It’s Veterans Day, so first, a real thank-you to everyone who served and everyone who held it down at home while they did. I spent a lot of years in that world, and I’ll say it plainly, coming home steady is its own kind of training, and plenty of us are still doing the reps on it.
Your fuse gets shorter or longer the same way everything else does, through reps. The work that shortens it happens in the boring days between blowups, in the quiet reps you put in when nothing’s wrong. In the moment you’re already going off, the adrenaline has the wheel and it’s too late to do much.
What do those reps look like? Sleep, because exhausted men are flammable. Movement, because a body that never discharges its stress stores it and hands it to the people you love. Ten quiet minutes so you feel the heat rising earlier, while you still have options. A real conversation instead of stuffing things until they blow. Dull stuff. And it’s the whole game.
Systems over willpower lives here too. You will not white-knuckle your way out of a temper on the day it counts. What works is lowering your baseline so the surge starts from further down, and a lower baseline only gets built on the calm days.
I still get this backwards on a heavy week. I skip the gym, skip the quiet minutes, run hot on caffeine and deadlines, and then act shocked when I snap at someone who did nothing to earn it. The blowup was just the invoice for a week of skipped reps.
So two things today. What’s one rep you could bank this week, on a calm day, that your future hot-headed self will thank you for? And if there’s a veteran in your life, check on them with a real how are you doing, the kind that waits for the answer.
Friday, we close the week out honest.
If you’re a guy who keeps blowing up over small stuff and you’re done with it, this is the exact thing we built for it. The 5-Day Fix is 5 short video lessons, about 7 minutes a day, on defusing the surge and repairing the damage: https://mentalkingmindfulness.com/start-your-5days