I periodically spend some time in the RedPill IRC Channel. It’s an excellent opportunity to share advice on game, fitness, financial habits, and just interact in general with like-minded men in real-time, especially for those that don’t readily have this available in their daily lives.

Men need male friends. Those who continue to rely on females for guidance or a sounding board will consistently miss out on the ability to grow through having a masculine presence in their lives to confront them on their bullshit. If you want to get cuddled and coddled hang out with primarily women. If you want to grow into a better person, have male friends and mentors.

On a consistent basis, men will come into the chat seeking advice. Advice on how to regain frame with a plate, text game advice, or similar. This is a good thing. They are given direction, usually which requires making a difficult choice. Inevitably more often than not instead of taking the advice and bettering themselves, they become hostile, argumentative, defensive, and double down on beta logic.

It’s something I’ve come to call the Triggered Gerbil™.

It is the psychological phenomenon in which the thinking brain yields to the mind’s conditioned fear response in order to protect itself from pain.

I suspect this comes from being raised by single mothers, or by a father who easily gives in to the fear of psychological pain. It happens to all humans, but through conditioning we can notice and change it.

In psychology and logic this type of, rationalization is a defense mechanism in which behaviors or feelings are justified and explained away by shitty logic. The net result is that we favor faulty logic that keeps us emotionally safe over cold hard change. Feels over reals.

The triggered gerbil is the nexus of all beta faggotry. It’s a red alert in the mind to avoid pain at all costs. Specifically, the pain of seeing ourselves as weak, or seeing the reality that we are making a mistake. The mind gets “triggered” and goes into full defensive mode to avoid what it believes is a cascading meltdown that might lead us to insanity.

This behavior is damaging to your ability to thrive, and if reinforced can become a habitual and entrenched pattern of thinking.

This is what makes this dangerous to achieving your goals because on a conscious, surface level your behavior can appear to be completely reasonable. It makes us make sense of our own bullshit hubris. This form of ad hoc hypothesizing (adding to a belief in order to save it from being falsified) often happens subconsciously. It would go something like this:

  1. Beta Brian goes into a chat room, asks for advice.
  2. Advice given. Advice involves making a tough choice (dropping a plate, work out, stop being such a faggot)
  3. Brian’s brain anticipates that integrating the advice means psychological pain. Since Brian can’t change his reality, his subconscious concludes that he can only change the way he thinks about his reality. A rationalization is a much easier, much ‘cheaper’ alternative than submitting to psychological pain with no guarantee that things will change.
  4. Brain’s subconscious activates rationalization. Outward expression of this is defensiveness, posturing, excuse making, etc. He beings arguing, and constructs a reality in his head that other’s don’t understand him, or don’t know what they are talking about.
  5. Beta Brian’s brain rewards itself from keeping itself consciously unaware of rationalization. He leaves the situation, safe and resolute in his beliefs.

Don’t be Beta Brian How many times have you rationalized not cold approaching a girl due to approach anxiety? How many times have you passed up lucrative opportunities by saying to yourself they weren’t worth it? How many times have you turned off the alarm at 5am, rolled over and gerbiled yourself into skipping leg day? What sort of bullshit did you tell yourself?

I’ve shaved well over 40 pounds of fat off my body, gamed countless 8’s & 9's, and nearly tripled my income in just under the 3 years by applying the self-improvement principles of TRP in my life. This required pushing into pain, living in fear, and submitting to the idea of being uncomfortable.

Time and time again when friends I knew see me, they say something to the effect of “I wish I could do what you did,…BUT…” and then insert some form of rationalization. The truth of the matter is they COULD do what I did, but lack the capacity or the inclination to push into fear, uncertainty, and pain in order to come out of the other side victorious.

The sub exrp is full of the varying shades of this behavior. In society at large, beta mentalities such as “the nice guy gets the girl in the end”, “money isn’t everything”, “the world is fair”, “work hard and you’ll be rewarded”, are all bullshit rationalizations to keep us from feeling bummed out about the harsh reality of life. The world isn’t fair. People with money do live better lives. Being attractive is objectively better than being unattractive. Harsh realities to accept, but to fundamentally move past rationalization and into action requires an act of will.

To be alpha, do the opposite of rationalization. Don’t give in to the instinct to reason away pain. Practice withstanding psychological as often as possible to ferret out opportunities for your brain to trick you into bullshit. Surround yourself with male friends who will do the same.

If the mind doesn’t see pain as that damaging, it will do less to avoid it. This gives you a decisive advantage.

Getting triggered into inducing the fear response is going to happen. The important factor is whether you can realize it and steer yourself away from responding to it. Don’t let yourself fall into shitty patterns. Push into the pain and rise on the other end of it stronger than you ever could imagine.

Think this doesn’t apply to you? Are you sitting right now in ‘monk mode’ rationalizing away not lifting or going out gaming under the banner of “I’m still doing research bro”? Are you finding yourself triggered by something I’ve said and the faggotry of rationalization is setting in?

Be curious and watch for this shit. It will help you as you grow into a stronger frame.