The version of you that walks into the office performing the role of leader is tired. So is the team that can feel the performance. You’re both running on fumes, and the show around the work is what’s draining you the most.

This week, I’m asking you to try one thing.

Notice the moment you put the mask on.

That’s all. Just notice it.

There’s a tiny shift that happens. Maybe in your jaw. Maybe in your voice. Maybe in the way you walk into a room. Most leaders have been doing it so long they don’t even register it anymore. The armor goes on autopilot.

This week, your focus is to catch yourself in the act. One moment a day where you feel the mask going up, and you just notice. Write down what triggered it. A meeting? A specific person? Walking through the office door?

That’s the focus check this week. Awareness first. Action after.

If you want to go deeper, I dropped a Men Talking Mindfulness solo episode this Wednesday on leadership theater and what happens when you finally drop the armor. Worth a listen if any of this is landing.

Stay focused.

Jon

PS … EXCITING STUFF!!! Awareness to Action is almost here. The course Will and I have been building for the last year officially opens May 27th. Twelve modules that walk you through this exact work. Sit in on the live launch webinar that same day and you'll get a coupon code for 40% off the course, good for 48 hours after the webinar ends.

Register for the webinar here.

Text MTM to 33777 to get the course info, the webinar link, and everything else we're doing.

Or just click here.

Jon opened this week’s episode with a question most people have felt but never said out loud: you’ve read the books, nodded along, agreed with every word in them, and then changed nothing. What’s actually going on there?

Our guest is . Author of Hooked (the book about building products that capture your attention), then Indistractable (the book on how to resist some of those same systems), and now Beyond Belief, which goes into the deeper layer underneath both of them. Why do we know exactly what to do and still not do it? Nir spent six years on that question. He had a real answer.

90% of your distractions don’t start with your phone.

Only 10% of the time you reach for your phone is because of a notification. The other 90% is because of what Nir calls an internal trigger: an uncomfortable emotional state you’re trying to escape. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, anxiety, uncertainty. That’s the actual source. The phone is just the vehicle available in that moment.

The implication matters. You can delete the apps, leave the phone in another room, turn off every notification. And the feeling that drives distraction will still be there, looking for something else to climb into. The vehicle changes. The feeling underneath stays. Which is why any approach to distraction that only targets the technology is solving for the wrong variable.

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The motivation triangle has a third leg most people never see.

The conventional model of motivation is a straight line: if I want the benefit, I’ll do the behavior. Classic economics. But Nir says there’s a third element most people never account for: belief. You have to believe the benefit is actually available to you. And you have to believe you’re capable of the behavior. Without that, the structure collapses.

His finding from the research: the number one reason people don’t meet their long-term goals is that somewhere along the way, they stopped believing it was going to work. And once that belief goes, quitting follows. As Nir put it: “Quitting guarantees failure. Perseverance doesn’t guarantee success, but quitting is the one guaranteed way to lose.”

Beliefs are tools, not truths.

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Nir draws a line between facts, faith, and beliefs. Facts are objective (the world is not flat). Faith is conviction that doesn’t require evidence, and almost never changes. But beliefs sit between those two. A belief is a conviction that’s open to revision based on new evidence. They can be changed. That’s what makes them so important.

There’s a story in the book about a man called Mr. A, a research subject who overdosed after a bad breakup. He took an entire bottle of what he believed were antidepressants. By the time he reached the ER, he had dangerously low blood pressure, a falling heart rate, and was fading in and out of consciousness. Real physiological symptoms, textbook overdose presentation. Except he was in the control group of an antidepressant trial. The bottle was cornstarch placebos. 15 minutes after they told him the truth, his vitals returned to normal and he walked out fine. His beliefs had literally become his biology.

On the other end: a Yale study found that people with positive beliefs about aging lived 7.5 years longer. More than the effect of diet. More than exercise. More than quitting smoking. From belief alone.

And the identity piece, which is where this gets personal. Nir has ADHD. The diagnosis was useful at first: it explained something that had been hard to name. But over time, every time Nir got distracted, his brain went straight to: chronic brain disease, never going to fix this, I can’t do this like other people can. That story took him further from the task he was trying to do. So he changed the script. The diagnosis is a map, he says. It shows you where you are. A map isn’t your identity, and it doesn’t tell you where you have to stay.

Psychologists call it identity foreclosure when a label or diagnosis becomes so fixed that you stop looking further. You tunnel your entire experience through it. I’m this way because of this thing and that’s that. The question worth asking: is that a fact, or is it a belief? Because if it’s a belief, it can change.

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The rats swam for 60 hours.

Richter’s experiment in the 1950s. Wild rats dropped into a cylinder of water swam for about 15 minutes before giving up. Then he took a second group, let them swim to the 15-minute mark, pulled them out just as they were starting to struggle, let them rest, and put them back in. How much longer did the second group swim? 60 hours. 240 times longer. Same rats, same cylinder, same challenge. The only variable was that the second group had experienced rescue. They had reason to believe that if they kept going, something might change.

Jon connected it to SEAL training. Some of the strongest men he’d seen, genuine physical specimens, would ring out early. And watching them leave, he said, his own belief actually grew. Not because the physical challenge got easier. Because the story about what was possible shifted. Richter’s experiment is not about rats. It’s about what becomes available when you believe the hand might reach in.

The full conversation is up now. Audio: pod.fo/e/412ab7. Video is available on Spotify now and will be on the Valor Media Network YouTube channel later Thursday.

This week’s newsletter has 3 practical tools from the conversation below: the internal trigger log, the belief audit, and the time-boxing practice.

And if this conversation hits close to home, it goes deeper in Module 4 of our Awareness to Action course (Noticing Thoughts and Emotions). Head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest or text A2A to 33777 to stay in the loop.

Full newsletter archive: newsletter.focusnowtraining.com or text MTM to 33777.

Nir Eyal’s free 5-minute belief change guide: nirandfar.com/beyondbelieflive

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Click here —> Something’s coming May 27.

We’ve been building a course for the past nine months but it’s been six years in the making.

12 weeks of practical tools for presence, awareness, and the gap between what happens to you and how you respond.

We’re sharing details with a smaller group first... pricing, early access, the stuff that won’t hit this newsletter until launch day.

If you want in on that, get on the list.

Click here —> Join the inside track here.

Jon and Will

Ok. Fair warning: this week is different. And we realize this is at the risk of you hitting that “unsubscribe” button… but please hear us out first!

Every week we write about what we’re learning from the podcast conversations, what stuck, and what you can actually use. We try not to sell things too much here. That’s been the unspoken rule since we started, and we’ve kept it pretty consistently. But we spent the last several months building a course, and I’d feel like I was keeping a secret from you if I didn’t at least tell you it exists. So. One exception.

It’s called Awareness to Action (A2A). It’s a practical course in mindfulness and meditation, built by Focus Now Training. And the science behind it is what I want to tell you about today, because that’s what got me in the first place. (I used to think this stuff was bogus!)… if you wanna skip all this and go straight to finding out more information about the course… scroll all the way down. Otherwise… here’s the research…

The actual studies, not the pop-psych summaries. And what kept showing up is that the physiological and neurological changes from a consistent mindfulness practice are specific, measurable, and a lot more concrete than most mindfulness conversations let on.

Breath and the nervous system

Studies from Harvard Medical School and the National Institutes of Health show that slow, controlled breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, which reduces heart rate and blood pressure and increases feelings of calm and clarity. Stanford University’s Center for Mindfulness and Compassion found that daily breath awareness can lower cortisol by up to 25% in just 8 weeks. And the American Psychological Association has confirmed that Box Breathing significantly reduces stress, improves sleep, and improves concentration. It’s also a technique that has recently become popular and somehow has gotten attributed to my former community, the Navy SEALs (yes, we do it but it’s existed way longer than the SEALs have been using it). But hey, if it works well enough for the guys jumping out of planes and diving under ships, it’s probably worth 4 minutes of your Tuesday morning.

Body awareness and what’s actually happening in the brain

Research from the University of Wisconsin and the APA shows that mindfulness-based body awareness increases activity in the insula, the brain region responsible for interoception (your ability to sense your internal states). Better interoception means better emotional regulation and lower physiological stress. Studies published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience show that daily body-scan meditation decreases activity in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, while increasing gray matter density in regions tied to self-awareness and empathy. The NIH also reports that consistent somatic mindfulness practice improves heart-rate variability and lowers inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein.

So we’re not talking about feeling vaguely calmer. We’re talking about measurable changes in brain structure and chemistry.

Thoughts, emotions, and “The Gap”

Research from the NIH and Harvard-affiliated researchers shows that mindfulness reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network. Less rumination. Less self-judgment. Less emotional reactivity. In our course we call this space calls “The Gap”: the distance between what happens and how you respond. That gap is where you stop reacting and start choosing. And it turns out you can train it.

The future self piece

Columbia Business School research shows that connecting to a specific version of yourself projected 6 to 12 months into the future significantly increases consistent healthy behavior. Increased exercise, better diet, reduced alcohol use, lower depression risk, greater sense of well-being, smarter long-term decisions, and stronger resilience after setbacks. The mechanism behind it: most of us treat our future self like a stranger. Someone who’ll deal with the consequences of what we’re doing now. When you make the connection to that version of yourself specific and vivid, it changes how you make decisions today.

We built a 6-prompt Future Self exercise into the course for exactly this reason. Not a vision board. A structured set of prompts specific enough to actually land.

What the course actually is

3 sections (Awareness / Practice / Action); 12 Weekly Modules. Each module follows the same structure: learn the concept, practice it, reflect, apply it. There’s a Circle community component where you’re doing this alongside other people who are working through the same material. And a workbook that goes with everything.

The philosophy of the course, and I mean this sincerely: start where you are. Begin again when you drift. Consistency and honesty matter more than intensity.

Here’s the actual ask

We have a free webinar on May 27th. That’s also the day the course opens. Anyone who signs up within the first 48 hours gets Founder’s Pricing, which is a significant discount off the standard rate (over 40%!!!). To stay in the loop and get the details, head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest or text A2A to 33777. And to register for the May 27th webinar directly: register here.

That’s it. Thanks for letting me break the rule once. Back to normal next week.

Mindfulness is everywhere. Apps, corporate programs, retreats, workplace wellness modules. A $2 billion industry. And when you look around, we’re burned out, disconnected, and more distracted than ever. Men’s mental health is worse, not better.

Jon opened this week’s episode with one question: is any of this actually working, or are we just buying calm-shaped merchandise?

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, we sat down with Sean Fargo. Former Buddhist monk (2 years in a monastery in Thailand), founder of mindfulnessexercises.com, trauma-sensitive teacher, and the person whose program Jon went through to earn his mindfulness meditation teacher certification. Sean’s teaching has reached over 20 million people. He had a real answer to that opening question.

A few things from the conversation worth knowing:

Gabor Mate calls it the hole. Something inside is reaching for relief, and whatever’s available becomes the vehicle. The phone, the wine, the scroll, the work. Swap out the vehicle and another one shows up, because the hole is still there. Sean says most of us are moving faster than we ever have, and speed is its own kind of avoidance. We’ve lost the ability to just sit. And I don’t mean meditate. Just sit in a chair and breathe for a few minutes without reaching for anything. When we feel unsafe from uncertainty (and most of us are feeling that right now), the instinct is to control, move faster, brace. The thing that actually helps is the opposite of that instinct.

The seeking is doing damage. Jon said it plainly: we’re collecting connections on social media, on LinkedIn, on our phones, taking pride in how many we have, and the depth in most of them is nearly zero. And the seeking is actively breaking the relationships we actually need. He talked about sitting on one end of the couch, his wife on the other, kids watching a movie, both of them on their phones… something that happens in a lot of homes. Sean’s response was a question: what are we actually looking for when we seek connection? And can we offer some of that to ourselves?

He told a story from the time of the Buddha. Ananda (the Buddha’s attendant monk) had a woman who loved him and kept pushing him to leave the monastery and start a family. The Buddha asked her: what do you love about Ananda? She listed 5 qualities. Are those same qualities in you? They were, undeveloped, not fully lived. Tend to those in yourself, and the desperate grip loosens. Sean was clear: we need connection. But tending to your own qualities rather than outsourcing that work to someone else changes how you show up in every relationship you have.

External goals have one point of failure. Sean draws a line between inside purpose and outside purpose. Outside purpose is real and worth pursuing. The career, the business, the revenue, the life you’re building. But any single event outside your control can wipe it out. AI takes your job. A health crisis hits. The market turns. The partner walks. If the internal compass isn’t built, you lose yourself when you lose those things. The question Sean comes back to when the noise gets loud: what would I like for myself? Not what does everyone expect from me. What would I like for me. He says it always comes back to values. To how you want to be. To what matters when everything external is stripped away.

Men are carrying grief they haven’t touched. This was Sean’s final point, and probably the most unexpected. The grief of a purpose that shifted. An identity built over years that no longer fits. A version of life that didn’t materialize the way you thought it would. Men file all of this under “I’m fine” and keep moving, and then sit down to meditate and find themselves fidgety, restless, unable to settle. Something underneath keeps surfacing that they’re trying not to look at. Sean’s answer: meet it. Let it get messy. Let the energy come out without labeling it or judging it. Once it starts to move, the ability to just sit and breathe comes back. The grief was never the obstacle. Leaving it untouched was.

The newsletter this week has three practical tools from the conversation. Sean’s internal compass practice (the “What would I like for myself?” exercise done properly), the Ananda practice (a specific way to identify what you’re seeking from others and begin tending to those qualities in yourself), and the grief practice (honoring what’s been carried so it stops running the show).

******ANNOUNCEMENT!! ******

Our Awareness to Action course (A2A) starts May 27th. Head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest to stay in the loop.

Find this week’s episode:

Audio: Available now on your favorite podcast platform. Search Men Talking Mindfulness or use this link: pod.fo/e/40d186

Video: Available Thursday on Spotify and on the Valor Media Network YouTube channel.

Full newsletter archive: newsletter.focusnowtraining.com or text MTM to 33777.

Sean Fargo: mindfulnessexercises.com

This week’s paid three resources:

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This week we’re keeping it simple. And we’re including a bonus.

The breath you’re ignoring right now

You breathe about 20,000 times a day.

And almost none of those breaths are intentional. They just happen. Your body runs on autopilot, you stay alive, and you never think about it.

Which is fine. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

But did you know the way you breathe affects your nervous system in real time. Shallow, fast breathing tells your body something is wrong. Slow, controlled breathing tells your body you’re safe. And your body believes whatever signal you send it.

This is why “just breathe” is terrible advice. Everyone breathes. The question is how.

Box Breathing: The Simplest Protocol That Actually Works

Box breathing is used by first responders, surgeons, and anyone else who needs to stay calm when things get loud. I used it for years in the SEAL Teams. Still use it today.

Here’s how it works:

Inhale for 4 counts. Hold for 4 counts. Exhale for 4 counts. Hold for 4 counts. Repeat.

That’s a box. Four sides, four counts each. Simple enough to remember when your heart rate is through the roof.

Why it works: the exhale and the holds activate your parasympathetic nervous system… the “rest and digest” side. You’re manually overriding the stress response by controlling the one thing you can always control: your breath.

When to use it:

Before a difficult conversation. Before a presentation. When you’re stuck in traffic and already running late. When your kid does something that makes you want to lose your mind and you have three seconds to decide how to respond.

Any time you need to create space between stimulus and response, box breathing buys you that space.

BONUS: Watch the video above!

We put together a short guided box breathing video for you. No fluff, no long intro. Just the practice.

Try it once today. See how you feel after.

The So What

You can read about stress management all day. You can understand the science. You can know exactly what you’re supposed to do.

None of that matters if you don’t have a tool you can actually use in the moment.

Box breathing is that tool. It’s free, it’s portable, and it works whether you believe in it or not. Your nervous system doesn’t care about your opinions. It responds to the signal you give it.

Give it a better signal.

One thing to try this week

Use box breathing once a day for five days. Doesn’t have to be a crisis. Could be before your first meeting. Could be in your car before you walk into the house after work. Could be right now, before you read the next paragraph.

4 in. 4 hold. 4 out. 4 hold.

That’s it.

One more thing…

Will and I have been building something for a while now. A course called Awareness to Action. It goes deeper on everything we cover in these newsletters… breath work, attention training, stress response, the gap between stimulus and response.

We’re launching it at the end of May.

If you want to be first to know when it opens, get on the list here:

https://focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest

No spam. Just a heads up when we open the doors.

What situation are you going to use box breathing in this week? Reply and tell us… we actually want to know.

Jon and Will, Focus Now Training and The Men Talking Mindfulness Podcast.

For more on focus, attention, and building the mental skills that actually move the needle at work, subscribe.

There’s a piece of glass. It can be a window or a mirror. The glass doesn’t decide. What decides is whether something dark gets put on the back.

When there’s nothing behind it, you see through. When something dark lines the back, you see yourself.

International best seller, Dr. Ishan Shivanand, offered that as a description of the ego. And it’s one of those things that sounds simple until you start applying it to your own day. How much of today did you spend looking through? How much did you spend looking in?

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, Will and I sat down with Dr. Shivanand, a man who spent roughly 20 years living and studying in a Himalayan monastery before moving to the West. He wrote a book called “The Practice of Immortality.” The title sounds like something you’d file under spirituality and not finish. The conversation we had is something else.

A few things worth knowing:

What “immortality” actually means. Dr. Shivanand is pointing at the timeless. The principles that outlast the ego. The way of being that continues after you’re gone. Gratitude, patience, presence. The stuff that’s been said for thousands of years because it keeps being true. You practice it because it makes what you’re living matter, and because the ego, left to its own devices, will spend your whole life chasing things that don’t.

The ego as the dark backing. That’s the metaphor, and it holds. When you’re running your day through the filter of how you look, whether you’re ahead or behind, what the situation says about you... you’re looking at a mirror. The window is still there. The glass is the same. But what’s behind it changes what the glass does. Gratitude is one of the things that clears the backing. The real kind. Looking out instead of in. Noticing that the world exists independently of how you’re doing in it. That shift from complaint to observation is something Dr. Shivanand came back to throughout the conversation.

America is the Ghost of Christmas Future. He said it, not me. His point was precise: we’re the leading indicator. McDonald’s spread across the world and brought obesity rates with it. Social media was built here, and the anxiety it generates here is spreading the same way. What gets normalized in America tends to get exported. He said it without judgment, the way you’d deliver a diagnosis. Here’s what’s happening, here’s the trajectory, here’s what you do with that information personally.

The ego will build a cathedral out of a hangover. He told a story from early in his monastery years. A man arrived one night, stumbling and incoherent, clearly out of his mind. The monks spent the night with him. By morning, the man was fine. Ishan, young and still early in his training, walked around feeling good about himself afterward. Very much a “look what I did” situation. The senior monks told him the man was drunk. Not haunted. Not in need of spiritual intervention. Just drunk. He laughed when he told the story. The point wasn’t the punchline. It was what he noticed afterward: the ego will find significance anywhere. Given the chance, it’ll attach to whatever’s available and call it a calling.

Before we get to the premium stuff, if you’ve been thinking about what it looks like to actually do something with the awareness you’re building, we’re hosting a free webinar on May 27th tied to the launch of our Awareness to Action course (A2A). Head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest to sign up and you’ll get our Train Your Mind app as a free gift when you do.

Here’s more information about the course…

Find This Week’s Episode:

Audio: Available now on your favorite podcast platform. Search Men Talking Mindfulness. Direct link: pod.fo/e/4077c7

Video: Up later today on the Valor Media Network on YouTube.

Full newsletter archive: newsletter.focusnowtraining.com or text MTM to 33777.

Everything below this is paid subscriber content.

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You know the moment.

Someone says something in a meeting that lights you up. Or you get an email that makes your chest tighten. Or your kid does something right before you have to jump on a call and suddenly you’re carrying that frustration into a conversation where it doesn’t belong.

We’ve all been there. And most of us handle it the same way... we react. We say something we have to clean up later. We send the reply we shouldn’t have sent. We make the moment worse.

There’s a better way. And it takes about ten seconds.

The STOP Method

This is one of the simplest tools we teach, and honestly one of the most useful. Four letters. Four steps.

S - Stop. Just pause. Whatever you’re about to do or say, don’t. Not yet. Create a gap between the stimulus and your response.

T - Take a breath. One slow breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. This isn’t woo-woo stuff... it activates your parasympathetic nervous system and pulls you out of fight-or-flight mode. Your physiology shifts in seconds.

O - Observe. Notice what’s actually happening. What are you feeling in your body? What’s the story you’re telling yourself about this situation? Is that story accurate, or are you filling in gaps with assumptions?

P - Proceed. Now you can move forward. But you’re doing it from a place of clarity instead of reactivity. The action you take from here will almost always be better than the one you were about to take ten seconds ago.

The So What

Stress doesn’t go away. Frustrating people don’t go away. Situations that trigger you will keep showing up for the rest of your life.

What changes is how much space you have between the trigger and your response. That space is where your professionalism lives. That space is where your leadership lives.

STOP is how you build that space, one moment at a time.

One Thing To Try This Week

Use STOP once a day for the next five days. Doesn’t have to be a big moment. Could be traffic. Could be a minor annoyance at work. Could be your kids doing kid stuff.

Just practice creating the gap. See what you notice.

This is one method of stress management and focus we teach in our upcoming Awareness to Action Cours. If you want to go deeper on this kind of training... we’re launching in late May. It’s built around practical tools like this one, designed for people who want results without the fluff.

Get on the interest list here so you don’t miss it.

What situation are you going to try STOP with this week? Reply and tell us.

Jon and Will, Focus Now Training

One molecule controls your blood pressure, your brain, your sexual health, and how fast you age. After 40, most men have half of what they need. Here’s what to do about it.

There is a molecule your body makes that controls your blood pressure, regulates blood flow to your brain, determines your sexual performance, governs how well you recover from workouts, and influences how fast you age at the cellular level. Most people have never heard of it. After the age of 40, the average person is producing about half as much as they need. And the things most men are doing every single morning — brushing their teeth, rinsing their mouth, taking their heartburn medication — are making it worse.

The molecule is called nitric oxide. This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, we sat down with Dr. Nathan Bryan, who has spent 25 years researching it. He’s published more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers, holds dozens of patents, and has built a billion-dollar portfolio of companies around this one molecule. He also lost his oldest son to a car accident in 2018, watched his father become paralyzed in 1984, and still wakes up every morning choosing purpose over circumstance. We got into all of it.

What Nitric Oxide Actually Does

The short version: nitric oxide is the body’s master signal for blood flow. When your brain needs more oxygen to think clearly, nitric oxide dilates the blood vessels that supply it. When you start exercising, it increases blood flow to your heart and muscles. When you need sexual function, it’s what triggers engorgement — in men and women. It mobilizes stem cells that repair damaged tissue. And it prevents telomeres from shortening, which matters because shorter telomeres mean a shorter lifespan.

Three researchers — Fred Murad, Robert Furchgott, and Lou Ignarro — won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1998 for discovering how this works. Dr. Bryan trained under Murad. He describes it as the greatest discovery in the history of cardiovascular medicine. More than 200,000 papers have been published on nitric oxide since the Nobel Prize. And still most people have never heard of it.

The Low Battery Warning Your Body Is Already Sending

Dr. Bryan made a comparison in the episode that I haven’t stopped thinking about. He said the body is like a smartphone. When the battery gets low, a red light comes on. The problem is most men ignore that light. By the time they pay attention, the phone is already dying.

The hierarchy of symptoms as nitric oxide declines goes like this. The first sign — the very first red light — is erectile dysfunction. Not as a standalone issue, but as a signal that the blood vessels throughout the entire body are losing their ability to respond. Then blood pressure starts to climb. Then metabolic disease and insulin resistance. Then you start getting winded going up a flight of stairs. Then mild cognitive impairment begins, and eventually it tracks toward Alzheimer’s. Two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation in blood pressure. Nine out of ten are metabolically unfit.

The flip side: when nitric oxide is where it should be, you wake up with energy, your mind is sharp, your physical performance is there, your body adapts to the demands you put on it, and you don’t develop vascular disease. Dr. Bryan is 52 years old. His vascular age tests at 29.

The Four Things Quietly Killing Your Nitric Oxide

This is the part of the conversation that will change what you do tomorrow morning. Dr. Bryan laid out four things that actively suppress nitric oxide production — and all four are things most people do without a second thought.

Fluoride. 72 percent of US municipalities still add fluoride to drinking water. The National Toxicology Program published a paper last year — one the previous administration suppressed for five years — confirming there is no benefit of fluoride in drinking water for cavity prevention, and that it lowers IQ in children by an average of seven points. It is a known antiseptic and neurotoxin. When you absorb it through your mouth, it kills the bacteria in your oral microbiome that are responsible for producing nitric oxide. Your blood pressure goes up. The benefits of your workout disappear.

Antiseptic mouthwash. Two out of three Americans use it every morning. Listerine still advertises that it kills 99.99 percent of bacteria in your mouth as if that’s a selling point. It isn’t. The oral bacteria it’s killing are part of a system that converts nitrates from your diet into nitric oxide. When you eradicate them, you lose a significant production pathway. There is no mouthwash currently on the market that doesn’t negatively affect the oral microbiome, according to Dr. Bryan’s testing.

Antacids and proton pump inhibitors. Prilosec, Nexium, Prevacid, omeprazole. These are among the most prescribed drugs in the country. They work by shutting down stomach acid production, which is also a pathway the body uses to produce nitric oxide. People who have taken PPIs for three to five years have a 40 percent higher incidence of heart attack, stroke, and Alzheimer’s compared to those who haven’t.

Sugar and simple carbohydrates. Glucose is sticky. When blood sugar spikes, glucose literally adheres to proteins throughout the body, including to the nitric oxide synthase enzyme. When that enzyme gets gummed up, it can’t do its job — and instead of producing nitric oxide, it generates a harmful oxygen radical called superoxide. This is the same mechanism that makes hemoglobin A1C a diabetes marker. The higher your blood sugar, the more your body’s ability to make nitric oxide gets locked down.

What to Start Doing

Switch to fluoride-free toothpaste. Hydroxyapatite-based formulas remineralize teeth without the antiseptic damage. Dr. Bryan has used one for over 20 years and says when people with high blood pressure make the switch, many see their blood pressure normalize within 30 days. Fire any dentist who tells you fluoride is non-negotiable.

Ditch the antiseptic mouthwash. If fresh breath matters to you, that problem is mostly solved by stopping mouth breathing at night — which also happens to be one of the most significant things you can do for nitric oxide production.

Nasal breathe, especially at night. The highest concentration of nitric oxide synthase enzymes in the body is in the nasal epithelium. Every breath in through the nose activates them. Mouth tape exists for this reason. If you haven’t tried it, this episode is a good reason to start.

Get sunlight early. Twenty to thirty minutes of direct sunlight per day, ideally in the morning, activates nitric oxide production through the skin. Dr. Bryan does this as part of his daily routine without exception.

Move your body for 20-30 minutes, most days. Moderate physical exercise is one of the most reliable triggers for nitric oxide production. This does not have to be aggressive. Brisk walking counts.

There’s much more beyond the paywall below. If you’d like to read more, hit that subscribe button and become a paid subscriber.

But before that…

This episode connected a lot of dots for me, and I think it will for you too. The science is real. The changes to make are simple. And the reason to make them is clearer than it’s ever been.

Speaking of that — if you’re ready to take what you’re learning and actually build it into how you operate, our Awareness to Action (A2A) course launches in May. Head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest to stay in the loop.

As for how to get this week’s episode:

Audio: Search Men Talking Mindfulness on your favorite podcast platform — new episode dropping now

Video: Valor Media Network on YouTube — available later today

A2A Course: focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest

Subscribe now

Read more

We talk about focus like it lives entirely between our ears.

We buy apps. We try productivity hacks. We read books about deep work and attention management. And then we sit at our desks for nine hours straight, skip lunch, sleep five hours, and wonder why we can’t concentrate past 2pm.

I spent years in the SEAL Teams watching this play out in real time. Guys who were absolute physical specimens could solve problems under pressure that would make most people’s brains melt. And guys who let their fitness slide... you could see the cognitive decline show up in their decision-making before it showed up anywhere else.

This wasn’t coincidence. It was physiology.

The Science in Plain English

When you exercise, your brain releases a protein called BDNF... brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Think of it like fertilizer for your neurons. It helps your brain build new connections and strengthens the ones you already have. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for focus and decision-making, is especially responsive to this stuff.

When you sleep, your brain clears out metabolic waste through something called the glymphatic system. Skip sleep, and that waste builds up. The result feels exactly like what it is... trying to think through a fog.

When you eat garbage, your blood sugar spikes and crashes. Every crash takes your attention with it.

None of this is complicated. We just ignore it because it feels too basic to matter.

The So What

You can have the best focus techniques in the world, but if your body is working against you, you’re fighting uphill with a weighted vest on.

Physical health isn’t separate from mental performance. It’s the foundation of it.

The most productive people I know don’t treat exercise and sleep as things they’ll get to when they have time. They treat them as non-negotiables that make everything else possible.

One Thing To Try This Week

Pick one physical input and lock it in for five days straight.

Maybe it’s seven hours of sleep minimum. Maybe it’s a 20-minute walk before you start work. Maybe it’s not eating lunch at your desk while answering emails.

Just one thing. Five days. See what shifts.

What are you going to try? Reply and tell us... we actually want to know.

Jon and Will, Focus Now Training

And if you want to go deeper on building the mental skills that support everything we’re talking about here... we’re launching our Awareness to Action course in late May. Practical tools. No fluff. Designed for people who actually want to use this stuff at work and at home.

Get on the interest list here so you don’t miss it.

We were in Hawaii a few years back. My wife was there, a buddy of mine had just competed in a physique show the night before. We went to the beach the next morning. He took his shirt off. And I… put mine back on.

I laughed about it at the time. But if I’m being straight with you, that moment peeled back something I hadn’t admitted was there. I had been carrying a quiet dissatisfaction about my body for a long time, and that morning it had a face. So I came home and signed up for a physique competition. I got obsessed with it. And then I had to sit with the honest question: was what I was doing discipline, or was it something else?

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, we brought in Kyle Ridley, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and TV producer of over 15,000 segments, to have the conversation most men never have. Kyle struggled with bulimia throughout his 20s. He spent almost a decade hiding it. He’s 41 now, over a decade into recovery, and one of the first men willing to talk about this publicly with any real honesty. What he said changed how I think about the whole subject.

The Numbers Nobody’s Talking About

Jonathan Haidt’s research in The Anxious Generation found a 416 percent increase in eating disorder related hospitalizations for young men over the past two decades. That number only counts the men who ended up in a hospital. The men who are managing it alone, quietly, while showing up to work and hitting the gym and keeping it hidden — they’re not in that figure.

Until recently, medical diagnostic criteria literally could not classify a man as having anorexia. A female-specific symptom was built into the definition. The men were not written out of the research by accident. The assumption was that this wasn’t a men’s issue. That assumption was wrong, and a lot of men paid for it.

25 percent of people with eating disorders are men. Almost half of men say body image concerns are actively affecting their mental health. And yet when Kyle spent over a decade producing TV segments on eating disorders, every spokesperson he was offered was female. Every expert who came on was female. He would ask: do you have a male representative? The answer was always no.

The Secrecy Spiral

Kyle made a distinction in our conversation that I want to highlight because I think it’s the most useful thing in the whole episode. There is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Privacy is something you keep for yourself out of respect — it doesn’t need to be shared. Secrecy is shame-ridden. You’re not keeping it because it’s personal. You’re keeping it because you don’t want anyone to find out.

Eating disorders, he said, are a disease of secrecy. And secrecy is the thing that keeps the loop going. The lie you tell at dinner. The excuse you make to leave work early. The careful choreography of being alone at the right times. Every act of concealment reinforces the belief that the thing you’re hiding is too shameful to survive being seen. That belief is what keeps you stuck, not the behavior itself.

This maps onto what we’ve seen across every episode where men talk about the things they carry quietly — anger, grief, addiction, body shame. The pattern is identical. The thing goes underground. And underground, it grows.

When Does Dedication Become Disorder?

This is where the conversation gets complicated for men specifically, because the exact conditioning that drives disordered behavior around food and fitness — discipline, control, being hard on yourself — is the same conditioning that gets celebrated. The behavior looks like a virtue from the outside. That’s part of what makes it so hard to see clearly from the inside.

Kyle’s answer to where the line is: when it starts to isolate you. When the behavior begins to determine what you can and can’t do, who you can be around, whether you can go out to eat with friends. When a missed day — at the gym, on your plan, whatever your version is — derails not just your mood but your ability to function in your relationships. When you’re making excuses to leave, or lying to protect the routine. That’s when it has crossed from dedication into something that needs attention.

The comparison game is part of this too. Social media serves you an endless stream of the extreme end of what’s possible. If you click on one thing, the algorithm assumes that’s all you want to see. You stop noticing that most people don’t look like that. You start measuring yourself against a manufactured standard that almost nobody in real life actually meets. And the gap between where you are and where you think you should be becomes its own source of shame.

Where to Start

Tell one person. Kyle’s first recommendation was simple and specific: not someone who’s going to immediately offer to help or fix it, but one person in your life who can just receive it. Who can say “I hear you” and still be there next week. That’s the move. Not a full disclosure. Not going public. One person. Kyle said he kept his disorder secret for the first two years of his marriage to his husband, and it was a small intervention by his mom and his husband — not a hospital, not a program — that started the shift.

Know the difference between secrecy and privacy. Ask yourself honestly: am I keeping this private because it’s personal, or am I keeping it secret because I’m afraid of what would happen if someone found out? The answer to that question tells you a lot about what you’re actually dealing with.

Get professional support. Kyle was resistant to this for years — he kept telling himself he could handle it alone, and kept starting over on Mondays. The disorder doesn’t respond to willpower because it’s not a willpower problem. An eating disorder specialist or a therapist who has experience with men can make a difference that solo effort can’t. If you or someone you know needs to talk to someone now, the Alliance for Eating Disorders Helpline is available at 1-866-662-1235.

Build real community — not digital proximity. Kyle spent his 20s isolated. His 30s were a marriage and a dog. At 38, post-divorce, he made a deliberate decision to build connection. He kept a note on his phone of everyone he met. He had coffee with 200 people over two years. He now has a dozen men he can call. Jon admitted on the show that he’s in a bunch of group chats but doesn’t have regular in-person connection with men who hold him to a standard. If your main social life is a thread, that’s worth looking at.

Much more below the paywall at the bottom here. Subscribe to read more with the Subscribe Now button below…

But before that…

This was a hard episode to sit with, for reasons I didn’t fully expect. If it landed that way for you too, that’s probably the episode working.

Speaking of awareness leading somewhere — we’re launching our new Awareness to Action (A2A) course in May. It’s built around exactly what the name says: taking what you notice about yourself and doing something with it. If that sounds like what you need right now, head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest and we’ll keep you in the loop.

This Week’s Episode

Audio: pod.fo/e/3fce78 — available now

Video: Valor Media Network on YouTube — available later today

A2A Course: focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course-interest

Thanks for your support,

Jon and Will,

Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness

Paid readers, don’t forget… MUCH MORE BELOW!!

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A quick note before we get into this…

You’re getting something new from Jon and Will at Focus Now Training/Men Talking Mindfulness this week, and every week moving forward.

We’ve been sending Your Thursday Three Things for a while now, and that’s not going anywhere. You’ll still get the podcast recap and the usual stuff every Thursday.

But we wanted to give you something to start your week with too. Something short and useful. One idea, one tool, one thing you can actually try on a Monday morning before the week runs away from you.

So we’re adding Monday Focus Check to the mix.

Think of Thursday as the recap. Monday as the warmup.

We hope it’s useful. Let us know what you think… we actually want to hear it.

Now, here’s this week’s edition.

We spend a lot of time blaming our brains for our inability to focus.

We tell ourselves we lack discipline. We tell ourselves we need more coffee, more sleep, more motivation. We download apps. We try timers. We move the phone to the other room and then walk over there to check it anyway.

And most of that misses the point entirely. Because your eyes have more control over your focus than you probably realize.

Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist at Stanford, has been hammering this point for years. Cognitive focus tends to follow overt visual focus… what you’re literally looking at. In plain English, where you look determines where your brain goes. This is why people put blinders on horses, or wear a hat to obstruct their vision while working.

Think about that for a second. We’ve known this principle for centuries with animals. We just forgot to apply it to ourselves.

The 60-Second Reset

Here’s Huberman’s simplest protocol. Costs you nothing but a minute of your time.

Pick a specific spot related to your workspace. A point on a piece of paper. A corner of your monitor. A spot on the wall. Now stare at it. Set a timer. Start with 30 seconds of focused attention, then work your way up to 60 or even 90 seconds over time.

That’s it.

When you narrow your visual attention onto a single point, neurochemicals get released in your brain that increase alertness and arousal. This controlled focus opens the door to cognitive focus, making the work ahead feel less heavy and require less mental effort.

I’ve been using this before deep work sessions. Before calls where I need to be locked in. Before writing when the words aren’t coming. The research backs it up, but honestly… you’ll feel it working before you read a single study.

One note from Huberman that made me laugh: “Don’t make the fixation point your phone; duh.”

The 13-Minute Daily Practice

If you want to build this capacity over the long haul, there’s a meditation protocol that’s been shown to actually rewire the focus circuits in your brain. Not just make you feel calmer in the moment. Actual structural change.

Research shows that a brief 8-13 minutes per day meditation can improve cognitive focus. Huberman recommends 13 minutes, eyes closed, directing your mind’s eye to a location just behind your forehead.

The key isn’t staying perfectly focused the whole time. The repeated return to a state of focus from a state of non-focus… that’s the actual work. Every time your attention drifts and you bring it back, you’re doing a rep. You’re building the muscle.

You’ll still get the benefits even if you’re a meditation novice or you lose concentration a few times. That’s normal. That’s the point.

One thing worth knowing: if this kind of meditation is done too late in the day, it can mess with your sleep because it actually requires a high attentional load. So this is a morning or early afternoon practice. Not something to do before bed.

The So What

Most productivity advice treats focus like a character issue. Like if you just wanted it badly enough, you’d have it.

That’s not how your nervous system works.

Focus has a neurochemistry. Epinephrine and dopamine work together with acetylcholine to help you get focused, direct that focus, and stay focused over time. And the fastest lever you have to pull on that chemistry is your visual system.

More than 40 percent of your brain is involved in vision in some way or another. You can train your cognitive focus through practices of visual focus and attention.

You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t need to download anything. You just need to understand that your eyes are the steering wheel, and start using them that way.

One Thing To Try This Week

Before your most important work block each day, spend 60 seconds staring at a fixed point. Not your phone. Not your email. Just a spot.

Then get after it.

(By the way... Will and I have been building something that goes deeper on this stuff. Focus, attention, the gap between stimulus and response. More on that soon!)

What did you notice when you tried it? We actually want to know.

Jon and Will, Focus Now Training

For more on focus, attention, and building the mental skills that actually move the needle at work, subscribe!

In this conversation, retired Navy SEAL Commander Jon Macaskill (Focus Now Training) and neuroscience-based EHS consultant Janel Penaflor break down what’s actually happening inside your workers’ brains when fatigue sets in, distractions multiply, and the pressure to perform overrides the ability to stay safe.

This isn’t a safety compliance lecture. This is a conversation about the human operating system underneath the hard hat.

What you’ll learn:

• Why good crews still make bad decisions

• How stress spreads across your crew (and the neuroscience behind it)

• Why “just pay attention” doesn’t work

• Practical tools your crews can use tomorrow (60-Second Reset, Attention Audit, Transition Ritual)

• The one question every safety leader needs to ask

Topics covered: construction safety culture, attention management, mental performance training, cognitive overload on the jobsite, decision fatigue, Navy SEAL leadership, neuroscience of safety, frontline supervisor training, psychological safety, human factors in construction, mindfulness for construction crews, EHS leadership development

About the speakers:

Jon Macaskill is a retired Navy SEAL Commander with 24 years of service and co-founder of Focus Now Training, delivering keynotes and workshops on attention management and mental performance to construction, engineering, and manufacturing teams across the country. He co-hosts the Men Talking Mindfulness podcast and is the author of DIAL In Your Leadership. focusnowtraining.com

Janel Penaflor is a neuroscience-based EHS consultant known as “The Safety Disruptor” who specializes in applying brain science, psychological safety, and human factors to workplace safety culture and frontline leadership development.

Subscribe for more on construction safety, mental performance, and leadership.

If you lead crews, manage safety, or run operations in construction or any high-risk industry... this one’s for you. Share it with your safety director.

#ConstructionSafety #SafetyCulture #MentalPerformance #NavySEAL #AttentionManagement #EHS #JobsiteSafety #LeadershipDevelopment #NeuroscienceOfSafety #FocusNowTraining #ConstructionLeadership #WorkplaceSafety #HumanFactors #MindfulnessForConstruction #FrontlineSupervisor #DecisionFatigue #SafetyTraining #ConstructionIndustry

That’s not a metaphor. It’s neuroscience.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, Jon Macaskill (retired Navy SEAL Commander, still accidentally on a Bahrain missile alert list) and co-host Will Schneider break down what the U.S.–Israel campaign against Iran is doing to your nervous system — even if you’re nowhere near the conflict.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why your brain can’t tell the difference between a CNN headline and an actual incoming threat

• The root chakra connection: how destabilizing news rattles your entire system from the ground up

• Chomsky’s “enemy filter” from Manufacturing Consent — and why it’s running at full speed right now

• The STEA framework (Stimulus → Thought → Emotion → Action) for inserting a critical pause before you react

• How to talk to your kids about war without transferring your anxiety to them

• Practical steps to break the dopamine loop of compulsive news checking

This isn’t “just breathe and ignore the world.” This is deeper contact with reality — so your opinions are built on clarity, not cortisol.

Plus: Jon’s new book Dial In Your Leadership is out now on Amazon, and Mindfulness for A-holes is coming later this year.

Text MTM to 33777 to get this newsletter in your inbox.

🎧 Full podcast episode available now on all platforms. Video available here and on the Valor Media Network YouTube channel.

Welcome to the Listener’s Digest Audio Version of our Newsletter. This audio version is read by AI and is a weekly shorter version of our Thursday Three Things newsletter, put out by Focus Now Training, the parent company of the Men Talking Mindfulness podcast. Each week we take one of our former newsletter editions and give you the highlights in a format you can listen to on a walk, a drive, or wherever you’ve got a few minutes. This week’s edition is based on one of the most personal ones we’ve put out, with a guest whose story drew more response than almost anything we’ve published... and enough of you asked for it back that we’re bringing it around again. This one’s with Commander Mark Divine, former Navy SEAL, founder of SEALFIT, and one of the few people Jon has ever called flat-out uncommon. And that’s saying something.

Here’s the short version of how Mark got to where he is.

1985. He’s 21 years old, working at a New York accounting firm during the day, studying for his MBA at NYU at night. Corporate track. Everything on paper looking the way it was supposed to look. And then one evening he’s walking down 23rd Street and he hears screaming coming from the second floor of a building. He stops, looks up, and there’s a sign that says World Sato Karate Headquarters. He goes up. And standing in that room is a man named Tadashi Nakamura, a ninth-degree black belt, founder of the style, and by Mark’s own words, the complete opposite of his father in every way that mattered.

Mark grew up in an abusive home. A lot of rage. A lot of alcohol. He’d found solace in endurance athletics because physical training was the one place he had control. He says the seeds of the Navy SEAL were forged in the fire of his father’s abuse and in turning toward the discomfort of hard physical work. Coleman Ruiz made a similar observation on Andrew Huberman’s show, that a surprising number of BUDs graduates came from broken homes, or had been in trouble, or had something to prove that ran deeper than ambition.

What Nakamura introduced Mark to wasn’t just karate. It was Zen. Sitting on wooden benches, eyes closed, focusing on the breath. Inhale, count one. Exhale, count two. Try to get to ten. Mark says it took him about a year and a half before he could credibly say he thought he might have made it to ten. And even then, he probably started thinking about the fact that he was close to ten right around eight.

But here’s what that practice opened up. Somewhere in the middle of learning to hold attention on one thing, he noticed something he couldn’t quite explain. He noticed that he was watching his own thoughts. And if he was watching his thoughts... who was doing the watching? That question, once it lands, doesn’t go away. Mark calls it the first major shift. You realize you are not your thoughts. You are something behind them, something that observes them. And when that clicks, the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you are starts to look different.

For Mark, the story he’d been telling himself was CPA, MBA, corporate track, not good enough. The story that came from the other side of that observation was something else entirely. One word: warrior.

He started visualizing BUDs before he was even accepted. He’d watched the Navy recruiting video twenty times until he could insert himself into the imagery. He practiced the training in his mind every day after his run. About nine months in, he felt a shift. Went from hoping and wanting and wishing to a state of flat certainty. Two days later his recruiter called to tell him he’d gotten a billet. Mark says he wasn’t surprised. The recruiter said, you know, you guys are weird, you’re going to make great SEALs.

He graduated as the honor man in BUDs class 170. 185 people started. 19 finished. And Mark led his entire boat crew of seven through with him.

The model he teaches now is what he calls the five mountains: physical, mental, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual. The physical comes first because you can’t do the inner work if the body is a wreck. Breath control is the entry point. Get control of your physiology and you have a fighting chance at getting control of your psychology. From there, attention control. Then positive mental management. His BUDs mantra, the one he repeated every swim and every run, was this: I’m feeling good, I’m looking good, I ought to be in Hollywood. Doesn’t matter where it came from. It worked.

And the leadership piece. Someone asked Mark what the secret was to leading six men through one of the hardest selection programs in the world. His answer … the best leadership quality is demonstration. Show me, don’t tell me. Not technically. but In terms of character. Be the leader you would have wanted to be led by.

Mark’s got a metaphor for the inner work that stays with you. He talks about the difference between being on the surface of the ocean in a storm versus being three hundred feet down. The surface is noise, chatter, reaction. Three hundred feet down is utterly still. Meditation, in his view, is what moves your center of gravity down toward the still water. The storm is still happening. It just stops running you.

Full newsletter is at newsletter dot focusnowtraining dot com. Or text MTM to 33777. If this one hit you differently than you expected, that’s kind of the point. Pass it on.

I got one of those emails this week. The ones I’ve been trying to unsubscribe from for eleven years. A shelter-in-place alert from a security list I got put on when I was stationed in Bahrain back in 2014. Incoming missiles. Seek cover immediately.

I’m in Colorado. My kids were eating cereal at the kitchen table. And something in my body still responded to that email before my brain had time to process that I was on the other side of the planet.

That’s what a nervous system looks like when it’s working. The problem is that my kids were right there, and in the three seconds before I got myself under control, they read something in my face. My youngest looked up from her bowl and asked what was wrong.

I told her it was nothing. And she went back to her cereal. But she already had the information she actually cared about, which wasn’t what was in the email. It was the look on my face. That’s the part she filed away.

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot in the context of leadership. Because what’s true at the breakfast table is true in every meeting room and job site you walk into right now. Gas prices are climbing. People are watching the news at night and waking up with it in their heads. They’re worried about what it means for the economy, for their families, for the future. And they’re also watching YOU... to see how you’re carrying it.

You are the weather in whatever environment you lead. The team takes its emotional read from you before it takes it from any briefing or update or team meeting agenda. If you walk in activated, they activate. If you walk in steady, they have something to anchor to. That’s part of the job. That IS the job.

Here’s what makes this hard. Most of the people I work with who are running teams right now are carrying more than their teams know. The external situation on top of everything else that was already on their plate... it adds up. And the instinct in high-performance cultures is to absorb all of it silently, stay stoic, and project certainty.

That strategy stops working when the body stops cooperating, which usually happens at the worst possible time.

The guys who hold up well under this kind of sustained pressure aren’t doing it by pretending the pressure isn’t there. They’re doing it by staying honest with themselves about what they’re carrying and managing their own regulation before they walk through the door. The regulation has to happen somewhere. If it doesn’t happen in private, it happens in public, and usually on someone who didn’t deserve it.

This week on Men Talking Mindfulness, Will and I talked about what happens to the mind and body when war news saturates the information environment. The short version: your nervous system responds to perceived danger the same way it responds to actual danger. When that response fires, curiosity goes offline, empathy shrinks, and the part of the brain that does complex reasoning starts to step back. That’s biology, not weakness. But if you don’t know it’s happening, you’re making decisions and leading people from a place you didn’t choose to be in.

The question I kept coming back to is one I’ll put to you directly: When your environment is asking you to panic, what do the people around you see in you?

Not what you say. What they see.

And a quick, shameless plug… I write about this in DIAL in Your Leadership because it’s one of the things that separates leaders who earn lasting trust from leaders who earn compliance. Trust gets built in the hard moments, the uncertain ones, the moments where nobody knows what’s coming and the leader doesn’t pretend otherwise but also doesn’t collapse under the weight of it. That combination... honesty about the uncertainty plus steadiness inside it... is what people are actually looking for right now.

You don’t have to have answers to the geopolitical situation. You won’t. Nobody does. But you can regulate your own nervous system, acknowledge the reality your team is living in, and lead from a place that isn’t driven by fear. That’s available to you.

Full episode is up now on Men Talking Mindfulness. Audio at this link pod.fo/e/3f5fb6 or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Video on the Valor Media Network on YouTube or right on the Focus Now Training Substack. Full newsletter with practical tools at newsletter.focusnowtraining.com or text MTM to 33777.

If this landed, pass it to someone who’s leading people through a hard season right now.

And that’s all we have this week. Until next time, take care.

With utmost gratitude and respect,

Jon and Will

Hey,

This is the last one, I promise.

Tonight, the 99 cent Kindle price on DIAL in Your Leadership goes back to full price. If you’ve been meaning to grab it, this is your window.

https://geni.us/dial

If you already have it... thank you. If you’ve already read some of it... I’d love to hear what landed for you. And if you could leave an honest review on Amazon, that would mean the world. Even a sentence or two helps other people find the book.

This week has been one of the most meaningful of my professional life. Thank you for being part of it.

Jon

This newsletter is about what that does to your mind and body, why the panic is partially by design, and what you can actually do about it. Because cooler heads don’t prevail by accident.

Why the Word “War” Hits the Body Before the Brain

I was stationed in Bahrain for a stretch in 2014-2015, not deployed, actually stationed there. While there, I got put on an emergency security alert email list. I have tried to unsubscribe from that list for eleven years. Can’t do it.

So I’ll be sitting here in Colorado and my phone buzzes with a shelter-in-place alert. Incoming missiles. Find a bunker. And something in my body responds to that, even though I’m on the other side of the planet. That’s not irrational. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do.

The nervous system doesn’t process perceived danger and actual danger differently. If you see headlines about bombs and casualties and regional escalation, your body starts scanning for threats the same way it would if the threat were real and close. The brain reads the emotional intensity of the information and responds accordingly. And the media knows this, which is why the language of war coverage is always immediate, always urgent, always designed to feel like it’s happening right outside your door.

Ok… brace yourself. We’re about to get a little woo-woo for a second. Will described it well on the show. The root chakra in yogic tradition, called Muladhara, sits at the base of the entire energy system and governs survival, safety, food, shelter. When that base gets rattled by news like this, it doesn’t just affect your mood. It disrupts the whole system above it. You don’t feel grounded because, from your nervous system’s perspective, the ground isn’t safe.

What Fear Does to Your Thinking

Here’s what happens when the threat response activates. Blood moves away from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for complex reasoning, and toward the extremities. You get faster and more reactive. Your capacity for complex thinking drops. And critically, something else disappears too: curiosity.

Curiosity is a function of a calm nervous system. When you’re in survival mode, curiosity goes offline. You stop asking “what am I missing?” and start asking “who do I blame?” You stop wanting to understand the full picture and start looking for the fastest, simplest explanation that confirms what your gut is already telling you. Then you find the media source that gives you that explanation on a loop, and your echo chamber deepens.

This also affects empathy. When fear activates, we shrink our circle of concern. We protect ourselves, our family, our tribe. The people outside that circle start to become abstractions. They get “othered.” And once people are othered, the cruelty that gets directed at them stops feeling like cruelty. It starts feeling like defense.

And unfortunately, that’s just how we’re wired. But it can be worked with.

Manufacturing Consent

In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Walter Lippmann had introduced the underlying concept back in 1922. The argument is this: corporate media manipulates through structure not secret coordination. Ownership, advertising dependency, sourcing relationships, fear of legal and political consequences, and a rotating fear ideology. Chomsky and Herman identified these as five filters. Together, they shape what gets reported, how it gets framed, and what gets killed quietly before it ever runs.

The fifth filter is the most relevant right now. Chomsky called it the enemy filter. Originally it was anti-communism. After the Cold War, the war on terror replaced it. Today the enemy filter is whatever the designated threat is, and it serves a consistent purpose: a society in fear is easier to manage. People in survival mode don’t ask hard questions. They demand protection. They accept costs they would never accept if they were calm and thinking clearly.

Knowing this makes you harder to manipulate. You can still form opinions about what’s happening. But when you understand the architecture of the media environment you’re operating in, you make more deliberate choices about what you consume, how often, and from how many different sources.

Mindfulness - It’s an Active Practice

I want to address something directly. There’s a version of this conversation where it sounds like we’re saying: don’t care about the war. Retreat into your breath. The world is what it is. That’s not what we’re saying.

But mindfulness is actually deeper contact with reality. It means noticing what’s happening on the outside with more clarity, and simultaneously paying attention to what’s happening inside you, because those two things are connected. When you’re activated, your read of the external situation gets distorted. Mindfulness creates the gap between the stimulus and your reaction, and in that gap, you can choose your response instead of just executing your reflex.

introduced us to a framework he calls STEA: Stimulus, Thought, Emotion, Action. When something triggers you, the reflex is to move immediately from stimulus to action. Mindfulness builds the capacity to slow down and notice the thought and the emotion before the action. In a gunfight, that gap doesn’t exist because it doesn’t need to. In a conversation about geopolitics, or in a hard conversation with your team, that gap is everything.

What You Can Actually Do

Check the news once, intentionally. Not compulsively. If something significant changes, you’ll hear about it from the people around you before you hear about it from a push notification. Choose a time of day, check once, then put it down. The dopamine loop of compulsive checking is an intentional feature of the platform, not an accident. It was designed to keep you coming back.

Distinguish between understanding and endorsing. You can be curious about why people on the other side of a conflict believe what they believe without endorsing the violence or agreeing with the policy. If you can’t describe how the other side sees the situation, you don’t fully understand the conflict. And if you don’t fully understand the conflict, your opinions about it are based on half the information.

Ask more questions than you make statements. In conversations about this, the people who come in with the loudest declarations are usually the most activated. Ask what they mean. Ask what they’re afraid of. Ask what they’d consider a good outcome. The questions do more work than the arguments.

Regulate before you talk to your kids. They read your nervous system before they hear your words. If you’re activated when you explain what’s happening, they absorb the activation before they absorb the information. Get calm first. Then ask them what they’ve heard and what they’re wondering about. Let them guide the conversation.

There’s MUCH more beyond the paywall below but for those of you who may not be paid subscribers, we still wanted to say thank you!

This episode came out of Will and I watching the news too much and feeling the pull of it ourselves. We’re not above any of this. The tools we talk about work. They also take practice. Give yourself some grace for the moments when your nervous system fires before your mindfulness does.

If you’re working on the kind of clarity and leadership that holds up under exactly this kind of pressure, my new book DIAL in Your Leadership: 4 Non-negotiables for Leading with Clarity, Trust, and Purpose is out now. Get it here: https://geni.us/dial And be on the lookout for Will’s and my book, Mindfulness for A**holes!, coming out later this year.

Stay grounded out there. Text MTM to 33777 to get this newsletter delivered, or find us at newsletter.focusnowtraining.com.

As for this week’s episode

Audio: pod.fo/e/3f5fb6 — available now

Video: Valor Media Network on YouTube Thursday, or watch now on the Focus Now Training Substack

MORE BELOW THE PAYWALL FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS!

Read more

Jon and Will recorded this on March 18, 2026 — live escalation, real anxiety, no sides taken. Jon draws on his experience as a retired Navy SEAL Commander who still receives active shelter-in-place missile alerts from Bahrain. Will brings the neuroscience of fear and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent — a five-filter media playbook that has been running since 1922. Together they show you how to stay grounded, think clearly, and protect your family’s peace without burying your head in the sand.

Your clarity matters right now. The world needs cooler heads.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

Why ‘war’ activates your survival wiring as if the bombs are at your door — and how to reset

The 5 media manipulation filters being used on you right now

Why curiosity and empathy collapse the moment fear shows up

A Navy SEAL’s honest take on war, the battlefield, and the drive to serve

How to talk to your kids about war without transmitting your anxiety

The Overview Effect — what astronauts see that shifts everything

TOP 3 SIMILAR EPISODES FROM MTM:

Ep. 104 — How the News Is Hurting You

Ep. 138 — Curiosity Is Key to Breaking Men Free from Judgment and Rumination

Ep. 105 — Learning to Respond Without Reactivity with Dr. Charles Freligh

If our show resonates, here’s where to go next:

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FOLLOW the show, leave a rating and review, and share it with one man who needs it.

2026 Spartan Race Team: mentalkingmindfulness.com/spartan-race-2026

Episodes & Resources: mentalkingmindfulness.com

Coaching with Will: willnotfear.com

Book Jon to Speak: jonmacaskill.com

Co-produced by Robert Lopez | cratesaudio.com

Hey,

Quick update on the book launch... it’s been an incredible week. The response has been humbling, and I’ve gotten messages from people who are already applying what they’re reading. That’s the whole point.

I wanted to share one piece from the book that’s been coming up a lot in conversations this week.

There’s a section where I talk about how discipline isn’t about intensity. It’s about consistency. I use the example of Captain Sully landing that plane on the Hudson River. Every report from that cockpit said the same thing: he was calm. Direct. Steady. That wasn’t adrenaline. That was decades of disciplined preparation doing what it was designed to do. He didn’t rise to the occasion. He fell back on the standard he’d lived for years.

I get chill bumps every time I think about that story.

The Kindle version is still 99 cents for two more days. If you haven’t grabbed your copy yet, now’s a great time.

https://geni.us/dial

And if you’ve started reading... an honest review on Amazon would be a huge help. Even a short one. Reviews are how the book reaches people I can’t reach on my own.

Thanks for being in this with me.

Jon