Swallow the frog

There's an idea I heard about 12 years ago from a man named Brian Tracy.

An idea so simple, and so powerful, that it's stuck with me and massively influenced how I live day-to-day ever since.

One that, if you adopt it, I believe may just have a similarly profound impact on you as it has on me.

What he said was this:

Swallow the frog.

I'm paraphrasing here, but...

If every day, you had to swallow a frog… and there was no choice in the matter… then you may as well swallow that frog first thing in the morning every day, so that the hardest and ugliest thing you have to do that day is already out of the way. So you can move on with the rest of your day and put that ugly part behind you, and feel good about yourself for having done the hardest thing first.

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Discover why emotional maturity is the critical ingredient most men lack in their porn recovery journey.

This has influenced my lifestyle massively.

For example, I start each day with my most difficult tasks first.

And as I said, I believe this principle could be transformative for many people.

But that's not why I'm sharing it with you in this email.

There's a more specific application of it I have in mind:

That is, to work on crossing your Emotional Processing Bridge proactively. Because everyone has emotions, and dealing with them is much like the frog in Brian Tracy's example — they aren't optional, they must be dealt with eventually, and that bill always comes due. Which is sort of funny, because our brains are designed to seek pleasure and move away from pain, which is especially true when it comes to our emotions.

In other words, in their default settings, our brains want us to run away from those feelings.

And in the modern world filled with infinite easy, high-stimulation forms of pleasurable escapism… well, you can see how that can become a problem.

But crossing the Emotional Processing Bridge willingly and proactively is, in reality, infinitely easier and better than stuffing those feelings down with escapism for days, weeks, or even months… because eventually those emotions will come out anyways.

And when you stuff 'em down and let 'em accumulate...

Instead of taking a somewhat uncomfortable stroll across a bridge with a stiff, chilly breeze...

You may end up walking across a

crumbling bridge in the middle of a war zone.

Put another way, it'll be way worse later when you bottle things up.

Dealing with emotions proactively is, ironically, much easier.

Try telling that to our mammalian brain… haha. But it's true.

And it is possible.

I share this because I'm currently going through one of the most challenging emotional times I've faced in years. And the reality is, situations a lot less daunting than this used to send me spiraling into escapism. Most often, with porn, which was usually preceded and/or followed by whatever other forms of escapism I was favoring at the time — social media, games, YouTube, Netflix, weed, or something along those lines.

But these days?

I've retrained the neural pathways in my brain that used to launch me into escapism.

I just process things in real time.

My attitude towards what I've been feeling is more like "isn't that interesting" instead of lamenting it and not wanting to feel it, with some self-affirmation and soothing mixed in.

And I don't feel any need for escapism.

I've learned to be proactive about dealing with what I'm going through.

Whether that's stress with work, relationships, unexpected situations, plans being canceled, dealing with taxes, getting rejected, or whatever else that used to be super triggering for me.

Which, incidentally, is one of the greatest skills you'll need to learn if you want to put that porn habit down and keep it that way. Because it's one of the greatest forms of escapism the male brain craves most, and most guys who have been using it for years have unknowingly trained themselves to use it as a coping mechanism for almost anything.

And as long as that pattern is there,

it'll funk you up over and over.

You've gotta look under the hood of your mind and retrain those neural pathways.

That's why this is one of the major things we'll focus on during the Mental Reconditioning work we do while we work together.

Among some other things too that, when combined…

Will let you finally quit porn and leave it behind for good…

Without relying on white-knuckle willpower or feeling deprived…

Download the BeFree App today and start swallowing the frog of emotional processing.