Where you are at in your life? Are you struggling to find meaning or maybe no matter how hard you try you just aren’t happy? This is a common problem for most men. They are sitting on the couch, their life is sort of Blah. Maybe you are wondering how in the heck you ended up in this predicament? You had so much fire when you were young and then life just took over. Now you are overweight. Watching a game on the huge screen television. You have the house, the cars, the kids, yet you aren’t really happy, You aren’t depressed either you are just sort of Meh!
You are married and yet the sexual wild child you married now goes to bed in 2 layers of clothing socks on and maybe she lets you have some nookie once a month or so. The sex is almost like pitty sex. It achieves the purpose but there really isn’t much passion in it.
Where did you lose yourself?
It is not that you aren’t happy with the life you are pleased somewhat with what you have yet you believe that there should be more laughing and happiness floating through the air. Yet each week there is a new fire to put out. You have a honey-do list that isn’t shrinking at all. You aren’t overly joyous with where you are. The dream was to have the house and kids right? Well yeah but that is only one aspect and you are not facing the other parts of your life.
We were told that if we work hard we will get far in life. So why are you not happy? Why are you not filled with so much joy that you can’t stop laughing? Your wife’s clothes should be falling off the moment you step into the house. What could you possibly be doing wrong?
You do all the things that make sense to you. You stay away from negative people. You may go as far as not allowing negative people into your life. You may even keep a little sunshine in your pocket and you are such the little sunshine that some people may go as far as calling you Toxicly Positive because you can’t stand having people around you that are not happy either. Yet no matter what you do you aren’t feeling that happiness. and you hate that feeling. You want it gone.
Wrong Expectations
That is the whole problem. First off you have the wrong expectations. You think you should have this life of happiness and joy. You and your wife are always going to be intimately connected. So much so that you are not going to have to really have the hard conversation. It’s just “I love you” and a hug with a passionate kiss and the relationship is just going to be ok.
You expect your boss to throw you a promotion. Simply because you show up on time and do your work.
You accomplished your goal of having a house and kids and so you were expecting that the rest of your life would fall into place. Stop arguing with me because if you did know that you wouldn’t be expecting the wrong results you are getting
Your kids aren’t going to be the model citizen you think they are. Your life isn’t just going to be smooth sailing. In fact, no matter how hard you try you are going to have negative emotions.
The 50/50 Life
Life is going to have pain it is also going to have pleasure. The problem for many men is that we avoid the pain to the core of our being. We have been trained by years and centuries and millennia that pain is bad. If you are uncomfortable then you are going to DIE!!! If you embarrass yourself in front of others they will judge you and kick you out of the village and you will die. That was true a million years ago when man was looking for a cave to shelter in. If we get too cold and we don’t have a tribe to accept us then we will possibly be a bear snack. That’s not the case for today. Yet our Monky brain in the back of our mind doesn’t know that. It was formed to keep us alive.
If you are not at the home base you are not comfortable. If you are not comfortable then you are doing something that is dangerous. If you are doing something that is dangerous then you will die! So whether you know it or not your mind is always trying to work against you if you are trying to do something new and exciting. Even learning something new is not comfortable. Your mind has to expend more energy to make new connections. So to learn a new skill uses more energy than the brain is comfortable with. Why, because, what if you can’t get enough calories to replace the energy spent learning this new skill? You will die!
You see your mind likes a particular hormone called dopamine. You get that squirt of the good stuff when you do something that the brain perceives as good. When you eat it is pleasureful. When you have an orgasm you did good. Pleasure is something we are always chasing. That pleasure though is often not actually in our best interest. You get pleasure from Watching porn and from sleeping with your wife. Yet to have sex with your wife runs the risk of being rejected (this is perceived as bad). You may get criticized (This is perceived as bad). Yet porn all you have to do you open up a webpage and watch a video and your brain gets that dopamine hit when you get your rocks off.
The problem is that you aren’t connecting with your wife. That connection isn’t being built at all because you found an easier way to fulfill the need to have a dopamine hit.
We also get a rush of dopamine when we eat. That rush comes because of all the calories that our body needs to run. Now your brain doesn’t know that it’s not the highest quality of food and honestly it doesn’t care. It has a crazy amount of calories. Far more than the berries we have to go out and pick. So It is easier to fulfill that urge to eat at Wendy’s because well they have bacon on almost everything.
You also get a huge rush of dopamine when you take heroin. To our brain, these drugs are the best. Yet, we all know a person who is addicted to the dopamine blast that comes from taking illegal drugs. This is the best example of when we look to the comfort of the dopamine hit without examining what it does to us.
This is the great thing about us humans is that we have a prefrontal cortex. No actions can come from our desires or urges without the forefront cortexes approval. That is one reason why tweakers are often very creative with how they get the means to acquire their drug of choice. It may not be the smartest thing in the world but it is ingenious.
Your life is 50/50 which means that half of your experiences will be perceived as pleasurable and the other 50% will be unpleasant. Without paying attention to what you are thinking you will fall into the line of pleasure every time. While you will also avoid the painful experiences in your life.
Life in Buffering
Many times in your life you had some type of experience that wasn’t pleasant. Maybe you were abused in some way. or you are just really beating yourself up for some reason. This negative emotion is often experienced as something that we don’t want to have in our life. So we buffer from that experience.
The act of avoiding that negative emotion, will actually cause you more pain in the long run. a good example of this is overweight people who can’t control their eating. many of these people are emotional eaters, while some are stress eaters. That basically means that they are one and the same.
When someone who is an emotional eater has an unpleasant emotion, they push away that negative emotion by eating something that they like. for example, they may enjoy a whole tub of ice cream. this is because the ingredients in the ice cream send lots of dopamine to the brain. that makes the experience of eating ice cream very pleasant. so for a short time, their mind is not on the thought that generates the negative emotion. yet because they dodged that negative emotion they never really fix the problem.
Therefore the overweight man can’t lose weight because losing weight isn’t a pleasurable experience at the start see. Now, it can be a pleasant experience at the end when he hits his target weight.
The Emotional Bank
A good way to look at this is like an emotional bank account. all the pleasant experiences are added to The emotional bank account. Buffering actually withdrawals from the balance of the emotional bank account. You are taking satisfaction and joy away from yourself. If you keep taking you eventually wind up like most people in some form of misery because you are overdrawn. You have trouble finding joy, contentment, and satisfaction because you don’t have anything to draw from.
So you can see that buffering only allows you to avoid the pain in your life. Yet it doesn’t absolve that pain. You have to face the fact that you don’t like how you look. You have to face the fact that your wife may be looking at other men. Your means of avoiding the pain in your life leads to bigger problems. So it is actually better to face that pain and experience it now than to wait till the bill comes due with interest.
The urge to not do it
One of the hardest things to do in life is something new. You always seem to find something else to do. You could do your college thesis or you could play around of Call of Duty. You could learn the guitar or you could drink several beers.
We often wonder why we put off the project we know we need to do when that project may only take a few minutes. This is also why it is so easy for us to find ourselves browsing Facebook instead of doing whatever it is that we need to do. The instant reward is often more tempting than the delayed gratification we would get from doing the work. This all ties into the dopamine hits. We would rather be flooded from dopamine now than a small squirt at a later date.
So we find interesting ways to talk ourselves into getting the dopamine hit than we do having the fear of maybe getting rejected while trying to find a client or making a sale. Yeah there is a bit of danger but why worry about that when you can be comfortable on the couch
So why is this happiness not making you happy?
Well its not so much not making you happy as it is leaving you feeling unfulfilled and that lack is what is causing your suffering. People who are not fulfilled are not pushing themselves to a big scary goal. They are trying stuff but they are not taking action to achieve their goals. The actions are not comfortable. They aren’t always fun. Sometimes those goals are uncomfortable and cause you to grow in places you didn’t think you had to develop.
Often when people are faced with something that is “hard” they seek out the easy way of getting it done. That is why so many people look for get-rich-quick schemes. They hope they can get rich without the difficult and needed mindset shift to actually have the money. That is why so many people show up on social media and then disappear a few months after they can’t hold the money.
You actually know this deep down and so you find excuses and talk yourself out of doing the difficult things because you don’t want to do the challenging work on yourself. You end up playing small and then wonder why you can’t make the big changes you need. You cant play small, you have to go big.
Peaks and valleys
As I mentioned before, we want to stay on the happy side of life. Yet that is impossible and we actually don’t want to be happy all the time. You don’t want to be grinning like a loon at a funeral. We want to be sad and grieve. Yet in normal circumstances, you will also have negative emotions, but you avoid them and don’t allow them to happen.
Why do you need the negative to have the joy? Because if we were happy all the time we wouldn’t know what joy really was. You have to have the valleys of pain and sadness to balance out the happy and victorious times we are shooting for.
You need the valleys so you can get to the peaks without the valleys you don’t have mountains. The higher the mountain the deeper the valley. Don’t be afraid of the valley, yeah there may be swamps or other things down there but they are nothing you can’t get out of.
So how do you get satisfaction and accomplishments?
You do the work. Use fear as a compass (Ep 26). Your life and your skills are like muscles and they have to be used. If they are new it will be messy. You will fail early and you will fail often. Yet don’t look at those failures as failures but as points of learning. I am actually actively working on changing my vocabulary to get failure out of my lexicon of words I use. I want to start calling them points of learning. Because we all learn when something doesn’t work like we thought it would.
Celebrate the wins you have. This will give you the dopamine hit you are looking for. Have your close friends and Include your band of brothers. Let them in on the celebration. Make each win as sweet as possible that way you get the reward your brain needs for the hard work.
Notice when you are avoiding and succumbing to urges. When they are happening, listen to what your brain is saying, activate the thinking part of your mind. Go ahead and acknowledge what your monkey brain is saying and then set it aside. Your mind is just trying to protect you so ignoring it will only create resistance and that is where the urges become suffering.
You have this. You can find and make the life you want. You can reach your dreams. You will find happiness in the struggle. To do that you have to get into the area of discomfort because that is the only place you will grow.
Need help? You can work with me one on one or Join my exclusive men’s group The Brotherhood of Men
Operation: Tears of the 22 weight of my brother ruck March
