Your Self-Worth Won’t Let You Change - Until You Do This

All right, team, welcome back to the Mantalk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and today we'll be talking about why your lack of self worth will not let you change until you do the things that I lay out in this video. Now, self worth is a very interesting concept. I have seen so many men struggle with it, whether they are extremely successful to men that are not successful at all. It's something that so many guys struggle with. And today I'm going to lay out the two main reasons why you struggle with self worth and what you need to do to fix it. So most men think that self worth is a motivation problem. It's like this rational fallacy that we've created, right? They just think, I just need to be more disciplined. I just need it badly enough, I don't want it badly enough. Or I need a better mindset. And that's just largely wrong. Okay? The truth is that there are two things that you need to understand in order to improve your sense of self worth. And the first truth is about your identity. And the second truth is about your biology. I'm going to give you very specific, actionable steps for both of those in a minute. But first, let's dig into the truth about your identity that I have not seen most people talk about when it comes to psychology, therapy, personal development, et cetera. So the first truth is that your identity. First off, most people think about their identity as like, how they are perceived by other people, the image that they project out into the world, how they try and are seen by other people, how they see themselves. But the reality is that your identity is basically a set of predictable behavioral patterns based on the life that you have experienced. And you can think of these predictable patterns as, as the foundation of your identity, that your identity is basically an amalgamation of predictable patterns that you have amassed over the time of your life. Now, most people, they'd look at that and they'd say, well, those are just habits. But, but you don't necessarily have habits. You just have predictable behaviors and predictable patterns that reinforce your sense of self. Right? There's a predictable pattern for how you're going to respond when your girlfriend or your wife says something that causes you to feel embarrassing. There's a predictable pattern of what you're going to do when your alarm goes off at 6 o' clock in the morning based on your preexisting experience. Right? There's a whole series of predictable patterns. And your identity is also, and this is the second part of what's important with your identity. Your identity is also an extension of what your nervous system has been conditioned to do under stress and duress, okay? Your, your identity is also an extension of what your nervous system, what your body has been conditioned to do under stress and duress. And this is very important to understand because in psychology it's called the rider and the elephant. Okay? Your mind being the rider, that's just sort of like your rational mind and then your body being the elephant. And for most guys, when they feel like they're lacking in self worth, their immediate attempt is to say, oh, I have a rider problem. I need to deal with that within my rational mind. I just need to fix something rationally. But the truth is that if you have an elephant that feels threatened, that has all of these predictable patterns of responding to stress, responding to duress, then it is going to do whatever the hell it wants at the end of the day. Unless you have been a monk and trained your rational mind and your body to work as one, your body at the end of the day is going to do whatever the hell it wants under stress and duress, under panic, under attack, under whatever. And when you couple this with the truth that your brain is simply a pattern recognition machine that is designed to predict patterns and move you towards predictable patterns, okay? AKA it is designed to make choices and decisions and steer you towards patterns that it knows and recognizes. Even when those patterns and decisions and choices are maladaptive, unhealthy, unwanted, they cause sabotage, your brain will always choose those patterns over unknown patterns. So here's the catch. When you lack in self worth and you think to yourself, I want to change this, I want to do something about this, Essentially what you're saying is brain, I want to go against the known predictable patterns of my identity, AKA I want to shift my sense of identity, that creates an immediate problem in your brain because your brain does not know what the new patterns are going to be. And it's not able to predict the outcomes of those patterns, it's not able to predict how you're going to feel under those patterns. And so it immediately causes a stress response. And that's where your nervous system comes in. That's where the elephant comes in and it responds. So another way of saying this is that your brain will always reject change initially because that change is unknown. And the sad part that everybody has experienced is that your brain will choose unhealthy patterns simply because it knows those patterns. And this is what reinforces a lack of self worth. This is what reinforces that you are lacking in self respect because Your brain wants to choose, which again, is kind of screwed up to say, but your brain wants to choose those patterns simply because they are known. So you have to understand when you are trying to develop self worth, you are kind of initiating a battle inside a threat response to your identity, to your ego. So let's talk a little bit about that threat response and why so many men's sense of self worth collapses under pressure, right? Because the truth is that self worth, it's not a belief. It is a felt sense in your body and in your nervous system. It is something that you experience, it is something that you feel. It's not something that you have to think about. It's not something that you question. It's whether effort feels meaningful or not. It's whether progress feels real or not. And it's whether action feels worth taking or not. And that really comes down to three chemicals that we're going to talk about. Not affirmations, not statements, not motivational hacks, not mottos, but three chemicals that are very important biologically for you to develop self worth. And again, at the end of this, I'm going to give you some things that you can do for each of these to develop them and balance them out. The first one is different, dopamine. And you can think about dopamine as the having responsibility for drive, direction and pursuit. Dopamine is not necessarily about pleasure. That's kind of a misinterpretation. Dopamine is really a signal that something is worth moving towards. So I like to think about dopamine as the direction chemical, whether dopamine, when, sorry, dopamine is healthy, effort feels more meaningful and easeful. Progress feels more real and action feels obvious. Action becomes something that you feel capable and confident of doing almost seamlessly. When dopamine is low, everything can kind of feel pointless. It can feel harder, heavier than it needs to be. Planning replaces action. So you get stuck chronically planning everything out. And living tomorrow becomes a kind of lifestyle where you are incessantly saying, like, I'll do that tomorrow. I'll think about that tomorrow. I'll try and do it tomorrow. And so this becomes the guy that journals endlessly, that talks endlessly about what he's going to do, but never actually acts. And this is because low dopamine doesn't feel empty, it doesn't feel lazy. Sorry. It feels empty and directionless. A lot of people equate having low dopamine as being lazy. And no, it's that you are directionless and that it feels empty and Emptiness and directionless destroy self worth. The second chemical I want to talk about is serotonin. And I like to think about this as being responsible for control, stability and restraint. Now, most people think about serotonin as your level of happiness, but that's because the happiness is a, is a result. It's a kind of symptom, you could say, of what's actually happening with serotonin. Serotonin is about impulse control, which builds selfworth and happiness. It's about emotional breaking, which again builds self worth and happiness. And it's about the ability to pause instead of reacting chronically. So healthy serotonin lets you stay steady under stress. Build self worth, delay gratification, build self worth and stick to discomfort, which builds self worth. Below, serotonin looks like emotional volatility, anxiety, a short temper, and that experience that so many of you probably have, which is, I know exactly what to do, but I can't make myself do it. So that's the gap that serotonin, low serotonin can produce is the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. And this is where self respect and self worth really begins to get developed. Now, the third one is norepinephrine. And norepinephrine I like to think about as readiness, energy and backbone. And this one oftentimes gets confused with stress for good reasons, which we're going to talk about here in a sec. Healthy norepinephrine really looks like calm, alertness, resiliency and a readiness to act, which mo you know you need in order to feel congruent and aligned with a sense of self respect and self worth. Low levels of neuroprenephrine equals brain fog, avoidance, a feeling of learned helplessness, and the type of fatigue that sleep doesn't often fix. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, if you have too much norepinephrine, which I see in so many men that I work with, the high performers, high achievers, there's a ton of anxiety, a ton of burnout, lots of panic, insomnia that doesn't go away. And so self worth requires regulated intensity, regulated intensity, not collapse, not living like the hippie lifestyle, like, ah, nothing matters, man, but also not the chaos of living in chronic stress all day long, which many of us are used to. Now, last piece I want to talk about before I get into the actionables, which is why change and developing self worth actually feels like death. This is something that I have seen with so many men and I haven't seen anybody talk about it. I experienced it myself. This identity change that you are wanting to produce in your life actually feels dangerous in your nervous system. Okay? The actions that you have to take, the hard conversations, the boundary setting, the communicating your needs, the sticking to a new plan, a new pattern of waking up at a certain time and, you know, rituals, it feels like exposure. It feels like you're going to get judged. It feels like you might lose a sense of belonging with people. And it feels like one big thing, which feels like death to your brain, which is a loss of predictability. Okay? Anytime that your brain recognizes that there is a possibility of the loss of predictability, it is going to ignite your nervous system and your nervous system is going to go into a stress response. So the nervous system resists this change in identity like an actual threat, like a tiger is coming to get you. And that's why most men sabotage right at the edge of growth. They get right up to the edge. And in archetypal psychology and analytical psychology, this is called the guardian of the threshold. It is the sort of the, the, the warrior standing at the door of passage into change, really saying, like, are you sure you want this? Right. That's why so many of you, right, when you're on the edge of about to change, that's where sabotage comes in. It's not because you're weak and it's not because there's something wrong or defective with you. It's because the old identity doesn't want to die off. It doesn't. And again, when I say old identity, I'm not talking about some image of you, okay? I am talking about the old patterns. The old predictable patterns don't want to die. That's it. So what do we do? How do we actually fix this? Well, let's start with the chemistry. Number one, dopamine. If motivation feels dead, dopamine is probably depleted, you're maybe overstimulated and progress isn't really viable. So how do we fix this? Shrink down the tasks until completion is guaranteed. Okay, so for example, if you're trying to set a new, like a new getting up in the morning pattern or habit where you want to wake up at 6 o' clock in the morning, shrink down the tasks that you have to do until it's guaranteed. So that might mean that you start the night before, right? And you build a little bit of a routine up so that you can actually get up in the morning. The second thing is track your wins, really write them down, acknowledge them. I'm really proud that I did this et Cetera and eliminate novelty. Novelty will drain dopamine, but it's what we're conditioned to go after, right? When you look at, like, probably your pornography consumption or your social media consumption, it's all about novelty. I need that new thing. I need that new thing. I need that new thing. So if discipline collapses under stress, it's likely serotonin instability and poor sleep. And what you need to do is, is fix the routines, fewer choices during stress. So start to eliminate the volume of choices that you have when you are stressed out. Start to make things quite a bit simpler, okay? So lessen the routines that you have. Lessen the amount of choice and decision points that you have, or at the very least, make those decisions very, very easy and simple. Simplify your choices. And if you avoid hard things like the plague, that is probably low norepinephrine and a little bit of learned helplessness. And what we need to do to fix that is short, controlled exposure to discomfort. This is why you see this, you know, popularization of cold showers, physical challenges, deliberate stress that is going to help to start to bump up your levels of norepinephrine and help to bump up your resiliency. Okay? Behavior changes chemistry faster than thought ever will. So by simplifying some of these things, you are going to shift the chemistry inside of you. So again, with dopamine, uh, you want to reduce and shrink the tasks down to until completion is guaranteed. So make it super, super, super, super simple, right? If you want to start journaling, it's like, I'm gonna journal one minute a day until completion is guaranteed, right? I can do one minute a day. If you wanna start meditation one minute a day, right? Make it so that you cannot fail in that moment. So, and then track that win and, and eliminate the novelty for the serotonin. You want to be able to adjust your routines and reduce the amount of choices that you have, or at the very least, make those choices much, much simpler. This is why you see CEOs and executives having, like, you know, they've got two shirts to choose from and two pants, and that's all that they have in their closet. They are reducing the amount of decision points that they have and complexity of decisions throughout the day, day. And then for norepinephrine, again, it is being able to expose yourself to a little bit of discomfort. And if you are at the other end of the norepinephrine spectrum and you're constantly burnt out, then you likely need to reduce the amount of intensity and the amount of discomfort that you are exposing yourself to which might be challenging based on your job. Okay, now how do you know that this is working? Here's the real goal. The real goal is that your old behaviors, your old patterns, they feel awkward. That's how you know it's working. Your old excuses, they just sound stupid. And your old routines, they feel foreign, right? So like for me, hitting snooze 10, 12 times, which is legitimately something I used to do, feels so foreign, I can't imagine what that feels like anymore because my new pattern has been so established. So if your old behavior still feels comfortable, you haven't killed off that pattern. Lastly, the final truth about self worth that I want to leave you all with is that self worth is not something that you can convince yourself of. It's not something that you can talk therapy yourself into that doesn't work. It is something that your nervous system proves to itself through action, through repetition, and through ultimately the creation of new predictable patterns that reinforce this new identity. It is through stable chemistry, predictable follow through and an identity that no longer tolerates that old bullshit that that's how self worth is built. Not by believing more, but by becoming someone that you actually respect and admire. And in order to do that, you actually have to go through a little bit of hell. You actually have to go into a territory and a period of time where you genuinely feel like you are under attack or you're under threat because your identity actually feels like it is. And that's not a bad thing. So comment below. Man it forward. Share this with somebody that you know will enjoy it. Do not forget to like and subscribe. And if you want some support in doing any of this work, then check out the Man Talks Alliance. We've got over a thousand men from all over the world that are doing exactly this. It's a phenomenal community. We've got tons of resources, courses for you in there to do this work and build self worth. Until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.