Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha (18 page)

In terms of sugars that are okay, you don't need to spend much time stressing about fruits. Instead, watch out for all the hidden sugars in packaged foods, and be wary of taking in too much dried fruit or juice. We wouldn't recommend having either more than once or twice a week, and just a serving at that. You'd be surprised what one glass of juice per day could do to your blood sugar levels.

Watch Less Porn

For every guy who ever claimed that watching porn was merely for research, you've officially been liberated. There's some serious science behind watching porn, but that's not a good thing if you've made erotica a frequent hobby. According to research published in
Psychology Today,
watching porn can cause neurochemical changes that kill your ability to become aroused.

The power player behind this phenomenon is dopamine. You might know dopamine as the neurotransmitter in your brain that influences your ability to feel and experience pleasure. Not surprisingly, when you watch porn, it triggers a strong dopamine reaction. This is a good thing. But it becomes bad when you constantly or repeatedly create a dopamine surge from watching porn. Like any drug, you become resistant. In this case, that means you desensitize your ability to become aroused by sex and other pleasurable experiences.

This is a very dangerous situation. Too much porn can literally decrease your ability to form intimate relationships, and regular sex will no longer be enjoyable. This has been shown to make people withdraw entirely from actual sex and instead search for more outlandish forms of pornography that might trigger dopamine and cause them to experience arousal.

What this means is your boundaries will be pushed so far that it'll be difficult to be aroused by anything basic. Over a long enough period of time, the extended exposure will make it harder for the act of sex to get you aroused.

While we're not saying you shouldn't watch porn, we are saying that you want to be mindful that it can have a detrimental effect on your intimacy and arousal. As they always said at the end of
GI Joe,
“Knowing is half the battle.”

Check Your Prescription Meds

There's a reason why depression is one of the biggest hurdles to sexual satisfaction. Once you become depressed, there's a dangerous catch-22 associated with finding your way out of the dark and into happiness. If you're depressed, some of the most effective drugs you can take are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These drugs increase the amount of serotonin, another feel-good neurotransmitter. From a chemical standpoint, you almost have no choice but to feel better. There's just one catch—SSRIs also interfere with sexual pleasure. Some situations are so bad that SSRIs have been shown to inhibit your ability to orgasm. This, in turn, makes you feel bad and can increase symptoms of depression even when physiologically you have medicine that is supposed to make you happier.

Unfortunately, there's no simple fix for this situation. You have to experiment on a personal level. Researchers suggest starting with a low dosage to assess if your depression symptoms improve without any negative sexual consequences. But if your sex drive and pleasure disappear, it might be time for a different medical solution.

Get More Sleep

Are you starting to sense a theme in this book? Sleeping is incredibly important to many of the fundamental attributes of being a man—and that includes your sex life. The sweet spot appears to be five hours, say researchers at University of Chicago. (Remember, your
goal
is still six hours. But when you get less than five hours, that's when the worst consequences appear to take over.) That's the breaking point where your testosterone levels drop. And like booze, it doesn't take long to have a significant impact. Just one week of sleeping less than five hours a night can drop your levels to those of someone fifteen years older. That's significant when you consider that testosterone has been shown to drop up to 1 percent every year after you hit thirty. The men in the study reported that the drop in sleep quality resulted in less happiness, satisfaction, and sex drive.

A requirement should then be to get
at least
six hours of sleep per night, and when you think about it, that's not a big request. If you struggle sleeping, here are a few tricks that might help:

 

1. Make your room colder.
This improves your ability to fall asleep.

2. Eat more carbs late at night.
We already told you that you should be having carbs at night because it's good for your body and your workouts, but the carbs will also help you pass out. Need proof? Think about every Thanksgiving after you eat approximately two pounds of stuffing and sweet potatoes. We'll show you how many carbs to eat at night, but in general, you'll be splitting all your carbs between two meals: after your workout and before bed. If you work out late at night, then prepare yourself for an evening carb party!

3. Eat protein before bed.
When you're throwing down your carbs, make sure you're combining them with some protein. It can be a chicken breast or just a scoop of protein powder. Protein contains amino acids, one of which is L-tryptophan. If you love
Seinfeld,
you already know this as the secret sauce in turkey that makes people tired. Your brain uses tryptophan to produce melatonin and serotonin, both of which improve your sleep.

4. Have a cheat day.
That's right. Here's another reason why cheat days are so great—low leptin levels can hurt your sleep. So by going higher carb, you'll bump up your leptin and improve your quality of sleep.

5. Sleep in a dark room.
This might seem obvious, but your sleep cycle is dependent on circadian rhythms. In other words, when it's light your body “knows” to be awake, and when it's dark it makes you want to sleep. The light decreases melatonin production, which makes it harder for you to go to sleep.

6. Avoid caffeine before you sleep.
Another no-brainer, but even if you don't feel that caffeine has an impact on you, it's still a stimulant. Since the half-life of caffeine can be a while, depending on the individual, we recommend that you avoid caffeine after four p.m. if possible.
^*

 

Take More Vacations

We've already made it perfectly clear that stress harms your hormones in a way that is frighteningly dangerous for your sex drive. And while it'd be great to live a life that's free of stress (in fact, it's one of our primary goals for this book), we know it might take some time to progress to that level. So as you learn the ropes, your easiest solution is to take a vacation.

A nine-year study found that vacations are one of the best stress relievers. They're so powerful that men who take vacations have lower levels of cortisol and are 30 percent less likely to die from heart disease. The key wasn't the length of the vacation, but rather the frequency. It's a good reminder that if you play and work hard, you need consistent tune-ups to keep you performing at a high level. In that way, your body is like a car. If you drive it all the time and only bring it in once per year, your car will die on you sooner than you want.

We know that vacations are a luxury, but a getaway can occur in many forms. And because price shouldn't be a limiting factor that prevents you from getting away, we recommend the Alpha vacation. Go camping, hiking, or kayaking or spend a night sleeping in a tent somewhere. The idea is that you unplug, get away, and include some sort of exercise. (Bonus points if you do pull-ups in the trees.) Bring your guy friends and enjoy a weekend. The stress that will be removed by this type of approach will shock you. A few days every few months can literally make a difference that could help you live longer.

 

CONFIDENCE

We don't need to tell you that sex feels good. But there's another psychological benefit of sex that plays an important role in your development as a man. Sex allows you to feel that you have fulfilled a biological imperative in that you've taken steps toward procreation; this satisfies the ego on a deeply subconscious level.

When you fulfill your ego on a subconscious level, it bubbles up to the conscious level. We probably don't have to explain this to you. Any time you start having more sex—especially with someone new—you walk with a little more spring in your step. Of course this is partially due to the fact that sex is fucking awesome. But, more than anything else, sex has reaffirmed—or created—an unwavering belief that you can accomplish anything. It is acceptance and approval at the highest level; it's the most visceral form of approval. Someone is literally letting you
in
to their body.

Acknowledging that your confidence is tied in part to your sex life, and in particular how active and successful it is, does not mean you are drawing all your self-worth from your sexual accomplishments. It just means that you acknowledge that you're human, and more importantly, a man.

A true Alpha accepts these things and makes them part of who he is. He realizes that understanding the relationship between sex and confidence gives him power over himself. It allows him to objectively look at his self-esteem in times when his sex life is not active; this knowledge allows him to understand that the reason he's feeling down may be due in part to the lack of sex.

All of that creates a greater control over your sense of self. You'll be able to objectively monitor how you're feeling.

On the other hand, in times of your life when you're having sexual success—with one or many partners—the Alpha awareness of the relationship between sex and confidence will ensure that you don't turn into a cocky asshole who thinks he can bang the entire world just because he's having a lot of sex.

But remember, sex is just a catalyst. The bigger picture is how you build confidence, in general. The easiest and most
powerful
ways to do that are by improving your physical attributes through exercise and diet, and by boosting your sex drive.

Once you experience that success, you'll learn to link your confidence to other things. After all, in order to hit your target, you must first learn how to pull the trigger—by optimizing your hormones and experiencing those benefits—and then you can look for more bullets. As you build confidence, this more readily allows you to take a more honest appraisal of your self-worth so you can look at all the things you have to offer and how they can drive or further boost your confidence.

As we stated in the Alpha Traits, a true Alpha is confident but not cocky. He has a very real understanding of what he can and can't do. However, the Alpha's confidence is high because of his assessment of his abilities, and thus he realizes there isn't much he can't do.

 

HAPPINESS

Take a moment to think about the last time you were happy. We're not talking about the fleeting moments when you smile and laugh. We mean
real
happiness. A permanent state of being when you were content with yourself and the world you live in and you didn't experience any stress or desire for anything more.

For some people, this type of fantasy is reserved for sleep. Stress is a part of life. Frustration is inevitable. And in a world where what you can achieve appears limited by what you directly control, it's inevitable that you're always going to want more.

Or is it?

As sex is a catalyst for confidence, happiness is a by-product of creating more control in your life. This doesn't mean building a world where you are insulated and every person and decision is a puppet that creates a safe environment. This is about using your newfound confidence to establish more comfort in your universe, which allows you to stress less and stop worrying about everything that corrupts your happiness.