TheBroCode Rule #4: You must let a bro know immediately if he has food in his teeth, or on his face, when in public.

This is literally how almost all buying decisions are formed and made by every man on earth. The crazy thing is that it also applies to our mental health. Most of us are unaware we even have a problem. Most of us live in somewhere in the stages of not knowing/knowing we have a problem, but doing nothing about it. For most men, this is how they go through life. The fact that you’re even here, puts you in the top 20% of action takers. So let’s dive into it.

I spoke with a few psychologists this week who work with hypermasculine men and they broke it down like this…. Men can’t get to a place of self awareness or even recognizing they have a problem, until they can understand the purpose of emotions to be able to classify feelings and moods. Most men have no idea how they feel about anything, because they don’t know how, or don’t go through the mental exercises of classifying emotions and being present with themselves.

I know right? we’re men. we’re not stupid. we know how we feel right? Wrong. I started to practice this myself over the last few weeks and every time I feel a big emotion for something (sports bet, a sad movie, a funny joke, etc.) I would pull out my phone and go through the emojis and think for a second about which emoji I actually feel in that moment. There are 4 core emotion buckets and men mainly only express 2. Let’s get into it.

 WTF are emotions? (The 4 × 3 Matrix)

Emotions are conscious mental reactions brought on my neurophysiological changes.

There are 4 basic human emotion buckets:

1. Sadness

2. Anger

3. Happiness

4. Fear

Of these 4 types, men are usually only comfortable expressing #2 and #3 due to societal stigmas growing up. ALL HUMANS feel all 4 emotions, so it’s stupid to think that men should not be able to express the others. Men need to tap into the feelings and categorize your emotions when you feel them. This is the 1st step to any sort of self awareness, Thousands of dollars in therapy, healing past traumas, etc. and you’re learning it here for FREE.

STEP 1: The best way to start is this (this is what I did):

• Take a look at the emojis in your phones keyboard, get familiar with them, especially the one’s you never use or look at

• Next time you go to send a message, or every time you go through your phone, take a few seconds, look at the emojis, and think for a minute about how you actually feel in that moment.

• Identify the emotion and attach it to an emoji

• once you get comfortable with actually identify HOW you feel in various situations and can consistently describe how you feel (based off of emoji classification) then you’re ready to take actual steps to help shift your mood using science.

This step is probably the most critical and most harped about by therapists….if you can do this as a man, you’re already 40% through the journey of becoming a better version of yourself. The rest of therapy usually differs by person and retraining the mind, reframing situations, using different mental models but this CORE part is the beginning to it all

There are 3 components to every emotion:

1. Subjective Component: How you experience the emotion

2. Physiological Component: How your body reacts to the emotion

3. Expressive Component: How you behave in response to the emotion

Step 2: The best way to start is this (this is what I did):

• once you get a decent handle on step 1 above, then use the notes app in your phone. Once a day (in the evening as you get ready for bed) you’re going to write one sentence in your notes.

• The one sentence will cover all 3 components above and summarize your emotion for the day overall, or at a specific event that happened during your day.

• Example #1: Today, I lost a big contract. I felt sad and fearful. It felt like my heart sunk into my chest, I had a pain in my throat. I took the afternoon off, started looking for new contracts at Starbucks while sipping a sugar cookie latte

• Example #2: My girlfriend surprised me with wings for dinner. I felt happy and loved that she cared about what I like. I felt good inside, my heart felt light, I felt a little less tense, I gave her a kiss, smiled, and rubbed her feet later as we watched tv to say thanks.

Once you are able to do the two steps above (as consistent as you can, but ideally daily), you are 60% there, as far as, being on the journey of self awareness and what you would actually do in therapy.

I know, it sounds easy, you’re probably thinking “how is this going to help me?”, but the truth is, IT WORKS. This is how every male celebrity and idol you’ve ever had, starts the self-awareness journey. (The Rock, Kobe, LBJ, Brady, Steve Jobs, ,etc.)

Men tend to regulate their emotions through actions rather than words

We’re not built like women. We don’t like to sit around and be all ‘Koombaya’ about our emotions and feelings over a glass of wine.

But as a result, men tend to have lower emotional intelligence, and even end up as strangers to their own emotional life.

Start practicing the two steps above:

• Recognizing & Identifying Emotions

• Identifying the different components

This will save you thousands of dollars in potential therapy, make you more in-tune with your emotional buckets, and if you let your significant other know that you’ve started this journey, they’ll likely have a new-found appreciation and respect for you as a man.

You may need to mentally give yourself permission to FEEL. Allow yourself to feel the 4 buckets in the entirety. It’s okay to NOT be okay sometimes. We’ve all been there. You’re not alone bro. Sometimes just recognizing it and allowing yourself to FEEL emotions that you’ve been suppressing will help you heal.

Emotion and Mood Identification is the KEY to improving your mental health and becoming a better version of you.

So what are you waitin’ for bro? The sooner you start the journey, the sooner you can grow into the new you.

There’s a lot to unpack in a newsletter, so I’ll leave you with some articles for reference:

The reframing of masculinity as an opportunity to 'be a man' about your own health, to 'be a man' about your family, to' ‘be a man’ about taking care of yourself and your mental health is exactly the kind of narrative destruction we need in this world.

There is something powerful about taking back control of the word masculine and making it modern. Men need to start focusing on their mental and spiritual sides (as I mentioned in the 3 legged stool example in the last edition).

Masculinity in the digital age and AI era, will be defined as a man who has mastered his mental, spiritual, and physical self.

To strive to better everyday. To be the BEST version of you. To be honest with oneself. To put in the work it takes to heal. To deal with your shit. To fight the battles everyday in your mind and win. That’s the new definition of masculine in this age.

I remember it vividly. It was March 9th 2019….I was drenched in humid rain sitting on the patio inside of a B&B in Ubud, Bali…..check the email next week for the story.

As men, nobody uses hand signs more than us for everything we possibly can. From head nods, to fist bumps, to sports plays, body signals and hand signs have dominated how we communicate. Crazy thing is, the same signs tend to mean different things to different people, depending on where you are in the world. I’ve shown three of them below, but click on any image to see the full 10.

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