S'up

This is a quick story on how I got my mojo and confidence back.

For about a year and a half, something has been missing from my mind.

The best way I can describe it was I just felt off my game.

It was almost like....imagine there are two parts in your mind.

There's the censor. He's the dude who regulates your actions. He tells you "Don't do this", "don't say that". He has his uses. He also helps with long trains of thought.

Then there's the other part. I'm gonna call him impulse. Why? Because impulse doesn't have a voice. Impulse has only one way to communicate to your mind. It's the sudden urge to perform an action. The urge to say that quip. The urge to hug that person. The urge to carry out that crazy action that will make for a good story.

So usually these guys work in balance. Impulse urges you to do something. Sometimes it's for the good, sometimes it can go too far. This is where the censor comes in. He stops you from going to far. I mean if you get the impulse to jump off a plane without a parachute, the censor is going to step in and save your life. So the censor has his uses.

Most people in this subreddit seem to have an over-active censor. But for me the problem was something else.

I just didn't have the impulse to do anything.

I didn't have the impulse to speak in social situations.

I didn't have the impulse to joke, or to do something spontaneous.

This made me feel super off, because I'd had enough reference experiences do back up impulse. My personality was all about giving impulse a free reign. The amount of funny stories I have in my life to share with others because of impulse....all I'll say was that I had the reference experiences, so it wasn't like I needed more.

This sucked because, I knew I had to talk up in social situations, to talk to girls... but I just didn't have the urge. So what did I do instead? I forced myself. I used the censor to talk, to go up to people.

This meant everything I did came across as contrived. I was like an actor pretending to be funny. It sucked. It sucked balls man.

After a while I realised something was wrong. They were as follows:

  • I'd been unemployed for a while. I'd been building my freelance career straight out of college and had a long ass dry spell.
  • I just didn't have a sex drive any more. It was nearly non-existent. And the few times I nearly had sex, I just couldn't get it up. As a supposedly virile 25 year old male this was a big warning sign that something was wrong.
  • I was living at home with my parents.

No wonder my confidence had taken a beating.

So after trying a shit load of things in my career, I eventually enlisted the help of a mentor. A few months later I started to get some work thrown my way. Winning in my work felt good man.

Then I did some research. My symptoms sounded very similar to people who suffered from low testosterone. The fix? Go to the gym, lift weights, and eat healthy.

So I did just that.

It took a bit of a while.... about 3 months, and a few other things (meditating everyday, and writing gratitudes...look I don't know exactly what works. I just did a bunch of things in the hope that they did work.), but slowly I found impulse speaking again.

I started spontaneously saying funny things in front of my friends.

I started spontaneously doing funny things.

I started becoming the centre of attention at parties somehow.

And then I started getting a lot of female attention.

Suffice it to say, I got my mojo back.

In hindsight there were two problems:

  • My confidence had taking a beating because my work was going nowhere. Your career, or your mission in life is important for your confidence. I have no idea why, but that's just the way it is. Work with it.

  • I had low levels of testosterone in my system. This is akin to walking through life being castrated. It's a disability of sorts. You can't be yourself if you're missing a vital hormone in your body.

So ladies and gentlemen that is how EndOfTheUniverse got his mojo and confidence back.

I wrote this down because if there is just one person, one person in this subreddit who's suffering from what I suffered... then if I pointed them in the right direction to fix their life... that'll make my day.

Sometimes your lack of confidence, especially if you've been confident in the past, isn't because you need more reference experiences. It's because you really need to fix your neurobiology.