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Life Advice

The Daily Man-Up

(photo: @diegonacho)

Screen-free mornings and evenings.

The programming: Keep your phone by your bedside. Wake up, check your inbox and Twitter and Instagram before you get up. (Associate your smartphone with safety and warmth). Look at a screen until the moment you pass out. Wake up and do it again.

The counter-programming: It is critical to have a morning and evening routine that omit screen time. The first and last hours of your day should be low activity and screen-free. Honor your body’s natural wake/sleep cycles. I can’t overemphasize how critical this is.

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The Daily Man-Up

dont fight with people online

Align values with behavior online

The programming: Act one way in person, but let your inner child run loose online. Bully people, complain endlessly, pick fights with strangers, leave nasty comments. What’s the harm? It’s not you. “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

Oh wait, it IS you. You ARE the person you act like online.

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The Daily Man-Up

porn free

No porn.

The programming: Indulge your hedonistic desires to your heart’s content. It’s normal, healthy and free.

Except… It’s not normal. The monkey brain wasn’t made for the world of on-demand, high-def, infinite-variety porn that can be delivered straight into the eye sockets of anybody with a working internet connection.

Porn, like compulsive gambling and spree shopping, is an extreme example of the brain’s reward system being highjacked by an exaggerated version of a naturally healthy stimulus. Just as the gambler needs to keep pulling that lever to get their dopamine fix, so do porn addicts learn to blunt themselves into docile submissiveness with their habit.

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The Daily Man-Up

stop multitasking

Stop multitasking.

The programming: Rapidly flick from one screen to the next. Notifications popping up to tell you about everything, all the time. Answer emails while walking to the coffee shop. Check your social media during the lecture. It all feels super-productive, but multi-tasking crushes productivity, increases frustrating, and saps your energies. A day spent multitasking is a day wasted. A life spent multitasking is fractious and ineffectual.

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The Daily Man-Up

a man protects his family

The essence of protection is the “need to establish and defend boundaries.” Boundaries create a sense of identity and trust. Should that line be crossed, men will spring into action. Men are called on to guard the perimeter between danger and safety, protecting tribe and family from predators, human enemies, and natural disasters.

A man adds to his individual honor by developing and demonstrating prowess in the protector role. At the same time, he bolsters his community’s reputation for strength as well, as the tribe’s overall reputation serves as a form of protection in and of itself — functioning as a deterrent to attack.

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The Daily Man-Up

Any progress is good progress. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You can’t edit a blank page etc. Don’t expect to go from a lazy, unstructured layabout to Mr efficient marathon running supersoldier overnight, over a week, over a month, hell even over a year – this is setting (often deliberately) unrealistic expectations for yourself and setting yourself up for disappointment.

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The Daily Man-Up

If you don’t let up on yourself and instead become comfortable always operating with some level of pain, you will evolve at a faster pace. That’s just the way it is.

Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life—you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.

The irony is that if you choose the healthy route, the pain will soon turn into pleasure. The pain is the signal!

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The Daily Man-Up

Positively reframe situations

Positively reframe situations. Instead of looking at the gym as a place of sweat and pain, look at it as a place for strengthening the body and mind.

Instead of looking at a job interview as a torturous exercise in awkward silences, humble bragging, and sycophantism, look at is as an opportunity to improve the way you project yourself, fortify mental resilience, and potentially enter a fulfilling career.

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The Daily Man-Up

minimum days

If you want to make working out a habit, have minimum days.

If you’re like me, you go through phases where you want to get back into shape and try really hard at it, only to lose motivation after a few weeks or months. The only time it stuck was when I planned out what would be my “minimum day”. A minimum day is just the bare minimum of what you have to do to stay on track, but is much faster and isn’t too daunting.

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