And the thing that got me was the math. More than 700,000 gallons of water go over those falls every second. They’ve been doing it for 12,000 years. Long before my quarterly targets, long after I’m gone, that water just keeps falling. It doesn’t check its email. It doesn’t wonder if it did enough today. It just falls.

That’s the lie a lot of us carry. That it all depends on us. That stepping back, even for a minute, is a risk we can’t afford.

So here’s the debrief I’m running into the holiday weekend, and I’d offer it to you.

What did you carry this week that was never actually yours to carry? What would still be standing if you set it down for two days?

Most of it. Maybe all of it?

The falls will keep falling whether I watch or not. My family, though. They notice when I look up. So this weekend I’m going to be the guy who looks up.

What’s one thing you can put down before Monday? Tell me, I read every reply.

Monday I’ll be back with the Focus Check. For now, set something down. Go enjoy the long weekend.

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Greg paused when he told us this. “That’s a fucking problem.”

He’s right. The guy has done a lot of the other work. He eats well. He doesn’t drink. He’s rebuilt his fitness. But his identity is so tangled up in the job that he couldn’t put the terminal down for his son’s biggest day. He probably would have told you, a week before that trip, that family was his top priority.

The calendar said otherwise.

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What it looks like to actually be trapped

Greg turned 47 and realized he was now living a day longer than his father ever had. His dad died in 1992, at 47, when Greg was 17. So Greg at 47 was standing at the exact edge of his father’s whole life. And he had what he describes as a look-in-the-mirror moment: he had the successful business, the beautiful wife and family, the house that kept getting bigger, the schools that went private, the car that got fancier. Two 7-figure exits. A company acquired by Michael Eisner. And he felt kind of mediocre.

Is this it? Do I care about any of this? How did this happen?

He calls it conformity, complacency, redundancy. The CCR. The way it works is subtle: things aren’t bad. Things are okay. And “okay” is where men park themselves and stop moving. The other guys at work are 10 or 15 pounds overweight, so being 10 or 15 pounds overweight is fine. The other guys drink a little after work. The other guys aren’t coaching every season. You absorb the floor around you and call it normal. Misery loves company, and that company is very large and very available.

You can live there your whole life and quote-unquote be fine. You won’t be lonely. You might not be happy, but you won’t be lonely.

Greg’s version of the Wall Street friend was himself, 6 years ago. Something has to crack the shell. For him it was COVID. When everything strips away, you see clearly what you actually want to bring back.

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More isn’t better. Better is better.

Here’s what Greg found in every area of his life when he actually asked the question: the answer was less. Curate, minimize, focus. Better wardrobe, not biggest. Sustainable fitness, not most events and competitions. Wealth defined as freedom, not just accumulation. Food that the body responds to, not the most elaborate approach.

He calls it the 6 F’s: Family, Fitness, Finance, Food, Fashion, and Fun. One area at a time, he asked what “better” actually looked like. Specifically for him. Not for his colleagues or his neighbors or the other dads his kids went to school with. For him.

I’ve had a version of this for years, my 8 F’s: Faith, Fitness, Family, Friends, Food, Focus, Finance, and Fun. Greg’s point is that your F’s don’t have to be anyone else’s F’s, including his. The point is knowing what yours are. Rule 1, as he puts it: knowing what’s important is what’s most important. And what was most important in your 30s probably isn’t what’s most important now.

The other thing he’s clear about: once you’ve defined what better looks like in each area, the 6 F’s or 8 F’s or whatever yours are, the answer in almost every area is doing less of the wrong things, more deliberately, rather than doing more of everything.

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A question about your calendar

Greg has one line that I keep coming back to, and I want to put it to you plainly: show me your calendar, and I’ll show you your priorities. Your actual priorities, not your stated ones.

Most of us have a version of our values we keep in our head. Family. Health. The relationship. The thing we’re building. And then a calendar that doesn’t reflect any of it, because the calendar gets filled by whatever shows up and feels urgent, and the important things slide.

Greg’s friend on Wall Street probably would have said family is paramount. But he shipped the monitors.

Knowledge doesn’t make you better. Application does. Greg’s been direct about this with the men he coaches: you can listen to every podcast, read every book, build the most comprehensive personal development plan you’ve ever seen, and make no progress. Because consumption isn’t action. “Listening to someone talk about doing push-ups,” he said, “is not the same as doing push-ups.” You have to pick a horse and run it.

His question for himself every single morning: better one or better two? Sleep in or go to the gym? Kiss his wife good morning or roll out of bed and skip it? Coke or water? Small choices. They compound. You make the better one more often than not and your life, slowly, gets better.

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What to do about it

1. Show your calendar to someone who will be honest with you. Not to explain or defend it. Just to see whether it reflects what you say actually matters. The gap between the stated value and the calendar is information.

2. Define your F’s in one sentence each. Take whatever your version of the framework is, 5, 6, 8 areas, and for each one write 1 sentence about what “better” looks like specifically for you, right now, at this stage. Not a vision. A sentence. Something you could put on a calendar.

3. Ask “better one or better two?” for the next decision you have to make. Just one. Today. Start there.

4. Build the 3-year window. Greg says 1 year isn’t long enough to actually change anything that matters, and 10 years is long enough to convince yourself you have time to keep putting it off. 3 years. Where do you want each of your F’s to be? Then reverse engineer it back to this month, this week, today.

5. Do one thing today, not just plan it. Greg’s clearest rule: you have to produce more than you consume. Knowledge is not the lever. The thing you actually do is the lever. Before the day is over, take one action step toward any one of your F’s. Not a plan to take it. The thing itself.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Will and I sat down with Greg Scheinman: 2 seven-figure exits, a company acquired by Michael Eisner, 100-plus executives coached, HYROX Nationals competitor, and at 53 he’s in the best shape of his life. He’s also been through alcoholism, depression, losing his father at 17, and hitting rock bottom twice. He now runs Midlife Mail, a newsletter for over 50,000 men who are done going through the motions.

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2 years ago I would’ve skipped it. 9 minutes felt pointless, not worth changing clothes for. These days I know better. 9 minutes done beats 40 minutes undone.

That’s the whole game with this stuff. Mental and physical fitness get built the same way, in small boring reps you can actually repeat, not in the big heroic session you do once and tell people about.

Most folks try to run their well-being on willpower. Wake up motivated, white-knuckle the good habits, then fall off the second life gets heavy. And life always gets heavy. There’s a study Will and I come back to a lot, on judges deciding parole cases. Early in the day, fresh, they granted parole at a high rate. Right before lunch, running on fumes, that rate fell off a cliff. Same judges, same kinds of cases. The thing that changed was how much gas they had left in the tank.

Willpower runs out. A system holds.

So I build reps so small I can’t fall off of them. One slow breath before I open the laptop. 9 minutes on the bike when 40 isn’t in the cards. The bar is low on purpose. Low enough that “I’m tired” and “I’m slammed” stop working as exits.

The reps look like nothing on any single day. That’s exactly why people quit them. You have to fill the tank before you lead the team and that doesn’t happen in one grand gesture. It shows up in the unglamorous thing you did again today when nobody was watching and nothing felt different… yet.

Some weeks I string them together clean. Some weeks I drop half of them, give myself grace (not an excuse), and pick the bar back up the next morning.

What’s one rep small enough that you could do it even on your worst day this week? Start there.

Your Thursday Three Things tomorrow and Friday’s Debrief is about setting down the stuff from this week that was never yours to carry.

A few free tools if you want to put this into practice:

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That’s the body going into fight-or-flight over a block of text. No bear in the room. Just words on a screen, and my nervous system reacting like a threat walked in the door.

Here’s the thing about that moment. Between what happens to you and what you do about it, there’s a gap. Tiny. Maybe a second or two. And almost everything that matters about how you lead and how you live happens inside that gap. React, and the email writes itself. Respond, and you get to choose the words.

The reset I use to find the gap

One long exhale. That’s the whole thing.

Breathe in through your nose, add a small second sip of air on top, then let it out slow through your mouth, longer than the breath in. Once or twice is plenty. The long exhale is the part that tells your nervous system the threat is over, so the body can climb down out of the rafters.

You’ll still feel the spike. The breath doesn’t erase it. What it buys you is a couple seconds of clear air, enough to ask “what do I actually want to happen here” before your thumbs answer for you.

I came to this late, and not by choice. After I left the SEAL Teams I had plenty of spikes and no gap, just stimulus straight to reaction. Learning to breathe on purpose was one of the first things that gave me my responses back.

So yesterday I exhaled. Read the email a fourth time. Turns out the guy wasn’t even upset. I was. I sent two clean sentences instead of the paragraph I’d have regretted, and went on with my day.

One long exhale. You can do it in a meeting and nobody knows. At a red light. Outside your kid’s door before you walk in.

When was the last time a screen put you into fight-or-flight? What did you do with it?

Tomorrow’s Wednesday Reps is about the boring daily work that keeps you steady enough to find that gap in the first place.

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That’s how Monday starts for a lot of us. Awake for 90 seconds and already on somebody else’s agenda.

Your attention is the most valuable thing you own, and it’s getting stolen every second of every day. There are smart people and expensive systems built to grab it the second you give them an opening. First thing in the morning, half asleep, you hand it over for free. (I mean, I’ve maybe got some of yours now… and some of you, thankfully, PAY me for that! Maybe some others will too?!)

What you point your attention at in those first few minutes kind of sets the tone for the whole day. Point it at a glowing rectangle full of other people’s priorities, and you spend the day reacting to them. Point it on purpose, and you get to run your own day.

I’m not great at this, by the way. I fail at it plenty. (See above. 6:14.) But on the Mondays I get it right, the whole week runs different.

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The one move

Pick the first thing your attention touches on Monday, and make it something you chose. Not the phone. It doesn’t have to be meditation or anything fancy. One rep so small you can’t fall off of it.

Mine is this (when I do it!). Before any screen, I name the one thing that has to go right this week. Out loud, usually in the kitchen while the coffee drips. Just one. Some weeks it’s a work deadline. Some weeks it’s “be patient with my kids.” (Let’s be honest… it’s that every week!) Saying it first means I’ve planted a flag before the inputs come for me.

20 seconds. That’s the whole practice. The phone can wait 20 seconds.

Try it tomorrow. Name the one thing before you touch a screen. See if the week feels even a little more like yours.

What’s the first thing your attention lands on when you wake up? Be honest, I read every reply.

Tomorrow’s Reset is about what to do when the day spikes you anyway and you feel yourself starting to react.

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Most of us never do this with our own week. We just stack one on top of the next and wonder why we feel flat by Friday.

I spent years believing the strongest thing I could do was carry it all myself. Don’t ask for help. Be the rock everyone else leans on.

Being the strong silent one scrapes you down slowly. You don’t notice until you’re scraped raw.

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So here’s your Friday debrief. Take 10 minutes before the weekend swallows you. A few questions, that’s it.

What actually went well this week? (Name it out loud. Most of us blow right past the wins.)

What drained me, and how much of it did I take on that was never mine to carry?

Who could I have leaned on, and why didn’t I? The strongest thing you can do is know who to call.

You don’t have to do this perfectly. Sit with the questions and answer them honest. Give yourself grace on the hard parts. That’s a different thing than giving yourself excuses, and you’re allowed to do it.

Tell me how your debrief goes. And if this is the kind of thing that helps, I’m in your inbox every weekday now…

Monday Focus Check: Start the week by aiming your attention on purpose, before the inputs grab it for you.

Tuesday Reset: One practice to settle your nervous system, so you respond instead of react when the day spikes you.

Wednesday Reps: The boring daily work that keeps you well enough to lead well, at home and at work.

Your Thursday Three Things: Three things worth your attention this week. An idea, a practice, and something we’re chewing on.

Friday Debrief: A few honest questions to close out the week, put down what wasn’t yours to carry, and head into the weekend lighter.

Don’t be scared…only the Thursday one is long :)

Have a great weekend!

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Hey all, real quick note before we get into this. You’ll see this is now coming from Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider rather than Focus Now Training. We still run FNT and FNT’s podcast (Men Talking Mindfulness) but we wanted to make this more personal… so we changed it to our names. Hope you will stay subscribed even with the messy change. We appreciate you… now, let’s get into it…

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“I want my real daddy to come home.”

Hal’s youngest son said this to him. The boy was maybe 3, maybe 4. Hal’s wife had been trying to explain to him why daddy wasn’t tucking them in at night anymore, why he wasn’t reading stories, why he wasn’t the same dad he’d always been. The boy resolved something in his small mind, looked at Hal dead in the eyes, and said it.

8 words.

Within 18 months, Hal was back on full duty as a police officer, despite clinicians who had told him he’d probably never work again.

Motivation comes from motive: the reason why. If the why is big enough, you figure out the how.

Hal Hughes spent years before that moment as a cop, a black belt in jiu-jitsu with plans to turn pro in MMA, a marathon runner, a highly engaged father of 3 with a 4th on the way, and someone who thought he was roughly bulletproof. Then January 2, 2008: on duty in his cruiser, waiting to turn left on a highway, the sun setting directly in front of him. The car behind him was blinded by the sun, didn’t slow down, and hit him at a speed that totaled the cruiser. His head took the impact off the steering wheel. “Mild” traumatic brain injury, the initial diagnosis said. Within weeks he’d gained 40 pounds, was sleeping 20 hours a day, had migraines 5 or 6 days a week, couldn’t drive, and was suicidal. And then his son said those 8 words.

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The sharpest instrument in an unsteady hand

Hal tells a story about a young man who wants to be a chef. Goes to find the master chef in the area, begs for a job, gets told: your first year, all you do is chop vegetables. The chef hands him a knife very carefully. “This is Henckel, surgical steel, razor sharp. This is not the knife at home in your parents’ kitchen. Be careful.” Kid says yeah yeah, sure. Half a day in: he chops his finger off.

The brain is the sharpest known instrument. In an untrained, unsteady hand, it cuts the one holding it: anxiety, depression, addiction. And it cuts the people around them: anger, frustration, the low-grade chronic reactivity that damages relationships slowly over time. When the pain of holding it wrong becomes too much, people do what humans have always done with pain. They find the fastest available way to change their state. Drugs. Alcohol. Netflix. Scrolling. Anything that doesn’t require work and produces some relief.

Hal’s TBI got him a prescription for 30 milligrams of codeine for the migraines. The codeine didn’t much help the pain, but it gave him energy and something close to mood. He didn’t know that was a thing. Within a couple of months, the 30-milligram prescription had become black-market oxycodone and hydromorph, whatever he could access. 2 overdoses. Suicidal again. An NA meeting he attended while high on opiates, looking around the room thinking he wasn’t like these people -- he was a cop, a family man, a martial artist. Second meeting, same. Third meeting, something shifted. “Hi, my name’s Hal, and I’m an addict.” This time he meant it.

People get addicted because they’re in pain. Usually emotional pain they’re trying to soothe. That’s the starting point for any honest conversation about this.

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The 500-horsepower engine going the wrong way

Hal’s worked with enough men in recovery to know what consistently fails: trying to willpower through it. The high-performing men especially. “I have a 500-horsepower engine,” goes the logic. “I can outpower this.” The problem, Hal says, is that a 500-horsepower engine going the wrong way up a one-way street does the most damage.

He talks about a study called Rat Park, done by Dr. Bruce Alexander. Put a rat in an isolated cage with 2 levers: one delivers food, one delivers cocaine or opiates intravenously. Some rats will sit there hitting the cocaine lever until they starve to death. They just choose it over food, repeatedly, until they’re gone. Then take that same kind of rat and put it in a large, enriched space with room to move, natural materials to manipulate, other rats to interact with, the full social and physical environment a rat needs to function. Give it the same 2 levers. The rat tries the food, tries the substance. And rarely ever gets addicted, irrespective of its DNA.

Addiction doesn’t happen in isolation, and it doesn’t get fixed in isolation. The path out runs through community. Specifically: one person who’s a little further down the path looking back and saying “come this way, I know the path.” That’s what NA and AA do. No clinicians leading it, no prescriptions. Just one addict or alcoholic who’s been where you are, still standing, pointing at the way through.

Hal’s seen a lot of clients in his work. He’s yet to see one get clean alone. Not one.

The man who headbutted him in the ER

4 years after the first TBI, Hal was on duty when an arrested suspect, drunk and violent, handcuffed on a hospital gurney while he was being stitched up, waited for the one moment Hal relaxed his grip and threw his whole body backward. Reverse headbutt. Hal went out on his feet. The floor of the ER caught the secondary impact. He’s a cop who got head-injured in an emergency room, so they literally picked him up and put him on the next gurney over. The subsequent scans and follow-ups showed bilateral permanent frontal lobe damage. Frontal lobe damage brings emotional dysregulation. Which brought more psychiatric medications than I’ll list here, and eventually the full spiral into addiction.

The man who gave him that second TBI ended up facing criminal charges. And Hal was invited to a community justice forum, which is a restorative justice process common in Aboriginal cultures where victim and accused sit in a circle with a court mediator and attempt to reach a binding agreement before the matter goes to trial. Hal’s wife didn’t come. She would have attacked the man. Hal went. And he admits that somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered if he might get a chance to do the same.

He sat there staring at the floor, unable to look across the circle. He described the events of that day and then the impact: the second TBI, the frontal lobe damage, what it had done to him as a father, a husband, a son, a brother. He was still staring at the floor when he heard a noise from the other side. He looked up. The man was sobbing. And everyone who’d come to support him, every person on that side of the circle, was sobbing with him.

Hal said that change is usually a dimmer switch. But sometimes it’s on-off. He stood up, crossed the circle, asked the man to stand. The man probably expected to get hit. Hal hugged him. And said: I forgive you. The only thing you owe me going forward is please try to show someone else a little more love and a little less judgment in your own life.

As part of the binding conditions: treatment for the man’s addiction, and coffee with Hal every couple of months.

I was tearing up listening to this. It’s real and it costs something. And the thing Hal said afterward stuck with me: he thinks part of what drove him there was wanting to be free. If he could turn an enemy into a friend under those circumstances, if he could show more love and less judgment in that moment, he knew he could do it anywhere.

More love, less judgment. He has it written on his hand.

What to do about it

1. Find the reason why and make it specific. Motivation comes from motive. Hal’s son gave him his with 8 words. Vague wanting to feel better doesn’t hold when the hard days come, and the hard days come. Who specifically needs you to show up as your real self? What specifically are you not being that you know you’re capable of? Write it down. Keep it visible.

2. Look at the environment before you fight the behavior. The Rat Park study says it plainly. The conditions around you shape your behavior more than discipline alone. Before the next round of white-knuckling, ask: what’s missing from the environment? Where’s the community? Where’s the meaningful challenge? Where’s the purpose? The park has to be built, and it gets built one piece at a time.

3. Get the vehicle right before trying to drive it. Hal tells his clients: become an athlete. Just someone who sees themselves that way and builds habits around that identity. Sleep, nutrition, movement: in roughly that order of importance, these are what determine whether the mind has anything to work with. You can’t execute psychological tools in a physiologically compromised body. A 2016 Harvard study found 8 weeks of consistent mindfulness practice structurally changes the brain: increases thickness in the hippocampus and emotional regulation centers, decreases size in the amygdala. But the vehicle underneath all of it still has to be maintained.

4. Try “strict with self, tolerant of others” for one week. Hal calls this a cornerstone of Stoic philosophy. Strict about how you run your physiology, how you treat people, how you use the instrument you’ve been given. Tolerant of what your fellow humans bring. All 4 clauses, not just the “strict” half. See what happens.

5. Start sparking. Toward the end of the episode, Hal told us about an elderly woman he met at a gathering. She’d been in an abusive marriage for over 50 years, isolated from family and friends by her husband. When he died, she made a decision: she was going to connect with anyone and everyone she could, wherever she was. The checkout clerk. A stranger on the sidewalk. Someone at a party willing to really talk. She called it sparking. She told Hal: “With all those little sparks, surely my life will have been filled with light.” Make eye contact. Say the thing. Spark.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Will and I sat down with Hal Hughes: former corrections officer, police officer, and now psychotherapist who works specifically with first responders and the military. 2 traumatic brain injuries, a bipolar and PTSD diagnosis, opiate addiction, 2 overdoses, sober since July 14, 2016, and coming up on 10 years. He’s earned every bit of what he brings to this conversation, and it goes places most conversations on this stuff don’t.

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I’m almost 49 … and while that isn’t “old” (at least not in my eyes!), it IS after the age our body starts breaking down. But I’m still working to hold a high level of fitness, and the part that surprises people is how incredibly boring the work can be. Same lifts. Very similar meals. Tuesday looks like Monday looks like the Tuesday before it. Nobody claps. You just show up and put in the reps. Nobody’s body holds at 49 on motivation alone… it holds on the boring stuff you do whether you feel like it or not.

Mental fitness works the same way, and a lot of us run it backwards. We treat our heads like something you only deal with when it breaks. Wait until you’re anxious, burned out, snapping at people, then scramble for help. That’s mental health care. Useful and necessary, but it’s reactive. It’s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

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Mental fitness is the training you do when nothing’s wrong. The daily reps. 5 minutes of breathing before the day starts. A 10-minute walk with the phone in your pocket (or better yet left at home!). Quiet stuff that builds capacity you can draw on when the hard day shows up. And the hard day always shows up… eventually!

If you lead anything, whether that’s a team or a household, you can’t pour from an empty cup, and your people feel your state before they hear your words. I’ve watched leaders try to rally a room while running on 5 hours of sleep and a full pot of coffee, white-knuckling through it. The team reads it every time. Stress is contagious. So is steadiness.

You have to be well to lead well. I say it constantly because I keep relearning it. The weeks I skip my own reps are the weeks I’m shorter with my team and thinner on patience at home. Not a coincidence.

So your rep for this week: pick one. Just one. 5 minutes of quiet in the morning before the inputs start, or a 10-minute walk at lunch with no screen. Do it every day for 7 days, even on the days you don’t feel like it. Especially those days.

Aim for one rep so small you can’t fall off of it. Find the floor… the level you will not go below… and get just that for now!

What’s your one rep going to be? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Jon here… first off… yes - we’ve rebranded our newsletter and substack from our company names to our personal names … Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider. We feel this gives a more connected community experience and we appreciate you all staying with us through this journey!

Now… onto the article…

I spent years thinking mindfulness was about calming down. Breathe, relax, lower your shoulders, feel better. That’s the version most people get sold, and it’s the version I believed for a long time even while I was teaching it. And it CAN help with that … but…

it turns out the more interesting story is happening one nerve deeper, and the science on it has gotten good enough that I want to walk you through it.

So let’s start with the nerve.

Your vagus nerve runs from your brainstem down into your heart, your lungs, your gut. It’s the main cable of your parasympathetic nervous system, the side that handles rest, digestion, and recovery. When people talk about getting your nervous system “hijacked” under stress, what they’re really describing is the other side of our nervous system… the sympathetic side taking over and the vagus going quiet. The whole game of regulation is getting that vagus back online.

Here’s the part that turns this from a feeling into something you can actually measure. There’s a number called heart rate variability, or HRV. It’s the tiny variation in time between your heartbeats. Your heart isn’t a metronome, even at rest the gaps between beats shift slightly, and that shifting is a good thing. More variation means your system is flexible and can adapt to whatever’s coming. Less variation means you’re locked in one gear, usually the stress gear. HRV tracks vagal activity so closely that researchers use it as a stand-in for what the vagus is doing, with a correlation around 0.88.[^1] That’s tight.

Now to the good stuff for those of us who chase performance.

A 2025 review in Medicine International by Gitler and colleagues lays out how you raise vagal tone with paced breathing, slow breaths at your own resonance frequency, usually around 6 a minute.[^1] Do that consistently and you strengthen your baroreflex, the reflex that manages blood pressure beat to beat. You calm systemic inflammation. You improve emotional regulation. They show up in bloodwork and in recovery data.

Now as I’m getting older and… more sore… the inflammation piece is the one that got my attention. There’s a documented pathway, the vagal anti-inflammatory reflex, where vagal activity signals the body to dial back the cytokines that drive chronic inflammation.[^2] Animal models showed it first, then human data from a large study called MIDUS II backed it up: higher HRV, lower inflammatory markers.[^2] So the breathing you do in the morning isn’t just changing your mood. It’s reaching into a system that touches heart disease, metabolic health, and how fast you recover from hard training.

And it runs both directions. The newer framing is the brain-heart axis, a two-way street where your brain modulates your heart’s rhythm and your heart sends signals back up that shape your emotions and your thinking.[^3]

Same review notes HRV also tracks with waist circumference and cardiometabolic risk.[^3]

One lever, a lot of outcomes.

There’s a model some researchers call NISIM, short for the Neuro-Immuno-Senescence Integrative Model.[^4] The claim is that how well your prefrontal cortex regulates your vagus under stress feeds all the way down through your spleen to your inflammation levels and eventually to telomere damage, which is a marker of cellular aging. Plain version: how you handle pressure may show up in how fast you age at the cellular level.

I love that idea. It’s still a model and the research is early. And to be fair to the whole picture, a 2025 study in depression patients found no clean link between cytokines, HRV, and the physical structure of the vagus nerve, so this isn’t all settled science.[^5]

What to do with this today…

Here’s what I take from all of it. The breathwork isn’t woo. When you run a physiological sigh, two inhales through the nose then a long exhale, or a few rounds of box breathing, you’re pulling a real lever on a real system. You’re training your vagus the way you’d train a muscle. The breath is the handle, and now we can watch the system move on the data.

You can’t manage what you’re not measuring. If you’ve got a Garmin, a Whoop, an Oura, anything that reads HRV, you’re already holding a window into this. So try this:

1. Watch your morning HRV for 2 weeks. Just look. Get a baseline.

2. Add 5 minutes of slow breathing a day, around 6 breaths a minute. Inhale for about 4 seconds, exhale for about 6.

3. Watch the number over the next month.

You won’t get a straight line up. Sleep, booze, stress, and training all push it around, and that’s the point, it’s responsive. But the trend is what matters. Give your vagus a reason to come online every day and it tends to show up.

Want help doing this? We’ve built an app to do just that!

https://focusnowtraining.com/get-the-app-page

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[^1]: Gitler A, Bar Yosef Y, Kotzer U, Levine AD. “Harnessing non-invasive vagal neuromodulation: HRV biofeedback and SSP for cardiovascular and autonomic regulation (Review).” *Medicine International* 5, no. 4 (2025): 37. <https://www.spandidos-publications.com/10.3892/mi.2025.236>

[^2]: Williams DP et al., on heart rate variability and inflammatory markers via the vagal anti-inflammatory pathway, MIDUS II data. <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4476948/>

[^3]: “Heart rate variability: a multidimensional perspective from physiological marker to brain-heart axis disorders prediction.” *Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine*, Vol. 12, 2025. <https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cardiovascular-medicine/articles/10.3389/fcvm.2025.1630668/full>

[^4]: “Prefrontally Modulated Vagal Tone Inhibits Inflammatory Responses to Prevent Telomere Damage” (Neuro-Immuno-Senescence Integrative Model). <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.17.480574.full.pdf>

[^5]: “No relationship between inflammatory cytokines, heart rate variability, and morphology of the vagus nerves in patients with major depressive disorder.” 2025. <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12140965/>

And still. At some point during the day, one of them wanted to show me something. A drawing, I think. And I caught myself looking at it while also thinking about something else. Half there, half somewhere else.

I do this constantly. My kid is right there, trying to share something with me, and part of my brain is running through the week ahead or replaying a conversation from last Tuesday. Then later I feel guilty about it, which helps exactly no one.

The doorway reset

Here’s something I’ve been trying. Stupid simple but it actually works.

Every time I walk through a doorway at home, I use it as a reset. One breath. Drop whatever I was just thinking about. Arrive in this room, with whoever is in it.

That’s it. Doorway equals reset.

The idea comes from research on something called the “doorway effect.” Scientists found that walking through a doorway causes your brain to create an “event boundary,” a natural break between what came before and what comes next. Your brain actually segments experiences around physical transitions. Researchers at Notre Dame, led by Gabriel Radvansky, ran studies on this in the early 2010s and found that people forget what they were doing after walking through a door because the brain treats it as the end of one mental episode and the beginning of another.

Most of the time, that’s annoying. You walk into the kitchen and forget why you went there.

But you can use it on purpose. The doorway is already creating a break in your attention. You’re just adding an intention to it.

Walk through the door into your kid’s room. Reset. Be here now.

Walk through the door back into the house after work. Reset. The work day is over.

Walk through the door into the living room where your family is watching TV. Reset. This is where you are.

One word, one transition

If you want to take it further, pick one word before you walk through the doorway. Just one. The word you want to carry into the next room.

Present. Patient. Calm. Curious.

You don’t have to announce it. You don’t have to meditate on it. Just think the word as you cross the threshold.

Dan Siegel, the neuropsychiatrist, talks about how intentions “prime” the neural system to be in a certain mode. You’re gearing up your brain to receive, to sense, to focus in a particular way. One word is enough to do that.

The so what

Your kids don’t need more stuff from you. They need you to actually be there when you’re there.

And I’m not saying this like I’ve got it figured out. I’m saying it because I don’t. My kids gave me an incredible day yesterday and I still caught myself drifting. That’s the work. It’s always the work.

The doorway reset is one small way to get better at it.

Try it this week

Pick one doorway in your house. The one into the kitchen, maybe, or the one into the room where your kids usually are. Every time you walk through it, take one breath and think one word.

See what shifts.

A few things that might help

We built a free self-assessment that takes about five minutes. Tells you where you are with awareness, presence, stress response. Good baseline if you’re curious.

Take the Awareness to Action Self-Assessment here.

We also have a free app with guided practices and breathing exercises. Some of the tools from the course, available whenever you need them.

Get the app here.

And if you want to go deeper, you can a part of the Awareness to Action course for free. Use the code FREE at checkout.

Start the course here.

Or if you want to see everything that’s in it before you jump in:

Learn more about A2A here.

What’s your doorway going to be? Reply and tell me.

Jon and Will

Why the difference between “I am” and “I’m being” matters more than you think!

I was walking my dog down the road a few weeks ago. A woman from my neighborhood was walking behind me, same direction. She crossed to the other side of the street and we started to converge at the end of the block. She had headphones on, phone to her ear. And as she passed me, I heard her say to whoever was on the line: I’m about to pass the husband of the couple I like least on the planet right now.

The 7-year-old in me (the one who moved from South Africa to the States, the one who got picked on by kids who didn’t know what to do with the accent) yelled at her. “I can hear you, you know.”

She didn’t respond. Noise-canceling headphones, probably. So I kept walking, furious. White-knuckling the ball I was about to throw for my dog. Blood boiling. I did some breathing. A few minutes later I had this thought: I don’t know that woman. I don’t know what she’s carrying today. And then: maybe I’ve wronged her in some way I’m not even aware of. I have blind spots. Maybe she’s seen one of mine and it was ugly.

I have a shirt with a Robin Williams quote. “Be kind. You never know what battle someone else is fighting.” I said that to myself over and over on that walk. It helped. Not all the way. But it helped.

How aware are you!?

What’s happening before the words come out

Jimmy Wightman recently came on our podcast and started with a story. Bad day with his then-girlfriend: forgotten tickets, couldn’t park, raining. She got frustrated and started pushing his buttons. And something happened in him that had never happened before: as she was saying these things, he saw an image flash into his mind of a kid who used to bully him at school. He made the connection in real time. The way she’s talking to me is triggering an emotion from back then.

He heard his inner monologue fire up with all the defensive responses. He didn’t say any of them out loud. He felt the urge to leave. He didn’t leave. He stayed regulated. And because he stayed regulated, she co-regulated. The whole thing moved on. He spent the rest of that evening going back to that moment: wow, what’s going to happen if I keep practicing?

That’s the promise. The work happens in the sitting. The result shows up in your relationships.

Dr. Stephen Porges spent decades mapping the mechanism. His polyvagal research shows that the nervous system is social by design: when one person stays grounded, the nervous systems in the room have something to anchor to. Your calm transfers. Your regulation is biology, not performance.

Get or free app (works on mobile only)

What actually wrecks relationships

Men tend to wreck their closest relationships quietly, not loudly. The big obvious blowups are visible. Everyone can see them, process them, move on. The actual damage tends to be quieter: the snapping, the half-listening, the checking out at the dinner table, the stonewalling. Chronic, low-grade reactivity that builds over months and years without either person being able to point at a specific moment. Viktor Frankl wrote about the gap between stimulus and response. That gap is where freedom lives. And meditation is one of the most direct ways to widen it.

A 2015 National Institutes of Health review by Brian Holesell and colleagues found that a consistent meditation practice builds more accurate self-awareness, less self-criticism, and a shift from seeing the self as a fixed, rigid thing to something more fluid and honest. Fewer reactions that are really about something that happened 20 years ago, dressed up as something that happened this afternoon.

I’ve been meditating about 11 years. My kids have noticed, which is the thing I care about most. I’ve got a 9-year-old daughter, a 7-year-old son, and an almost 5-year-old daughter. They inadvertently push buttons, same as all kids. And I still lose it sometimes. But my son made me a little rubber band bracelet. I snap it sometimes when I feel myself starting to go. It’s just a reminder: I love these people. Show them that.

“I am” vs. “I’m being”

This came up in 2 different places in the episode, so I want to pull it out.

Jimmy described something that years of practice produced in him: strong emotions still arise, but they no longer feel like they have an owner in the same way they used to. Before practice, it was “I am this anger.” After years of consistent sitting, anger arises. It’s distinct from him. That’s a different relationship entirely, and it’s hard to describe until you’ve felt it.

The practical frame I put on it: mindfulness helps you separate identity from behavior. “I am an asshole” is shame. You’re guilty for being something. “I’m being an asshole right now” is guilt. You’re responsible for what you did. Those are different categories. Shame is hard to work with because it feels like identity. Guilt is workable because the behavior is visible and specific.

Men often live in the shame column without calling it that. The inner voice that says “I always do this,” “I’m terrible at this,” “what is wrong with me” -- those are shame statements. They sound like self-awareness. They function more like anchors, keeping the behavior locked in place because the behavior and the person feel like the same thing.

Jimmy came to his version of this through people pleasing. He had it strongly: sacrificing his own needs to accommodate others, then resenting them for it. Completely invisible to him while it was running. When he started to set small limits, his nervous system responded like he was in genuine danger. Disagreeing with a client. Saying he wasn’t available to reschedule. His body read it as a high-risk situation. He stayed in the discomfort. Slowly, the nervous system learned something new.

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“Everything’s welcome, everything’s allowed”

Jimmy said he tells himself this about 20 times a day. Every time something comes up, some slight feeling of aversion, that’s the mantra. He softens around it. He doesn’t fight it.

He described 3 components of what a meditation practice builds. Concentration (the ability to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to). Sensory clarity (noticing the specific details of your experience: mental images, inner voice, body emotion). And equanimity. The 3rd one is the one most people don’t know about.

Equanimity is the option between reacting and suppressing. You feel something fully. You turn toward it. You let it be there. And you don’t act it out. Jimmy called it the magical third option. From that place, you can actually choose what to say next.

His girlfriend story was the demonstration. He felt the emotion coming. He felt the urge to run. He stayed and he felt it. The thing that needed space got space. Nobody got hurt. And something important: she co-regulated in response to him staying grounded. He didn’t fix it. He held it.

The thing is, you don’t access this in the moment if you haven’t built it in the calm. The feet on the floor, the breath, the grounding sensations: those are trained in the sitting. When you’re triggered, what comes online is what you’ve practiced, not what you intended to do. That’s the rub. And that’s why the sitting matters even on days when nothing feels hard.

What to do about it

1. Notice the moment before. There’s a moment between when something happens and when you react to it. Your job is to start noticing that moment. The more you practice noticing it, the more space you have to work with.

2. Swap “I am” for “I’m being.” Next time you catch yourself identifying with a behavior (”I’m such an idiot,” “I’m terrible at this”), shift the language. “I’m being” puts the action in front of you. You can look at it, take responsibility for it, change it.

3. Try the see-hear-feel practice. In any moment, especially a triggered one, name what you’re experiencing as seeing, hearing, or feeling. Inside or outside. That simple act of labeling takes you out of the storyline and into the actual present moment. You can do it anywhere. At the dinner table. In a difficult conversation. On the subway.

4. Build the sitting before you need it. A consistent sitting practice, even 10 minutes a day, builds the reference points your nervous system can return to under stress. You’re reminding it of a state it already knows how to find.

5. Use Jimmy’s interest/opportunity/necessity framework to find your practice. What are you actually drawn to? What time do you realistically have? And what do you actually need right now? The right practice is the one you’ll do tomorrow, not the most impressive one you’ve tried once.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Will and I sat down with Jimmy Whiteman, UK-based meditation teacher, known online as the meditation guy. He came to this work through insomnia and a nightlife career as a DJ in London, which is not the obvious path. He’s one of the clearest people I’ve heard explain what meditation is doing inside you, and why the stuff that happens in the sitting eventually shows up in your most important relationships.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

One more thing before the pay wall

Will and I launched Awareness to Action a few weeks ago. It went really well. Thank you to everyone who joined. We built community into the course on purpose, because connection is part of what makes the inner work actually stick. We’re looking to grow that into in-person retreats, the kind of thing this episode keeps pointing toward. Text MT

M to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course to find out more.

Until next time,

Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

If this landed for you, share it with someone who needs it. And if you want this in your inbox every Thursday, subscribe. We’ll be here.

Three resources for the relationship that goes everywhere with you

Resource 1: The see-hear-feel practice

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I did the breath thing. Two inhales through the nose, one long exhale out the mouth. Took maybe four seconds total.

Didn’t fix the traffic. Didn’t stop her crying. But I showed up at the next thing without carrying all of that with me. That’s the win.

The physiological sigh

Your body already does this on its own. Every five minutes or so, whether you’re awake or asleep, you take a double inhale followed by a longer exhale. It reopens the tiny air sacs in your lungs that start to collapse when you’re stressed. Offloads carbon dioxide. Resets the system.

The move is to do it on purpose when you need it.

Two inhales through the nose... the first one fills your lungs, the second one is shorter, just topping off. Then a long slow exhale through the mouth until you’re empty.

That’s it. One breath. Maybe two or three if you’re really wound up.

Stanford ran a study on this. Huberman and David Spiegel. Five minutes of cyclic sighing beat five minutes of meditation for reducing stress and improving mood. The exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, slows your heart rate, tells your body the threat is over.

I don’t do five minutes. I do one or two breaths when I need them. Before a hard conversation. In traffic. When one of my kids is testing my patience and I have about three seconds to decide what kind of dad I’m going to be in that moment.

Why this over box breathing

Box breathing works. I’ve used it for years. But it takes longer. Four counts in, four hold, four out, four hold... that’s 16 seconds minimum per cycle, and you usually need a few cycles.

The physiological sigh works in one breath. Sometimes that’s all the time you have.

Try it this week

Next time you feel the stress building, do the double inhale and long exhale. Just once. See what shifts.

And if you want to know where you stand with this kind of stuff... we built a free self-assessment that takes about five minutes. Gives you a baseline on awareness, presence, stress response, all of it.

Take the Awareness to Action Self-Assessment here.

We also have a free app with guided practices, breathing exercises, and some of the tools we teach in the course.

Get the app here.

What situation are you going to try the physiological sigh in this week? Reply and tell me.

Jon and Will

At mile 2, David had a very clear thought. He looked at the guys around him and knew: without them, he wouldn’t finish. He was right. He also finished.

7 miles in the heat, the hills, the wind, and the mud of Colorado Springs. Will and David came in from sea level. I live at altitude and still underestimated it. Nobody quit. The race itself is almost beside the point. What it unlocked is what I want to write about, because doing something genuinely hard together is a different category of experience than just getting together. It changes something. A weekend watching sports leaves you roughly where you started.

What your body does when it’s near other bodies

There’s a concept called co-regulation. When 2 people are physically present with each other, their nervous systems start to influence each other. Heart rate variability. Cortisol. The stress response itself. That’s what co-regulation means. Dr. Stephen Porges spent decades mapping this (he’s the nervous system researcher whose polyvagal theory identified a specific pathway in the vagus nerve he calls the social engagement system). Being near people you trust is biologically distinct from being near a screen. Your body is wired for proximity. Shared space. Physical presence. What we’re doing now (distributed across time zones, running most of our deepest relationships through rectangles) is new territory for the nervous system.

I noticed it the moment Will and David showed up at my front porch. Something settled. My wife noticed it in me. I noticed it in myself. Something that had been unsettled for a while just... went quiet.

Take our Awareness Self Assessment Here!

The honest thing about virtual work

I hate to admit this, but in the weeks before this trip, I was getting frustrated with Will. Business stuff: text threads, video calls, trying to build things while we’re 2,000 miles apart. That friction had been accumulating. Will was getting the worst of it. He showed up at my door and I gave him a hug. And by that evening, the stuff that had been building in those text threads just wasn’t there anymore.

There’s something about being in someone’s actual life (seeing where they live, watching them with your dogs and your kids, making a meal together) that gives you a read on a person that a one-hour meeting window can’t carry. I know what Will’s life looks like in New York because I’ve been there. He knows what mine looks like in Colorado Springs now because he’s been here. We both have information the other didn’t have before. That information makes us better to each other.

Our virtual connection is real. It’s also transactional in ways we don’t always name. We’re checking boxes. Getting through the agenda. Moving the business forward. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s a different bandwidth than being present in someone’s actual life. And over time, without the in-person version to recalibrate things, the transactional starts to feel like the whole relationship. It isn’t. But it starts to feel that way.

The couple with one arm

There was a man and a woman on the Spartan Race course. Each of them was missing an arm: him the right, her the left. They were running the course together, helping each other over obstacles, and occasionally helping other teams.

One of them was carrying a rubber arm. Giving people high fives with it. Then taking the arm off, throwing it over the obstacle, climbing over, picking it back up on the other side. Part of the race, fully committed.

I don’t know their names. But at one point I looked at them and any thought I had about how hard this was went somewhere else entirely. You don’t quit while those two are still moving. Nobody said that out loud. Nobody had to. That’s what community does when it’s operating well. It raises the standard you hold yourself to without anyone saying a word.

Experience Onward

After the race, we went to visit Dan Carcillo. 2-time Stanley Cup winner with the Blackhawks, multiple concussions from a career in professional hockey, now runs plant medicine retreats through an organization called Experience Onward. First in Oregon, now with a location in Golden, Colorado.

2 men were there who had just been through a retreat. I’d never met either of them. Big, solid guys, the kind you’d give a second look to on the street. We sat down in a room together and within 5 minutes they were talking about things that men don’t typically say out loud.

Complete strangers. A room, a shared space, people willing to be present. That’s what the environment created. The conversations men need to have usually start with proximity, time, and some evidence that the space is safe. Give men that, and most of them will do the rest.

What to do about it

1. Make the call. There’s someone you’ve been meaning to reach out to, maybe someone you haven’t talked to in years. He’s probably been meaning to reach out to you. You’d be surprised how glad that person is to hear from you. A call, not a text. You can pick right back up and go somewhere from there that a text thread never gets to.

2. Do something hard together. The specific activity matters less than the challenge level. Spartan Race, a real hike, helping someone with a physical project, anything that requires genuine effort from everyone in the group. What Will said in the episode is worth hearing directly: you can see each other struggle, and pull each other up, in ways that build something specific. The masculine wakes up differently under pressure.

3. Show up for the kids’ sake too. My son gave Will a hug that lasted close to 2 minutes and wasn’t letting go. Our kids get more than we can give them when there are other good adult men in their lives. Who are the men your kids are watching? Who are you bringing into that space?

4. Get out of the silo deliberately. Will made this point well: men tend to isolate into their daily responsibilities and lose track of the fact that other men are out there wanting exactly the same kind of connection they are. The first step doesn’t have to be a Spartan Race. A coffee. A call. One small reach across the gap.

5. Look up Experience Onward if you know someone who’s carrying something heavy. Dan Carcillo is doing serious work. I’ll let you make your own call on it. Those 2 men in that room had found something real. experienceonward.com.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Will and I sat down with David Valadez, who’s been on the show before, who flew out to Colorado Springs for the Spartan Race and stayed a few extra days, and who you will hear this time without the lisp our old recording equipment gave him (he does not have a lisp). We talked about what in-person community actually does to you, why shared struggle builds something that shared comfort can’t, and what happened when we walked into Dan Carcillo’s place and 2 strangers opened up within 5 minutes.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

Before we get into the exclusive paid content, Will and I launched Awareness to Action a few weeks. It went really well. We built community into the course on purpose, because connection is part of what makes things actually stick. We’re looking to grow that community into retreats and in-person events, the kind of thing we’ve been talking about in this episode. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course to find out more.

Until next time,

Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

If this landed for you, share it with someone who needs it. And if you want this in your inbox every Thursday, subscribe. We’ll be here.

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Steven Pressfield was 52 years old when his first novel was published.

Before that: 27 years of trying. 21 jobs. 11 states. At one point he was living out of his car. Writing through all of it. Not because it was going well… by his own admission, for most of those years what he was producing was no good, and he knew it. He kept showing up anyway.

Will and I sat down with him last week on Men Talking Mindfulness… the day his new novel, The Arcadian, came out. He’s the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire… all books a lot of people in our world have read more than once.

Someone once asked Pressfield: when in your day do you first experience Resistance?

His answer: the moment I open my eyes.

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Resistance (capital R)

Pressfield defines Resistance as a universal force. It’s faceless, formless, intelligent, and specifically aimed at anything that matters. It’s the force that shows up the moment you sit down to do the work you actually care about. When you open the blank screen. When you decide today’s the day you finally start. When you’re 10 minutes into something good and you suddenly remember six things you should check first.

Here’s what Pressfield figured out that changed everything for him: the more important the work, the stronger Resistance is. It scales with stakes. So if you’re feeling a particularly brutal pull away from something, that might be a signal you’re pointed at something worth doing.

He spent seven years completely defeated by it before he named it. He didn’t know what he was running from. He just knew he was running. The guy who eventually wrote The War of Art … the book that has helped thousands of people understand why their own creative lives feel like a battle … spent seven years not writing anything worth keeping. What shifted wasn’t his talent. It was naming the force. Recognizing it was real, that it wasn’t personal, that every person trying to build or create or change something is up against the exact same thing. The voice that says “who are you to do this?” speaks in everyone’s head. Hearing it doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re aimed at something.

Going pro

The shift Pressfield made was a decision. Not a milestone he earned. A mental switch he flipped.

He stopped thinking of himself as an amateur and started thinking of himself as a professional. And the difference between those two things isn’t talent or output or credentials.

An amateur asks: do I feel like doing this today?

A pro doesn’t ask.

He talked about Kobe Bryant. Michael Jordan. Tom Brady. Not to hero-worship them, but to point at something specific: these people had a relationship with their work that didn’t leave room for “I’m not in the mood.” Kobe was at the gym before anyone else arrived. Jordan never allowed himself only a 12-point game. Brady wouldn’t let himself fall below his own standard even on his worst day. Pressfield’s point wasn’t that you have to be them. His point was that the standard they held themselves to was a choice they made, and you can make the same choice about whatever your work is.

The metric he uses at the end of every day isn’t “was it good?” It’s two questions: Did I put in the time? Did I work as hard as I could? If yes then sleep soundly. That’s the whole ledger. Quality isn’t always in your control. Showing up is.

The Muse

This is the part I wasn’t expecting to spend as much time on as we did. Pressfield is a genuine believer in the Muse … the Greek concept that ideas come not from us but through us, from something beyond the material plane. He doesn’t hold this lightly or hedgingly. He believes Gates of Fire came from somewhere other than his own mind. Same with The War of Art. He received them.

He described it as tuning into a cosmic radio station. The professional’s job is to keep their antenna up, stay consistent enough to be worth transmitting to, and trust that if you do the work, the signal will arrive. It took him 30 years to access it with any consistency.

What I appreciated is that he kept the door open on language: call it the Muse, the quantum field, the unconscious, Jung’s capital-S Self, flow state. The label doesn’t matter. The experience is the same. When you’re in it, you don’t quite know what’s happening, and the work is better than what you thought you were capable of. Most of us have had at least a few moments that fit that description. Pressfield is saying that’s not luck. It’s what’s available when you show up consistently enough for it to find you.

Your authentic swing

Pressfield based The Legend of Bagger Vance on the Bhagavad Gita — the ancient Hindu text in which the warrior Arjuna receives instruction from Krishna, who appears as his charioteer. He transposed it to golf: troubled golfer, wise caddy. But the lesson underneath stays the same. You have an authentic swing. A calling. Work you were made for. And a shadow career is what you end up in when fear keeps you from swinging it.

His example: entertainment lawyers in Hollywood. A lot of them secretly want to be writers, directors, producers. They’re in the orbit of their calling but not in the thing itself. And when they make the jump they almost always succeed. Because the authentic swing was in there the whole time.

The question he kept coming back to, in different ways, over the course of the conversation: what’s your authentic swing? And are you swinging it? Or are you in something adjacent because it felt safer?

What to do about it

1. Name the Resistance. Give it a capital R. Pressfield said naming the force changed everything — not because naming it made it smaller, but because it made it visible. When you sit down to work and feel the pull to do anything else, that’s Resistance. And a named force is a force you can engage with. You stop saying “I’m just lazy” and start saying “there’s a thing here, and I know what to do with a thing.”

2. Flip the switch. At some point Pressfield decided he was a professional. Not because his output had earned it. He just decided. The question “do I feel like doing this?” stops applying once you’re a pro. Make the decision. You can make it today.

3. Ask the right two questions. End each day with: Did I put in the time? Did I work as hard as I could? Those are the measures. Leave quality out of it — that’s not always in your hands. Showing up and effort are.

4. Build the morning ritual. Pressfield cited Arnold Schwarzenegger on this: the moment you open your eyes, don’t think — get up. Because thinking is where Resistance gets its first foothold. Move first. Get some small wins before you sit down to the real work. He considers brushing his teeth a win. He was not kidding about this. The chain of small acts of discipline tells you something about who you are before the hard work even starts.

5. Think long haul. Pressfield’s peers from high school were retired by the time he cashed his first writing check. He could have looked at that gap and stopped. He didn’t, because there was no plan B. He had to keep going. Most of us have a plan B that quietly lets us off the hook. He’s asking you to consider whether that’s actually a feature — or whether it’s Resistance in a business suit.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness

Will and I sat down with Steven Pressfield — author of The War of Art, Turning Pro, Gates of Fire, and about 20 others — the same day his new novel, The Arcadian, came out. We talked about Resistance, what it means to go pro, the Muse and where ideas actually come from, shame as a useful force, and the Bhagavad Gita connection that most people miss in Bagger Vance. He offered to come back in six months. We told him to put it on his calendar.

Watch on YouTube | Listen here

Three resources for fighting Resistance and doing the work

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As a paid Focus Now Training subscriber, we’re giving you15% off the full Awareness to Action course inside our community.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Annual ($1,200) → $1,020 — you save $180

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That savings alone more than covers your Substack subscription. This thing literally pays for itself.

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The dentist callback. An email I’d been putting off. The car that’s been making a noise. A random thought about a conversation from last week. Your brain sends all of it with equal urgency. And once something shows up, it keeps running in the background until you deal with it.

The distraction parking lot

When something pops into your head mid-work, write down 2 things: what you were working on, and what just showed up. The first keeps your place. The second captures the distraction so your brain stops holding it.

We’ve talked about this in recent editions… your brain treats unfinished business like open browser tabs, running quietly, using up space. Bluma Zeigarnik, a Soviet psychologist, documented this in the 1920s: incomplete tasks stay mentally active until they’re finished or recorded somewhere. Writing the distraction down closes the tab. The alert stops.

Come back to the list when the session is over. Some of the things on it will still matter. Most won’t. Either way, you kept the work.

A2A launched

Will and I launched Awareness to Action last week. It went really well. We’re looking forward to having more people join. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course to find out more.

Here’s a little about it and a sample module follows that:

Sample module:

I got back from Sonoita a few weeks back. 5-day retreat with Boulder Crest, all former military and law enforcement. One full day we spent mapping our families from grandparents down: who they were, what they carried, what passed to the next generation. I guess it was a genogram of sorts…

3 days later I was talking to EJ and Tarah Kerwin, who’ve been couples therapists for a combined 30 years and built Relationship Renovation out of what they had to learn the hard way. They described the exact same mapping process as the foundation of all their couples work. Crazy how things work sometimes!

EJ and Tarah got married, got pregnant with twins on their honeymoon, and EJ’s 2 kids from a previous marriage (ages 3 and 5 at the time) came into the picture. Tarah went from 0 children to 4 in under 18 months while the twins had colic. EJ, who was a yoga teacher and a therapist with a serious mindfulness practice, went completely avoidant. Tarah said at one point she’d called him a “Buddhist motherF***” out of sheer frustration. They almost didn’t make it. 2 years later they opened their counseling center. The whole thing grew from what they had to figure out themselves.

The shelf life of a strength

EJ and Tarah’s core argument, and the one that I think applies to basically every high-functioning man we’ve talked to on this show: the traits that carried you through adolescence into professional success are often the exact traits that create the most damage in intimate relationship. Emotional control. Self-sufficiency. Problem-solving. Getting through hard things without breaking. They were functional. They worked, for a long time, in specific environments.

EJ is a clear example. He was the guy who could handle high-pressure situations and stay composed. That made him good at his work. It made him reliable in a crisis. It also meant he couldn’t show up transparent or vulnerable with Tarah, because he’d spent 20 years building an infrastructure around “I’m fine.” And he succeeded so completely at that construction that he didn’t even know it existed. His first wife had told him the same things Tarah was telling him. He married someone completely different. He got the same problems. At some point he had to look at the common denominator.

Tarah’s observation: most of the couples they see have been running traits that served someone, somewhere, at some point. The traits themselves aren’t the problem. The failure to recognize when context has changed is where things break. The skills that got you here require an upgrade for where you’re trying to go. That’s not a comfortable thing to hear if you’ve built an identity around those skills. I’m not saying it doesn’t apply to me, because it does.

Hypo-arousal is armor

This is the one I want every man who thinks he’s “the calm one” in his relationship to sit with. EJ’s observation, and it applies directly to how he used to operate: a lot of men mistake hypo-arousal for staying rational. Something activating happens. They shut down. And then they convince themselves (and try to convince their partner): “I didn’t yell. My voice isn’t raised. I’m fine. I’m the one who’s actually calm here.”

The problem is they’re not regulated. They’re checked out. Hypo-arousal is a nervous system response, not a choice, and it’s the opposite of being present. It’s the body going quiet to protect itself. EJ pointed out that men use it especially around intimacy: rejection comes, they shut down, and instead of saying “I’m feeling hurt and I’m feeling unwanted,” they go into this composed distance that their partner reads as resentment and withdrawal. The shutdown was supposed to be protection. It builds exactly the distance it was trying to avoid.

One of our earlier guests gave us an acronym that came up again in this conversation: FINE. Feelings Inside, Not Expressed. That’s the avoidant flavor of “I’m fine.” The difference between being regulated and being hypo-aroused is whether you could actually be present with your partner’s experience right now. A lot of men who think they’re regulated would answer that question differently if they were being honest about it.

Your partner can be your greatest teacher

This is the reframe EJ described, and it’s the hardest one to actually use. When Tarah triggers something in him, his default used to be to go toward blame or to go away. The shift he’s worked on: holding up a mirror. The discomfort she creates in him is pointing toward something in him that needs developing. The trigger is information, not just a problem to contain or exit.

Tarah said it differently: “EJ is my blind spot. There are so many things I don’t see about myself.” The relationship as a mirror rather than as a source of threat is a completely different orientation. It requires what EJ described as a willingness to sit with the discomfort rather than flee it. His phrasing: “If it hurts, I’m going to sit with it. I’m going to see what it’s teaching me.”

Which is mindfulness applied in the hardest place. Your partner, in your kitchen, after a long day, when something they said just landed wrong and every part of your nervous system is pulling you toward the exit. The window between what they said and how you respond is narrow. EJ and Tarah’s work is about building that window out. That, I think, is what the best relationship work is. And it’s also exactly what we spent the last hour on in Wednesday’s webinar.

Full episode: Audio here. Video is on Spotify now and will be on the Valor Media Network YouTube channel later today. Search Men Talking Mindfulness on any podcast platform. EJ and Tarah’s work is at relationshiprenovation.com. They also run a global men’s group called Men Who Do the Work.

Founders’ Days: A2A at 40% off through 1pm ET Friday.

The Awareness to Action course is live. From now through 1pm ET tomorrow, we’re running Founders’ Days: 40% off the annual membership and a significant discount on the lifetime fee. This is the best price we’ll EVER offer.

12 modules. Full year of access. Videos, guided meditations, live calls with Will and me, Circle community. The whole framework for attention, awareness, and action, built into a practice.

focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course or text MTM to 33777.

A note on what’s below.

The 3 resources at the end of this newsletter are the kind of thing we put in the paid edition every week: something you can actually use today, tied directly to what we talked about. This week they’re open to everyone.

If you want to keep getting this every Thursday, becoming a paid subscriber is how that works. We put real work into these and we appreciate everyone who supports it.

3 resources from this episode

Normally in the paid edition. Open this week.

Resource 1: The internal script audit

EJ described catching the cognitions that auto-launch before a conflict. His is “here we go again.” The minute that phrase surfaces, his nervous system has already decided how the next hour goes. He can catch it, he can pivot. But only if he knows what to listen for.

Write down your top 3. The internal phrases that surface right before things go sideways with your partner. “Here we go.” “Why does she always...” “I can’t say anything.” Whatever yours are. Writing them down gives you a fighting chance of catching them in the moment. You can’t redirect a script you haven’t read.

Resource 2: EJ’s compassion mantra

When Tarah was escalating and EJ’s old pattern would have been to judge and withdraw, he started using a specific phrase: “She’s suffering right now.” Not as a platitude. As a cognitive interrupt. He was replacing “what the hell is wrong with her” with a statement that was actually more accurate about what was happening.

Keep a phrase like this ready. When your partner’s behavior triggers your nervous system and you’re about to go into shutdown or defense, the phrase is a redirect before your default pattern takes over. EJ’s exact words work fine. Or find your own version that’s true.

Resource 3: The Triple H question

Jon brought this up during the conversation: before responding to your partner in a hard moment, ask which of 3 things they actually need. Heard. Hugged. Or Helped. Those 3 cover most of what’s actually being asked for. “Helped” is the fix-it response, which is usually not what’s needed but gets deployed most often. “Heard” is usually what’s being asked for, and it requires almost nothing except presence and your mouth staying closed long enough for them to finish.

You can ask it out loud. “Do you need me to listen, do you need to be held, or do you want me to help you figure it out?” Most partners will tell you. And most men are surprised that the answer is rarely “help me fix it.”

Men Talking Mindfulness is hosted by Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider.
New episodes every week. Search Men Talking Mindfulness on any podcast platform.
EJ and Tarah Kerwin: relationshiprenovation.com
Focus Now Training: focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course

Memorial Day is the one day I slow down and sit with the names. Not the idea of service or the concept of sacrifice. The actual people. The guys I knew who didn’t come home. The families who set a place at a table that will never be filled again. If you’re carrying anyone like that today, I hope you got some time to hold them in your hearts.

We don’t take that lightly here. Everything we build at Focus Now is built on the foundation those people died defending: the right to choose who you become, how you spend your attention, what kind of life you actually live. That’s not a small thing. And it’s worth remembering where it came from.

This week’s focus check

The open loops dump. 2 minutes. Before you do anything else today.

Your brain is not a storage system. It’s a processing system. But most of us are running it like a hard drive, loading it with every unfinished task, pending conversation, and half-formed worry, and then wondering why we can’t focus.

There’s a psychological principle behind this called the Zeigarnik effect. Your brain keeps unfinished tasks active in working memory until they’re resolved or offloaded. That hum you feel when you sit down to work, the background noise, the pull in 6 directions at once, that’s your brain running open loops. And it can only close them by getting them out of your head and onto something external.

Here’s the practice. Grab a piece of paper or open a blank doc. Set a timer for 2 minutes. Write every open loop you’re holding right now: the email you haven’t sent, the conversation you need to have, the thing you said you’d do that you haven’t, the worry you keep returning to. Don’t sort or prioritize. Just get it out. When the timer goes off, stop.

You’re not solving anything. You’re clearing the RAM. And what happens after you do it is noticeable: the background noise quiets, and you can actually put your full attention on the thing in front of you instead of everything else at once.

That’s the gap. The space between what’s coming at you and how you choose to respond. Right now most of us are living with that gap nearly closed because there’s so much running in the background. Tomorrow we’re going into exactly how to develop it. Which brings me to this.

Live webinar tomorrow: developing the gap

Wednesday, May 27 at 12pm ET

Viktor Frankl wrote that between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose. Will and I have spent years building practical tools for finding and expanding that space, and tomorrow we’re teaching the whole framework live.

We’re going to cover how that gap gets compressed under stress, why most focus advice misses this completely, and what you can actually do to widen it in real-time so that you’re responding instead of reacting across every high-stakes moment in your day.

It’s free. It’s one hour. And it’s the core of everything we teach.

Register for Wednesday’s webinar

Right after the webinar: the A2A course opens at 40% off

Our Awareness to Action course is live now at full price. For 48 hours immediately following tomorrow’s webinar, we’re opening it at 40% off the annual membership and a significant discount off the lifetime fee. That window closes on Friday at 1pm ET.

The course is 12 modules built around the exact framework we’ll be teaching tomorrow: awareness, attention, and action. Videos, guided meditations, resources, live calls with Will and me, and a full year of access. Everything you need to actually build this as a practice, not just understand it as a concept.

If you want to start now at full price, it’s at focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course. Or wait until after the webinar and get it at the best price we’re offering. Either way, come to the webinar tomorrow. It stands on its own.

Register for Wednesday’s webinar

Today, take a breath for the ones who can’t.

See you tomorrow.

Jon

Men Talking Mindfulness is hosted by Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider.
New episodes every week. Search Men Talking Mindfulness on any podcast platform.
Focus Now Training: focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course