The One Thing That Destroys Men's Lives

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Guys, welcome back to the band Talk show. Connor Beaton here. And today we're going to be talking about the one thing that destroys almost every single man's life. How this happens and what to do about it. Now, before we dive straight in, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Don't forget to man it forward. If you enjoyed this video, send it to another man that you think would enjoy it goes a long way. And don't forget to like it. All right, what's the one thing that destroys almost every single man's life? It destroyed my life, caused me to hit rock bottom. I've seen it wreck a lot of men's relationships and their financial situations, their health, their mental well being. That one thing is lacking impulse control. So many men struggle to have any type of impulse control. Maybe you might have it in some areas of your life, like maybe with your health, with eating, like you've got that reined in. But in other areas of your life, you're like, yeah, I have zero impulse control. I can't wake up at the time I want to wake up. Or you lack the impulse control to tell the truth. Or you lack the impulse control to not text that woman that you know is not good for you and so you know you're back in her DMs or, or you're texting her on a Friday night when you're like, God, this is just the worst dynamic I know. This is not good for me. So impulse control is one of those things that for the majority of men is causing them to spiral. It's causing them to feel like they cannot lead themselves and their lives effectively. I'm just going to give you a quick Aristotle quote because I think it, it really exemplifies why this is so important. He said, I count him braver who overcomes his desires that than him who conquers his enemies. For the hardest victory is over the self. The hardest victory is over the self. And as men, we are very externalized, right? We, we are much more external oftentimes than women. We look out at the world, we're trying to solve problems out there. We're trying to get, you know, validation from out there. We're trying to build things out there. And we oftentimes miss out on the fact that until.

We are able to have victory over ourselves, we're able to say no to the things that we want to say no to. We're able to say yes to the things that we want to say yes to. We're able to stop Ourselves from self destructing with some of the behaviors that you know, you want to stop enacting. Until we get that right, we will oftentimes build things out in the world that are not sustainable. We'll get into relationships with people that are not sustainable or healthy for us. And so it's not until we can move down this path of developing impulse control to not watch the porn at 11 o' clock at night, to not eat the popcorn at 10:30, you know, right before bed, or to not hit snooze a dozen times and you know, get super pissed off at yourself. So the reason why we do this, after a lot of self reflection, a lot of work, and by the way, this is what I had to work on myself. I did not have impulse control in my life as and I paid a super, super heavy price for it. I couldn't say no to myself around food, porn, women, waking up, I mean just a number of things, spending even, you know, sometimes overspending and putting things on my credit credit card and putting myself into a bad financial position. I really lacked impulse control. And so this is something that I've had to work extraordinarily hard on. So hard on. Oh geez, it's gonna like I was gonna say maybe we should edit that out, but I feel like maybe I' kick out of that. Anyway, that's just my 15 year old self dropping into our conversation. So here's what I want to talk about. I'm going to talk about two main things. What causes us to lack impulse control and how we can begin to develop a deeper level of impulse control. So number one, what causes us to lack impulse control? The big thing, after working with men for over a decade, men from all walks of life, all over the world, and dealing with my own lack of impulse control is, is that we lack impulse control when we are trying to avoid feeling something internally. Okay, that could be loneliness, boredom, anger, frustration, sadness, grief, being horny, like just whatever it is. But it's often when you are experiencing something internally that you do not want to experience, maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's like feeling a little bit depressed or sad or there's your grief is starting to come up. And when a lot of men are experiencing something internally that they do not want to experience, that because we're external, the brain's response is to try and find something external to offset that unwanted internal state. So the brain will say, okay, how do I solve this problem? I don't like what I'm feeling. I don't really have a lot of tools or resources to do deal with this unwanted internal state. And so I'm going to smoke weed or have a whiskey or watch porn and jerk off. And so it tries to soothe the internal state with an external substance or behavior. So again, coming back to this, and a lot can play into this, right? If you had trauma as a kid and you haven't dealt with it, right. If you were sexually abused or physically abused or you were abandoned or neglected, that can have a really lasting impact on your psyche, your mind and your nervous system, your body to such a degree that how you learn to cope with that trauma or that pain, that abandonment as a child was to, every time it came up, grab onto something externally in order to help yourself feel better, right? And this is. This isn't to blame you. This isn't to make you wrong. This isn't. This is a very natural and very well adapted. Well, it's maladapted, but a very, very sharp system that's at play that was trying to keep you safe when you were younger, but it's not serving you when you are older. So the first part, why we lack impulse control. We are trying to avoid something internally that we do not want to feel or that we have not been taught how to deal with. So a lot of guys have anxiety or they are lonely or embarrassed or whatever, and not. No one's taught them how to emotionally regulate. And so they move to some external substance. The second thing, pretty straightforward. Nobody taught you, nobody taught you how to have impulse control. You didn't have.

A father figure in your life or a man in your life or whatever, a woman in your life, a mom, a dad, somebody, just a somebody to teach you how to have impulse control. We are not naturally designed with impulse control. We are very instinctual beings. And so it takes something to teach you how to have a deep level of impulse control, to say no to yourself. When your body's saying, smash that bag of popcorn, you know, or destroy that carton of chocolate ice cream. I'm just giving away what I used to go to. Um, so if no one taught you how to deal with your impulse control or how to deal with your impulses, then it's just a skill set that you will not know how to deploy. It's just a skill set that you will not know how to use. And the good thing is, the good news is that it is a skill set and it is something that you can absolutely develop. So those are the two things. One, you're just never taught. And I'M going to give you a little caveat here because this is super important.

How most men have been taught about impulse control is through the vehicle of punishment. Most men, when they were boys and they lacked impulse control, were punished. This is what happens to so many men who have a lot of energy, who are loud, who are aggressive as kids, who are super rambunctious and they're jumping off of things and they're destroying things. Like I have a three and a half year old son, he does this all the time. He, you know, flies his little jet plane into the wall and scratches the crap out of it. He doesn't have impulse control because he's a child. And so it's my job as his parent to teach him how to have impulse control. But what most parents do, or used to do, was they would deploy punishment as a means to try and rein in that aggressive way, wild, energetic child. And what that child learned, AKA what you probably learned if you were that child, is how you should deal with yourself when you feel out of control is to beat the crap out of yourself, right? When you lose your temper, when you eat the ice cream, when you don't wake up on time, when you said you want to wake up, when you don't go to the gym like you said you wanted to, when you feel out of control, the response that you've been taught is to punish yourself. And, and so you self deprecate, you get angry at yourself, you shame yourself, you verbally attack yourself. And none of that makes the situation any better because punishing a child for lacking impulse control is not going to teach them how to correct their behavior. It's not going to correct the lack of impulse control. It's just going to teach them when I act out, I should just beat the crap out of myself. That's the behavior and response. It's a Pavlovian effect, right? Because kids, like I said, they do not know how to have impulse control. And so they're relying on their parents to teach them how to have impulse control. So if you were a boy that had lots of energy and acted out and were rebellious and you were loud and your parents responded with hostility, aggression, hitting, yelling, locking you in your room, I mean, I've heard all types of stories, right? Duct taping their kids to chairs and all types of stuff, that's not teaching you how to regulate your body. That's not teaching you how to reign in the impulse to destroy, to yell, to act out. It's not teaching you what to do with the intensity that's happening internally. And, and so what you learn is just when I feel that intensity internally, my response to that is to beat the living crap outta myself. And that just becomes a reinforcement cycle, right? So every single time you do that, it just reinforces the negative behavior or the coping behavior that you are using. Weed, porn, booze, et cetera. Because you act out, you lack impulse control. You beat the crap out of yourself verbally, and then you need a substance to help you feel better. Porn, weed, booze, yada, yada, yada. So what do we do? How do you actually develop a deep quality of impulse control? This is a subject I'm going to touch on again. There's obviously things that you can do, like meditation and cognitive behavioral therapy, and there's certain practices that you can go through. But the big thing that I want you to try is training yourself in delayed gratification. So actually practicing delaying gratification for whatever it is that, I mean, you can, you can choose whatever it is that you want to delay gratification on. So I'm going to give you some examples. When I wanted to start quitting porn, when I wanted to stop watching porn, maybe I should say it that way. What I would do is every single time I felt the urge to watch porn, I would set a timer on my phone for 30 minutes and 60 minutes or 90 minutes. And I wasn't allowed to watch porn until that went off. Now, a lot of times what ended up happening was I would get busy doing something else. I would start reading a book, I'd call up a buddy, I would, you know, go and work out or, you know, find a project to work on, or I would do some meditation or do some breath work or go do yoga or whatever it was. And I would find that that feeling would start to subside. So just the simple act of, of. Can I not eat the bag of popcorn today? Right? Can I just not eat it for the next hour? Can I not eat it for the next 24 hours? I'll reward myself with some of it tomorrow. Practicing and training yourself to delay in that gratification, to delay in the thing that you're wanting to do. Will start to develop that muscle over time. Of being able to say, actually, I don't need that. And this can be a little bit of a lengthy process, right? This isn't gonna like, you're not gonna do this once and be like, oh, I've got this. I have perfect impulse control. The thing that most people don't talk about with developing impulse control is that it does take a good amount of time. Because depending on how bad your experience was growing up, it can be very ingrained in you to lack any type of impulse control. To say no to yourself can feel very tumultuous and very challenging. So practice training yourself in delayed gratification, right? So if you go to the gym and you would normally reward yourself with something after a smoothie or whatever it is, even that, practice delaying that for an hour or two. This is why guys celebrate or celebrate practice. No nut. November, right? The idea that you're not gonna get off in November, what are they doing? They are delaying gratification. They're seeing, can I delay the gratification of getting off when I have sex or masturbate or whatever it is. So train yourself to do this, the second piece, and this is a really, really big piece. When you feel like you're going to lose any type of control over your impulses. You wanna reach for the popcorn, you wanna open pornhub, you wanna, you know, light up the joint or grab the bo. Ask yourself one simple question. What am I feeling right now that I am trying to avoid? What am I feeling right now that I'm trying to avoid? Again, most guys lack impulse control because they are trying to avoid an internal state that no one has taught them how to deal with. And so they lack impulse control because they're using external substances, mechanisms, et cetera, in order to feel better internally. This is why porn is so popular. So ask yourself in the moment, what am I feeling right now that I do not want to experience? And if you lost, you know, if you. If you lost the battle and you ended up smashing the popcorn or whatever, ask that question retroactively. What was I experiencing internally that I did not want to feel? And what you're to come into contact with is the thing you need to learn how to deal with your anxiety, your loneliness, your boredom, your grief, your sadness, your anger, whatever it is you're going to come into contact with, the thing that is living inside of you that feels intense. It might even just be a vague energy of just like, man, I just had a ton of energy and I didn't know what else to do. And so I smoked the joint, you know, or I watched the porn or whatever it is. The last step I'm going to give you, I'm going to go deeper on this in another video is you have to begin the process of regulating or dealing with the internal state that you are avoiding, right? So that internal state that's causing you to lack impulse control. Whether it's.

Anxiousness or depression or grief or sadness or anger or whatever it is, you have to start to work on having some really good tools to know how to regulate and deal with that part so that it's not hijacking your system and taking over and causing you to lose any type of inner authority. So comment below, let me know what you thought about this video. Don't forget to man it forward and share it with a friend. And as always, until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.