Change of plans

How do you handle it when shit goes sideways?

If you're anything like I used to be, then sudden (and often unpleasant) changes of plans can send you spiraling a bit, a trait I'm pretty sure I'd originally picked up from my family who, bless their souls because I love them dearly, just weren't ever that great at handling stress...

What that looked like for me was:

If I was feeling stressed out by work, If I was trying to figure out a tough problem, If I had an argument with my girlfriend, If I had to do my taxes, If I got some bad news, If I got rejected, If I was sad...

Or any other number of perfectly normal things that occur in everyone's lives every day...

I'd feel this impulsive need to reach for some sort of escapism.

One of the top ones was porn, of course.

But that was just part of a bigger picture.

I'd reach for weed, YouTube, Netflix, video games, and a whole host of other numbing agents to help me self-soothe too, although these days I realize that by so-called "self-soothing" that way, I was actually increasing my baseline levels of stress and further destabilizing my emotional state in the near future... because when you hammer your dopamine reward center with escapism like that, it has a direct negative impact on mental and emotional health, motivation, energy, and more.

And what I realized was that if I continued dealing with stress through escapism, I'd always have a lot more things to escape from.

It was just compounding my problems.

Part of my masculine growth process has involved an extremely healthy dose of developing emotional intelligence.

Cultivating the capacity to feel instead of run.

Approaching and consciously experiencing my internal world with curiosity and a mind to actually fix shit head-on instead of trying to side-step the discomfort. A process that I started by working on quitting porn, so that I could unthaw my emotional world that had been numbed by that form of escapism for so many years - given that it's the #1 most overstimulating thing that was in my life, and that's in most men's lives.

And the cool part about it?

When I learned how to face my shit down head-on, I've ultimately found I have a lot less shit to face head-on.

Because I'm no longer staring down the barrel of years of backlogged problems, grievances, and resentment like I was. Instead I'm just dealing with whatever fresh problems life throws my way proactively as they come up.

And there's a big peace there.

I've handled some pretty big "rogue wave level" problems without any of the escapism I used to rely on, and every time I do that, I can't help but feel proud... and can't help but want you to feel that too.

Truth is, the only real escape from your problems is to consciously work on fixing them.

And there's one thorn in your side doing more damage than the rest.