20 Health Habits for Men in their 20s
By Alexander Juan Antonio Cortes
Time is infinite, our lives are not. Your twenties can the foundation for your health throughout the years, or they can be time wasted. The following are the ways to create mind and body health that create quality and quantity of life. Sparing yourself from fixing your health later starts by how you live your life today.
- Learn how to have healthy relationships with women
–Women can be the best and worst thing to ever happen to you. Women are unequaled as a destructive force, the list of ways this can happen is an article unto itself. Call it redpill, call it game, call it whatever you like, you need to learn how to manage, handle and deal with women in a positive manner. If your relationships with women are negative, you are setting yourself to be bitter, used, and angry at the world. Women should ideally be a net positive for your life.
- Don’t compromise Health for relationships
-Go to college, gain the freshmen 15. Get out of college, spend your 20s partying, get a girlfriend, gain more weight. The more your physical health declines because of the people you spend your time with, the more your mental health will as well. Being 34 and complaining that you are old and fat is a joke you played on yourself. Your 20s set you up for the long run, take advantage of them. Go into your 30s with a body and mind to match, and friends that reinforce that. Not a body that is already failing you along with friends and a mental state that enables it.
- Have Fit Friends
–Research is clear; people that are overweight become more overweight over the years, and they influence their social circles to be overweight as well. We rise and fall to the standards of the people around us. Not all your friends need by exercise enthusiasts, but maintain a standard of knowing people who prioritize their health and don’t destroy it. The friends that you get drunk, high, and drugged out with become the people who let themselves go the fastest. And you will go with. Health is your environment, not only your internal mindset. Maintain a healthy social environment with you who you know and spend time with
- Make good friends
-Perhaps I could have made 3 and 4 the same point, but there is differences worth noting. People can be physically “healthy”, but be vapid, narcissistic, and otherwise useless beyond their physical form. I’ve known enough elite bodybuilders; many are muscular shells, and nothing else. So not all your friends will be the same, and everyone serves a different role. Not all my mens are friends are physical culturists like myself, and that is fine, we’ve got lots of other things in common. We share a common a purpose to be better man, better humans, and we’ve all masculine virtues. How that manifest is different person to person. Be friends with people you can be proud to call a friend.
- Eliminate poisonous people preemptively
-There is an irony to trust; we can make it easy to earn, but once given, we make it hard to admit we were wrong in giving it. Whether it’s family, women, or friends, all can be parasitic and become drains on your life. If someone begins to suck you of energy, don’t “wait” until they do something truly reprehensible to eliminate them. Befriend people easily, but be rid of them just as swiftly.
- Don’t become addicted to porn
-Porn of and in itself is not bad. Humans live for sex and reproduction. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with watching porn. If/when it becomes a substitute for meeting women, having actual sex, and it ruins your ability to do both the latter and former,
Now you’ve got a problem. Millions of young men warp their sexuality, confidence, and communication skills by consuming too much porn. I don’t suggest becoming a puritan, but recognize if its a problem for you. The devil is in the dose, find what your dose is for it being invigorating versus making you limp and insipid.
- Lift weights with consistency
-More muscle equals more testosterone. More muscle equals stronger immune system. More muscle equals better posture, more attractive, more confidence, increased lifespan, and a medley of other benefits. Muscle is the Holy Grail for health. Developing a lifting habits in your 20s gives you a physical foundation for the rest of your life. Your prime muscle building years are in your 20s, do not waste them. Creating a foundation of health in your 20s ensures you won’t need to “fix yourself” in your 30s, 40s, and beyond.
- Do not become fat
-Being overweight raises almost every risk factor factor for reduced mortality, lowers quality of life, and increases healthcare costs exponentially. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose by being overweight or obese. Not every guy is going to be jacked and tan with abs, but at least be normal bodyweight and keep your bodyfat under control. Having to spend time to unfat yourself is mental energy that you could have spent elsewhere had you not become unhealthy in the first place. Being fat makes you an opponent of yourself.
- Eat clean, drink water
-Eating clean means eat like an adult. Protein, vegetables, fruit, water. This is not complicated. Minimize processed food, don’t subsist on coffee, soda, and flavored beverages. The quality and quantity of food you ingest unequivocally affects your health.
- Don’t compromise sleep
-Barely sleeping is made out to be “hardcore”, and some other bullshit about how hard people hustle. It’s a false idol perpetuated by fake gurus and hustlers of no accomplishment. More time is wasted being tired than is spent producing when you are chronically underslept. Of the clients ‘I’ve had in their 30s, many had terrible sleep habits, and their health, work, relationships all suffered for it. Developing a bad sleep habit in your 20s is an anchor that slowly drowns you in your 30s, you will build a half-assed life and will not even be aware of it. To maximize your energy, productivity, and learning, maximize your sleep.
- Develop Skills that Pay Bills
-Ive always called it a skillset. Scott Adams calls it a talent stack. Principle is the same-to succeed in modern society, you need to be multi capable, not mono capable. The time of the “oneitis” career is over. You need to be adaptable, nothing is secure and no job is going to make you “next level” of its own accord.
Writing and speaking are requisite now, if you can write well and speak well, you have power. Sales/persuasion/marketing is crucial in a world of democratized information. There is one I consider crucial that is unsung; learn how to learn. Being autodidactic puts you years ahead of others. If you can write, speak, sell yourself, and teach yourself, you have the potential to dominate any profession you go into.
- Don’t develop bad spending habits
-Alcohol can be a huge waste if you are young guy that goes out. But so can clothes, supplements, cars, women, food, entertainment, accessories, electronics, and so much more. Don’t be a slave to status, status display and status seeking is essentially nothing but ways to show others how you spend money. And money is easier spent than earned. I don’t advocate absolute minimalism, but the strategy is a pragmatic one. Do not spend pointlessly, and never let expenses exceed cashflow and credit.
Learn financial mindset
-A lack of money creates stress like no other, and it ages you. With your skillset and your smart spending habits comes financial self reliance. The more money you have, the more options you’ll have, and options are a necessity to enjoying life fully. It’s far easier to lose money than to make it. Financial mindset is maximizing lifestyle and long term prosperity for minimal expenditure. Keep your expenses low, invest the extra in yourself, and save as much you can. Once you hit that threshold, hire a financial advisor and a CPA, and invest in long term investments. If you earn enough money to play short term games with money, do so at your own risk. Otherwise, keep a long term outlook, and base your plans on ensuring future security and prosperity.
- Use a flask when you go out
-Simple “bro” tactic. Order soda water with lime when you go out. Or order diet coke. Stick a flask in your back pocket, doctor up your drinks with that, or drink straight from it. I shudder to think of the thousands I spent on alcohol in my early 20s, and eventually an older friend turned me onto doing this when we went out (and we went out a lot). In one month of going out together I spent $600+, he spent $20. Ever since then, Ive flasked it on the now rare occasions when I go to bars.
- Learn to enjoy the outdoors
-Ralph Waldo Emerson took long walks. So did Aristotle. Boxers run for miles and do roadwork, soldiers march for conditioning. Jesuit priests walked in-between their studies. Almost every masculine rite of passage in history required going into nature a youth and returning a man. Historical examples of men who were writers, philosophers, scientists are endless, as are military examples. Lack of exposure to outdoor environmental causes cognitive delays and impairments in children, in adults, a city can be become a cage if you are in too long.
Spend time solitary in nature. Nature is the environment where a man discovers himself, and to never experience it is dismal to the soul.
- Learn How to breath (do cardio)
-Take 100 breathes in a row, in and out. Do nothing else. If you cannot, work on it. A man that cannot calmly collect his thoughts and breathe deeply will create endless miseries for himself.
“All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” – Blaise Pascal.
Do not be a man that hyperventilates and cannot calm down. Oxygen is what keeps you alive, you are dead within minutes without it. Be able to control breathing, and breathe deep.
- Have non digital habits
-Be able to walk away from your phone and laptop, and do something with your hands and your body. Play an instrument, take up boxing or BJJ or some other combative, play a recreational sport, lift weights, learn metal working or carpentry, learn to shoot, take photographs, go for walks, read books, have conversations with other people. Where I live, there is a group of old Vietnam veterans that meet for bagels almost every morning for at least an hour. Sometimes they talk a lot, sometimes little, but they also make conversation and talk to people. How often do you meet with friends to have conversations? You can live on online, but you’ll die in physical reality. Physical world will always be the more real, create your life there.
- turn off the mainstream news
-This goes for social media as well. Every piece of information you expose yourself to affects you. If I wanted to slowly emasculate a man, I could have him watch TV shows that show incompetent fathers, romcoms that show beta males getting the girl by being “nice guys”, adventure films devoid of male heros. I could feed him news every day that says all heterosexual men are rapists, that testosterone is evil, and that the “patriarchy” is to blame for all of the world’s problems. You’d feel guilty for being a man, you’d feel guilty for your own sexuality, and you’d be taught over time that obeying a woman is what good little male slaves do. And if you contradict any of this, you can be controlled with shame.
You have total control with what goes into your mind. Simply be reading site, you are clearly more self aware and perceptive than most. Don’t be willfully ignorant to the world at large, but dont feed on outrage by subjecting yourself to continuous SJW media propaganda either. Be Woke.
- Develop a masculine identity
-I’m not going to opine on what an “Alpha” or “Real Man” is. I’ll keep this simple; be physically fit, manage your emotions and mental state, be self reliant, create positive ensure that your mental and physical health are in alignment with each other. Be of value, learn the value of loyalty, and always be learning. Live in such a way as to be proud of how you live. A Man is many thing, you need to do all of them to be someone you admire. There is no version of gods or gods that admire cowards. Take action
- Develop Self Discipline
-Ive been hired as a personal trainer many times over to guide and direct people with the physical aspects of health, but ultimately these things are a question of Self Discipline. No one is going to do it for you, and consistency in action and behavior are what compound for your health. Whether this is positive or negative is upon you. If you take only only one lesson from all of this, let it be this one; Everything is your fault. If you believe that, then all of it is under your control to change
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Physicality=Mentality