite be in his own body, and why the gym, the restriction, the binging, and the looks maxing all point to a similar story underneath. And third, we're going to look at what the online world is doing to all of this, drawing on the work of Alexandra Lemma, whose thinking on adolescence and the body I keep returning to because it illuminates so much of what I see in the room. "So let's go." When I say lost boy, I mean something quite specific. To leave home, it's helpful to have a strong enough sense of self, to have enough good experiences of feeling secure in relationship with others, secure enough that something solid starts to build on the inside, something you can carry with you into the world. For a lot of young men, that process gets cut short, and this isn't always about difficult upbringings, though of course, that's part of the picture for some, and this certainly comes into the work that I do. But for so many others, it's cultural. The messages that boys absorb from a very young age can work against this kind of slow internal maturation. They may hear things like, "Toughen up, don't need too much, get on with it." It seems like boys get pushed toward independence before they're actually ready for it, before their inner world is prepared for what adult life is going to ask of them, and then they step out into a world that's already deciding what they should look like by now. Maybe you've felt this too, The sense that you're already meant to have it all worked out, even when you're still just trying to begin. Because here's what I think is so specific to this moment. These young men aren't just navigating early adulthood. They're doing it inside a social media goldfish bowl that has become very loud, with very public ideas about what a man in his late teens and twenties should already have. The birthday dinners, the champagne service, the more life aesthetic, financial ease as masculine currency. And this lands on young men at exactly the moment they might be starting their first job, or still figuring out how to pay rent, or coming from backgrounds where money was always precarious, or where home was chaotic and the message they receive is, "You're already behind." That gap between where they actually are and where the culture says they should be, it may seem aspirational, but it can cause so much frustration and shame. And we know that shame is insidious and different from guilt. Shame makes you hide. Guilt says, "I did something wrong." Shame says, "There is something wrong with me." It goes right to the core of identity. It says, "I'm deficient, I'm behind, and everyone can see it." For a self that hasn't fully matured yet, shame of that depth is crippling. It creates a kind of freeze state. It demotivates, and all of the feelings and the self-loathing need to go somewhere. And from what I've seen, it often lands on the body and to the online world, and sometimes both at once Now let's move to the second piece. What happens when young men can't quite feel at home in their own bodies, and why so many turn to the gym, food, or self-optimization as a way to cope. Here's what I'm watching happen in male body image culture right now. The male beauty ideal has shifted away from the classic gym bulk toward something leaner, more optimized, more digitally precise. GLP-1 medications that were once discussed privately are now openly part of the male conversation. Biohacking, data tracking, looks maxing, the relentless project of refining and measuring the physical self. Muscle is the baseline, but optimization is the goal. And I wanna be mindful here. For some young men, this genuinely is about health and feeling good. But for a significant number of young men, something else is going on. The psychoanalyst, Angela Connolly, writes about what she calls the false body self, a defensive construction where someone masks the reality of their inner experience by building an illusory perfect body She observes that men in particular tend to gravitate toward compulsive exercise and muscular development to create the illusion of a perfect masculine body. The outside is shored up because the inside feels empty Winnicott wrote that the psyche coming to feel at home in the body is actually an achievement, and one that by no means falls to everyone. He called this personalization, the process through which the live body, with all its limits, comes to feel like the core of who we are. When it goes well, the body feels like mine, felt, alive, known. When it doesn't, the self can become disembodied, identified with the mind, the image, the performance, but not with the felt, lived, owned body underneath and I want to emphasize something here, because when I talk about what pulls young men away from their own inner experience, I'm not only talking about early relationships or culture, I'm talking about technology. The constant pull of screens and social media, introduced early when the self is still developing, pulls boys away from the body as something felt, and toward the body as something performed, something that exists to be seen rather than lived in. So by the time they reach adulthood, the body stays something you manage from the outside, something to perform rather than inhabit. Connolly draws a distinction I find really useful here between body image and body ownership. Body image isn't just about how you look. It's all the thoughts and feelings you have about your body, which can change from moment to moment. Sometimes you notice your posture or how a certain part of your body feels, or you're aware of your emotions in your body, and all of that is part of your body image. Body ownership is something else. It's the sense that your body is really yours, that you live in it and experience the world through it, not just thinking about it from the outside. It's feeling like you're really in your body, not just watching it what I see again and again in these young men is a disturbance of body ownership. Maybe you know that feeling, the urge to fix, perfect, or control how you look, hoping it will finally let you feel at home in your skin. All of that focus on appearance, metrics, performance, it's often an attempt to feel real in a body that doesn't quite feel owned, as if making it perfect enough might finally produce that felt sense of aliveness and belonging from the inside But it doesn't, because what's being built is a false body self. And the false body self, however carefully constructed, can't deliver what was missing developmentally. Jean Knox, building on Fonagy's work, talks about what happens when early relational environments couldn't adequately mirror or mentalize a child's inner life. The child learns to establish a sense of existing, of being real, through the effect they create on others. And when that relational channel is unreliable, the body becomes the instrument. So if I can make my body do this, control this, build this, maybe I exist. That's the gym. That's the restriction. That's the binging. All of them are attempts to feel real enough through the body when the relational route to that feeling was blocked And what strikes me clinically is that these young men almost never come to therapy describing a body image problem. They come with job anxiety, low mood, a vague sense that life isn't working. The body piece surfaces later, once the shame starts to become something speakable. Once the real question underneath starts to emerge, "Am I real? Do I matter? Does anyone actually see me?" That's why male body image distress is so chronically missed. It doesn't look the way we've been trained to recognize it. The relentless project of building a body that doesn't yet feel like home And finally, the third point: what's happening in the online world and how digital spaces can shape, amplify, or even worsen these struggles for young men today? Alessandra Lema in her work on adolescence and the body Talks about the fantasy of living in what she calls an order of pure decision. The idea that technology makes it possible to exist without the body's demands. To transcend the body, bypass its demands and its history. To be whoever you decide to be without the inconvenience of actually having to live inside a physical self with all its limitations and its shame And she's careful to say that technology doesn't cause this. What it does is provide a culturally sanctioned, always available vehicle for something some young men are already primed for, The ones who are already struggling to integrate the reality of their body into their sense of who they are For those young people, the online world becomes what Lemma calls a psychic refuge, a retreat from the challenge of actually inhabiting themselves. And it does this through what she describes as floating identities, selves that can be constructed, performed, and discarded, untethered by the actual felt experience of being in a body with a history We could think of the gym content, the looks maxing journey, the financial performance as floating identities, avatar constructions of sorts, ways of being someone in the online world that the actual felt ashamed, incompletely owned body can't yet sustain in real life In one of her papers, Lemma writes about a young man she calls Paul, who told her he wished he could forget the body and have no body. He described himself as a nobody, and Lemma sits with that phrase very carefully. A nobody. A no body. The wish to exist without the burden of embodiment, to disappear into a world where the body's demands and its exposure to others simply cease to apply And here's what strikes me about that. Paul and what some might refer to as the wellness bro look like opposites. Paul wants no body. The wellness bro builds an excessive, hyper-visible, hyper-optimized body. But underneath, they seem to be reaching for the same thing, an escape from the felt body, the owned body, the body that carries shame and the trace of early relational experience. One goes invisible. One goes hyper-visible. Both, I think, are fleeing the same painful thing And the algorithm houses both perfectly. Because what Lemma identifies as the defining quality of virtual space is that it denies the reality of the body. It offers visibility without intimacy, engagement without attunement, the appearance of being seen without the appearance of being truly known. For young men already carrying the shame of feeling behind, already struggling to feel real in their own skin, the online world offers a temporary order of pure decision. So I will look like this, I will be seen like this, I will perform this identity even though I'm not sure who I really am. But you see, the shame underneath doesn't shift. The platform reflects the ideal, but it doesn't reflect reality, and so it becomes very difficult. Research from the Movember Institute found that young men who regularly consume masculinity influencer content online report higher rates of emotional distress, greater feelings of worthlessness, and are less likely to look after their mental health than peers who don't. The world that promises to make them visible is making them less well, and I think we have to be honest about where some young men can get pulled in. The shift from, "I feel ashamed, invisible, and left behind," to, "The system is rigged against men," actually makes psychological sense. This is where the manosphere incel-adjacent spaces and the Andrew Tate pipeline can take hold. When a young person's developing sense of self meets algorithm-driven content, often hidden from even the people who care about them most, these spaces offer something: an ideology, a sense of sameness, a ready-made story to fill in where the real wound lives So even as these online spaces offer him a sense of belonging or identity, the lost boy keeps searching. He might be more visible than ever, more optimized, more tracked, more performed for others to see. But underneath all of that, he's still looking for a way home to himself Okay, so let's bring this together. We started with the lost boy and the idea that so many young men are sent out into the world before they're fully matured, before something solid enough has formed on the inside to meet what adult life is going to ask of them. And then they land in a culture that's already decided that they should be further along. Second, we explored what happens to that shame and how it gets channeled into body image. This is the false body self. Turning to the gym, restriction, binging, or looks maxing, all in an effort to build on the outside what doesn't yet feel solid on the inside. It's an attempt to create a sense of self through appearance when that sense of self is still forming within. And third, we ended with Lemma's idea of an order of pure decision. The fantasy the online world offers of escaping the body's history and its shame, and why that fantasy is so compelling for young men who haven't yet found a way to feel at home in themselves Young men are holding so much right now, but they don't have to carry it alone. What makes the biggest difference? What helps the body feel like a safe place again is being truly seen, heard, and understood. So whether you're a clinician, a parent, or simply someone who relates to these struggles, that kind of real connection has the power to help. If this resonated, please do share it. This conversation needs to be louder. Until next time, stay curious