Topics/Pillar II

Emotional regulation

Regulation through granularity, not suppression.

The advice to control your emotions usually means suppress them, which works until it spectacularly doesn't. The more durable route is granularity: the better you can name what you are feeling, the less of your behaviour it silently drives. These lectures treat emotions as information with a signal-to-noise problem, not as noise.

6 lectures on emotional regulation

The Space Between Stimulus and Response

The single most valuable skill a person can develop is the deliberate widening of the gap between what happens to them and what they do about it, observation held long enough to make the response a choice rather than a reflex.

17 min

The Unreadable Man

Restraint is not coldness or repression; it is the refusal to broadcast your internal state to people who have not earned it, and that refusal is one of the few durable forms of leverage available to an ordinary person.

17 min

Lust Is a Leash

Sexual desire is the single most exploited vulnerability in the human mind, and a person who has not examined how thoroughly it directs his attention, energy, and decisions is being steered by it far more than he knows.

17 min

Anger, Decoded

Anger is information about a boundary or a thwarted value, not an instruction to be obeyed, and learning to read the signal while refusing the command is the difference between a person who is used by his anger and one who uses it.

17 min

Sleep Is the Floor

Nearly every capacity a person tries to build (emotional control, clear thinking, discipline, physical progress) is downstream of sleep, which means chronic under-sleeping quietly sabotages all of them at once while feeling like virtuous effort.

17 min

Why You Should Learn to Fight

Learning a real martial art is less about violence than about composure: it is the only training that teaches you to stay deliberate while your body is genuinely under threat, and the calm that produces cannot be faked.

17 min

In the workshop

Related subjects

Clear thinking Self-discipline Strategy and leverage Influence and social skill Strength Athleticism