Summary: A post on mens mental health, consciousness and the ability to employ the advice you are given to improve your life.

It’s becoming ever more apparent to me that there are two distinct sides to r.TRP. There is the first, the side that discusses Men’s sexual strategy and is a platform for men to share their ideas, successes and horror stories when it comes to women. In the manosphere we compare notes and trade tips and gradually, as tends to happen when ideas are allowed to be debated freely, a consensus has been reached on what the best strategies are and the best ideas have risen to the top. Concepts such as AWALT, Hypergamy, and AF/BB have all proven to be true and are considered the foundations of what a man needs to understand in order to have a successful sexual life.

What sets TRPl aside from the greater manosphere is that we have drifted away from focusing entirely on women and sexual strategy. While this is still a core part of what our community stands for, what has emerged on the sides of TRP is a mens mental health and support movement.

There is no real mainstream forum or movement around that helps men become men, and helps depressed men pull themselves up into success. We somehow, with the intention of helping men get laid, became that movement.


This was bound to happen, as you cannot be successful in the sexual marketplace without first being mentally healthy and strong on the inside. The most numerous and accurate diagnosis for the dating problems of the western man is that he is not mentally sound enough to be attractive to women.

You must have inner game in order to have outer game, and with the way our current society is set up, men are more than ever, increasingly marginalised, depressed and without guidance. The inner health of the past few generations of men has deteriorated rapidly, with the suicide rate amongst men disproportionately huge. There are many, many factors to blame for this, including feminism, the sexual revolution, loss of religion in the west, cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt school, and more, but this post isn’t about that.

You will see many posts on this sub from well-meaning and learned users sharing their knowledge, their stories and their paths in self-realisation, developing their masculinity and improving their overall physical and mental health. It is a prerequisite of seduction that you must have all the inner cogs working properly before you can be successful on the Fucking Frontier. You will never have any success with women if you are still a blubbering mess inside; of course you can learn the techniques and act like your favourite pick up artists, and in fact many betas turn up here and think that all they need to do is put on an act and say the right things, but what they quickly realise is it all falls apart because they do not have the inner framework to genuinely understand or employ these techniques. They are transparent in their self-doubt, anxiety and sometimes, borderline social autism. Women and men alike can smell it on them. I’m almost certain that will be a lot of you reading this post, and a lot more of you who have finally figured themselves out after making these very same mistakes are nodding their heads in understanding.

You can teach a beta how to act alpha, but you cannot teach him how to BE alpha; that is only something he can teach himself, you can however, give him the tools and the guidance to make that journey.

You cannot teach a beta seduction techniques, it won’t work. It is like teaching them how to run before they can walk, in fact, trying to teach them to run when they have no legs. First, mentally unsound, anxious, depressed betas need to grow legs. Once you have your legs, are content and have a healthy mind and body; then seduction comes easily. You won’t need tips or tricks. You will find your own way. You will marvel at how you ever found it difficult.

But first, you need to grow your legs. How do we do it?


Shut Up and Listen

By being shown how, and listening to the men who have already had to grow their own legs. This used to be the job of fathers, schools and churches. Now, we have none of that. Some of us on TRP have grown our legs and we write these posts in order to help you grow your own. All you need to do is shut up, put up, read and put in the work. You are not special or unique or different, you can make it just like we all did. This is why TRP takes such a hard, no bullshit, stance. It is the stance of the all-knowing father, teacher, drill instructor, coach. It is the masculine presence saying “I know better than you so shut the fuck up and listen”. A lot of us have never had enough of this in our lives, and TRP is our first taste of it.


Tick the Box. Make no progress.

So the first steps you need to take is to read and learn the literature. Absorb the guidance. However;

There’s a trap a lot of newcomers fall into when they first arrive here where they read, and read, and read some more. They read all of the side bar and the top posts and keep up to date with the front page consistently. Doing this, they feel like they have learnt something, they feel instantly as if they have joined the club and are enlightened. They have “oh that’s so obvious now” moments and realisations. They read up on tips on how to behave and how to think and what to say. For example; there was a good post on the front page yesterday about how to talk less.

The average frustrated chump will read this and think, “yes, I have read it and now I am a smarter and more socially adept person and now I will talk less”. They may do the same with posts about shit tests, or holding frame.

They will read, but they will never employ.

When it comes to an actual social situation, the average guy will forget everything he read. Does he have time to go back into his memory banks and remember all the tips and life hacks he scanned through? No, in fact he probably forgot most of them before he even closed the tab. He definitely does not have enough time to think about how he’s saying and acting when in front of a woman. He does not analyse every word that comes out of his mouth and cross examine what she is saying.

There’s a massive fallacy in thinking that just because you read something means you understood it. I read the whole of the 48 laws of power over the course of a few weeks, did I come out of it a Machiavellian genius? Absolutely not. I read it all, but I didn’t understand it all. I didn’t internalise it all.

Theredpill, nofap, getdisciplined subreddits, self help or philosophy books, whatever; there are huge resources everywhere you find that can help get your thinking back on track, but what you must, must, must avoid is reading something, pretending like reading it was enough, and patting yourself on the back for it.

Oh I read “No More Mr Nice Guy”. I’ve checked that box. Now I am a better person…

WRONG. Reading was not enough, you must actually employ what you read and translate it into real action. You must take the new information and program it into your brain. You must internalise the thought processes.

This is kind of like when you go to the gym and do a few lazy sets of light weight and just fuck about and check out the hot girls and leave after 30 mins and feel proud of yourself that you went to the gym that day. Yeah you might have ticked the box, but did you actually make any progress? Did you actually build anything? Don’t bullshit yourself, you know what the difference is between actually working out and gym-masturbating. You know.

When you read but don’t internalise, you are doing the same thing. A lot will even do it with this article. They will read it, think “huh, that was a good post, I learnt a lot”. Yet they will forget about it for the rest of their lives, they will never think about it or the concepts discussed in it ever again. They will read, but they won’t absorb.


How does one do this? How does one take the information they have absorbed and convert it directly into a real life change? How can we avoid letting good philosophy and self-help wash over us?

You must strengthen the Directing Mind.

Aurelius refers to the directing mind multiple times in his Meditations It took me a while to understand what he means.

The Directing Mind is the voice in your head that tells you to do stuff. It is the voice of reason in your head. It is the voice that makes you go to the gym or study, the little niggling “you’re not good enough, work on yourself” anxiety. The one that makes you have that protein shake before you leave even if you’re incredibly full because you need the calories. The one that tells your stomach to shut up when you want that piece of chocolate cake. The one that fights the fapping urge you get consistently when you’ve been a porn addict all your life.

Your Directing Mind is YOU. It is you when you are off autopilot, it is what Freud would call the superego. It is the rational voice in your head that knows what you want and knows the steps needed to get it. It is the part of you that is super stimulated when you have bursts of motivation, either fuelled by jealousy or angst (or drugs).

Your unconscious is always telling you to be a lazy, hedonistic piece of shit. It always wants you to lay in bed where it’s warm and jack off and play video games all day. It doesn’t want you to try.

Your Directing Mind is the guy inside you that is saying “hey man, we need to lift or we will stay skinnyfat. We need to eat 500 more calories today. We need to study for that test in 2 weeks”

Your directing mind is rational, and honest and the true representation of you. It is in a constant battle with the lazy, childlike, monkey that is your autopilot.

Think about when you operate absentmindedly. When you flick through new tabs on a whim, start “just one more game”, “just one more episode”, “I’ll study later”. Think about the word “absentmindedly”. When you operate on this auto-pilot setting, your mind is absent. You are not you, you are at the whim of your urges and itches. Your Directing Mind, you, the conscious you, the you that wants you to succeed and own your life, he is losing to the monkey child.

Successful men are those who have an active and strong Directing Mind, that overrides their own Auto-Pilot, that can keep their body disciplined and focused. They have the whims and urges and laziness programmed into them just like us, but their drive, training and discipline overrides it.

The problem is, with many young men, their directing mind is hidden, suppressed or clouded in brain fog. It only comes out occasionally, or when needed desperately; such as stressful situations like the week before the exam you should have studied for all year.

Most young men lose to their unconscious, hedonistic desires. Their Id controls them. They have no sense of self to help them stay disciplined and consistent.


You need your directing mind to employ advice you have read

When you read a piece of advice (A) and you want to implement that advice in the real world, you cannot rely on that advice to just appear from your subconscious at the right time and place. There is nothing that will just trigger you to call upon skills and techniques you learnt magically, especially if you are consistently on Auto-Pilot. No, what you need is a Directing Mind to first 1) read (A) properly and understand it fully, internalising it within you, 2) be observant for situations in which (A) would apply, and 3) implement (A) at that time and successfully carry it out.

Here’s an example from my own life. I read everywhere that cold showers would be good for me. I read it in multiple different posts, heard the advice from multiple different people, and thought, “yeah, cold showers are healthy”… but I never did it. I wasn’t just a pussy, I just never thought of it when it came to the time to shower. Then one day, I was thinking properly, I was using my Directing Mind, I was in a nice hot steamy shower and thought “well, I’ve heard a million times that cold showers are good for me. Why haven’t I done it yet?”

It was this mindfulness, this being present in the moment that reminded me that I needed to actually try this thing out. Normally I would just go about my shower with my fears and anxieties and thoughts of the day in my head, but this time, I was so present that I remembered that I needed to try out this technique I’d been told. So I did it, and it was painful and shocking and I didn’t last long.

But I remembered to do it again the next time, and the time after that, and every time after. I forced myself to do it. Inner me was trying to make stupid rationalisations “who cares if you don’t do it this one time. No one’s watching you. You might make yourself ill. It’s probably not that good for you anyway”, but my Directing Mind took control and said “just do it you pussy” and I had the self will to be able to do it.


In order to better yourself, you need to willfully work on your actions and thought processes. It is not enough to just read books and articles and tick the boxes. I wrote a post earlier called “Switch off Autopilot” and this is what I am advocating again in this post.

Stop going about your day as if your body is controlling you. Your body, your subconscious, your Id only wants pleasure and comfort. Your Directing Mind is the rational, human, male part of you that knows you must suffer pain in order to build yourself. You must strengthen the Directing Mind, you must amplify that inner voice, bring it out more often, make it clearer.

And because I hate when articles tell you to do something but never give you the tools on how to actually do it, I am going to give you some techniques right now on how to do it. This is not an exhaustive list, this is just what worked for me:


Strengthening the Directing Mind and achieving Mental Stability:

The Prerequisites:

These three things you will hear everywhere and in almost every “self help” post. You must have got bored of them by now, but there’s a reason we keep repeating them. They are non-negotiable. You cannot be a healthy person, a stoic man, an enlightened individual without first getting these basic things on track.

You cannot skip out on these things, they make the foundation that the rest of your self-building will rest on. You cannot take short cuts. I don’t care about what excuses you are making for not being able to exercise or sleep well or meditate, you are only bullshitting yourself.

Once again, stop trying to take short cuts and magic remedies for your own self-determination. There are none. Your insistence in trying to find a quick way is symptomatic of the very problems you are trying to fix.


  1. Meditation.

People are scared off by this always. They don’t understand it and think it’s some wishy washy mumbo jumbo.

Simply put, if you want your Directing Mind to be more present and consistent, you must first clear away the hazy fog that years of depression and anxiety has wrapped your brain in.

You must learn to shut up the thoughts constantly floating about your head.

You must learn to keep your mind focused and steady and not allow negative emotions or curve-balls to rattle your frame.

You must learn to just switch off your head occasionally. As you do this, you will become more “mindful”. More “in the moment”. Your autopilot will switch off, you won’t float about the day, and you’ll actually think about the shit you’re doing as you’re doing it. Your Directing Mind will have more space to manifest itself, more time to survive before it’s swamped again.

The more you meditate, the more you’ll have mindful moments throughout your day, without forcing them, just by accident. The more this happens, the more consistently you can fill these moments with introspection, understanding and planning.

Meditation. We all tell you to do it, it’s like exercising. I don’t think it’s something you can get away without doing. It’s lifting for your brain, it just makes it stronger, more durable.


  1. Exercise

‘Oh it’s going to be one of those “obvious shit we’ve all heard before” lists isn’t it’.

Shut up and listen. You, as a male, need to exercise your body in order to survive. You were built to hunt and kill things. You were not built to be a flabby, skinnyfat, immobile piece of shit.

Until you start exercising, you will not understand the real benefits it gives you. It is more than just looking hot and getting muscles. The discipline, the pain, the struggle, these are all things we must go through. It helps the rest of the world seem smaller when you’ve just squatted double your bodyweight and have the strength and agility to climb a boulder or beat the shit out of a person.

Learn to fight, play a team sport, train your body. Just do anything that makes you sweat and grunt and angry.

It’s only during days I exercise do I ever feel truly at ease with myself and content. It is like a drug. You chase the feeling of accomplishment and conquering. You feel like you’ve finally earned the dick between your legs.

And with that feeling comes the rationality and clarity that your Directing Mind manifests itself in.

Ones again, this isn’t optional, if you want to be a man, if you want inner and outer health, train your body.

  1. Sleep

Nothing gives you brain fog more than a fucked up sleeping schedule. I truly mean it, don’t stay up past like 10/11pm. Wake up at 6 or 7. Days will feel different. You will have whole mornings that you used to lose before. The morning sun and air is a different feeling entirely. It is exhilarating and refreshing.

Having a consistent sleep schedule will do wonders for the way you think and the clarity of your day. 8 hours sleep minimum every night. If you are exercising, you will have no trouble sleeping whatsoever. You may even start dreaming deeply again.

The rest of these can only be accomplished once you have the first three sorted. They are accessory exercises to your main compound lifts.

  1. Get Laid

There’s a scene in the ‘A Game of Thrones’ book where Ned Stark makes an important decision after fucking his wife and staring into the night sky. There is a magical clarity to the post-nut thought. Having done psychedelics for years, it’s oddly similar.

This is your Directing Mind at its peak. When you have fulfilled your biological imperative (planting your seed in a beautiful woman) your brain fog and anxieties die and all that is left is your rationality and free thinking.

Conquering women, chasing and getting the catch, courting and being successful, all thrills that push your masculinity to the extreme. They compound each other, once you get that first good lay, other women just seem so much easier. You’re riding off the wave of your previous success, and you are more clear in your thoughts and powerful in your actions during the weeks of a new plate than you ever are.

  1. Stop Masturbating.

    Stop being a fucking loser. This really fucks you up. Porn really fucks you up. It’s a brain fog machine. Stop making excuses for why you think it’s okay to fap. You are an addict clinging onto your drug. Don’t touch your dick unless it is to piss or to slide into a cute girls pussy, period. For the rest of your life.

  2. More Testosterone

All the above tips have multiple effects but the one they all have in common is that they boost your testosterone levels. Test is what it means to be a man. It is what separates you from the irrational, emotional children that are women. This steroid hormone is what causes all your successes and is more of a defining part of who you are than what you think.

Ask transgenders who have started hormone therapy to be men and they will all say that they feel and think differently. More rationality, more clarity, more control over their emotions.

If you ever meet a high test woman you’ll see just how, chill yet driven she is compared to other women.

Try and find ways to up your Test levels. Take a blood test if you need to. I won't tive you tips on how to up your Test as there are a million places you can find that information.

I have yet to try taking Test intravenously, but I’m assuming the effect is the same (any guys who juice care to share their thoughts?). I have however, upped my Test levels massively since I stopped smoking weed (fucks up your test) and started eating, sleeping and lifting better.

  1. Read Philosophy

Find out how other people think, and see if you can adopt it. Men greater than you have achieved so much, and all due to the way they see the world and how they act within it. If you can find out how others perceive the world, you can shape your own reality through their teachings.

Once again, it is not enough to read philosophy and then just shut the book and never think about it again. You must truly study the book. You must debate the concepts in your head. You must try and understand. You must see the author as another man talking to you face to face.

When I read I use a highlighter to mark the most important passages, and then I re-read those passages, and then I translate those passages into plain English into my journal so I can read them simply again later on and also solidify in my own words what those passages mean.

  1. Journaling

Write down how you feel and what you think. You have brain fog because you allow the same thoughts and feelings to float about in your head all the time.

Vomit your ideas onto a page. Your hopes, your stupid dreams, the people you are angry at, the girls you want to fuck senseless. Write as if no one will ever read it. Write for yourself to read later and laugh at. It is drastically important that you put your mind down onto a page, don’t just let it stew up in your head forever. You will lose important things, you will forget.

And when you write, that is your directing mind that is speaking onto that page. You are training it, you are strengthening it. Your auto-pilot does not write, the only person on that page is you, your Directing Mind. It is the best way of reading your own inner voice and seeing what it sounds like, seeing what it is telling you. If there’s one thing that I want you to do after reading this article, one habit that I want you to pick up, it’s this. It is super important to transfer some of who you are onto a page, something permanent. You will absolutely thank yourself in the later years, and you can read back and watch yourself grow.

Jordan Peterson has a great Self Authoring program where you can be guided on how to start doing this. Look it up.

  1. No Dead Time

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run”

I define dead time as anything where you just sit staring at a screen like a mindless zombie not building anything.

Watching TV and playing computer games is okay, but only as a short reward once you’ve ticked off all the important things you do that day. If you constantly marathon TV shows and movies or spend hours gaming then you are wasting your time and frying the circuits in your brain. You know what habitual, addiction like screen use is.

You should not be using reddit, the internet or Netflix/Steam to fill time. If you have free time, use it for something productive. I know I sound like all our parents sounded like when we were teenagers, but you will soon discover they were right.

Only fucking losers waste hours of their day on shit that gives them nothing. While you are sitting there playing “just one more (40 minute) game”, some other guy is using those very same seconds to build himself into a smarter person. And he will win, you will lose, and then you’ll complain about how life didn’t go your way.

No excuses. No dead time. Leisure time and dead time are different things. You know the difference. You earn leisure time, you use dead time to avoid your responsibilities.

  1. Psychedelics

Note I say Psychedelics, not all drugs. Most drugs are bad, some are brain-medicine.

This is a controversial one so I will not touch on it too deply, and I don’t want the comments below to be a debate on whether drugs are good or not and ignore the rest of the post. I truly believe that a good, heavy dose of Psilocybin or LSD once or twice a year (and not more) is needed for many men who have no Directing Mind, who are truly lost, who have no masculinity or even self-realisation. This is the quickest way to wake up, whether you’ve been asleep your whole life or you’ve fallen into a depressive slump. Repeated use will not have the same effects, you only need one good trip to make the realisations, after that, take the information you gained on your holiday back home, take the new voice you’ve discovered, and use it to build your life.


All these things have a snowball effect, they compound into one another and make getting your life and health back on track easier once you can get some going in tandem. The hardest step is and always will be, starting. This is what many men struggle to even begin, because you need a Directing Mind to tell you to get off your ass and fix yourself, and many of us have it hidden behind too much brain fog.

Once you have started, you need to remain consistent and not give up. This is where the rest of the failures fall. If you break at the first sign of hardship or resistance or pain you will never make it. It will never be smooth sailing, there will always be struggle, but every time you fall off the horse you must always get back on it again.

The men who succeed don’t just magically have it easier than everyone else. They have the same worries and hardships and anxieties and things restricting them. They are just able to navigate through them easier with the help of a stronger, sounder mind. And once again, there is no point reading all this if you will just forget it all once the tab is closed. You must fully try and internalise these techniques I’ve taught you, the philosophies I’ve attempted to pass on. Make notes, write in your journal, translate some of this into your own words. If you want to take this advice, you should not be thinking of it as “something some guy said on the internet”, it should be “something I believe”.


Lessons Learned:

  • You cannot game women if you are not mentally sound and sure of yourself as a man first.

  • It is not hard to be a mentally fucked up man nowadays, the whole of society is against us.

  • TRP and other male-focused movements have become forums for men to share mental health tips and advice, from those who know better and have made it themselves.

  • In order to understand and employ this advice, you must first have the tools and capability to process and translate this advice into real action.

  • Your Directing Mind is the inner voice of reason in your head that overrides your lazy subconscious and drives you to be a better man.

  • You can use your directing mind to understand and employ the advice and lessons you learn.

  • You can strengthen your Directing Mind in a multitude of ways. I have outlined in this post the few that have worked for me.