Connor Beaton argues that impulse control is what separates men who thrive from those who don't. Most men act impulsively to escape uncomfortable feelings like loneliness or anxiety, turning to weed, alcohol, porn, or food instead. The fix: practice delayed gratification, notice what feeling you're avoiding, and build tools to handle it directly.
All right guys, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Connor Beaton here, and today we're gonna be talking about the one thing that destroys almost every single man's life, how this happens, and what to do about it. 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. 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 than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over the self." The hardest victory is over the self. 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 1, 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 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 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 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 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 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. And so what you learn is just when I feel that intensity internally, my response to that is to beat the living crap out of myself. And that just becomes a reinforcement cycle. 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. When you feel like you're going to lose any type of control over your impulses, you want to reach for the popcorn, you want to open Pornhub, you want to light up the joint or grab the booze, 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 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 gonna 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.
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