MenTour

Wants Vs. Likes Have you ever wanted something really, really bad, but when you finally got it, you were left feeling kind of disappointed? Maybe you thought changing jobs would make you happy, but it didn’t. Or you thought you’d like living in another state, but ended up regretting the move. Perhaps you sunk a bunch of money into a new hobby you were sure you’d love, only to abandon it after just a few outings. Why do we experience these mismatches between what we think something will be like and the reality of it? This misalignment is often the result of confusing our wants and our likes — a common mix-up that gets in the way of our making good decisions and finding real satisfaction. The Difference Between Wanting and Liking While we often use “like” and “want” interchangeably, in the realm of cognitive psychology, they’re two different things. Wanting is simply the prediction that we’ll like something when we get it or experience it. Lik...

Listen Up! Learning the Skill of Paying Attention We’ve all had that moment where, after turning through several pages of a novel, we suddenly realize we haven’t the faintest idea of what we just supposedly read.  We saw the words on the pages, but we didn’t actually take the time to process them mentally.  In other words, there is a difference between seeing and reading.  Seeing happens as long as your eyes are open.  It is a passive biological process.  But reading requires you to exert some brainpower.  It is an active process of making meaning. When it comes to listening, we have a tendency to look at the words but never really “read” what our family, friends, and co-workers are saying.  But poor listening habits can be overcome.  As we press on towards becoming better men, the stereotype of the tuned-out male does not need to apply to us. Listening in Perspective You might be surprised how much we are required to listen...

Why Your First Impression Matters You meet a woman at a party and think you have a good conversation. But when you later send her a text, she doesn’t respond. You go into a job interview feeling confident and leave feeling like you aced it. But while you keep looking at your phone, expecting a callback, it never comes. You meet a guy at a party you feel you have a lot in common with and could become a good friend. But at the end of the night, you don’t exchange information in order to hang around again. Have situations like these ever happened to you? From your end, you feel like the interaction went well, but it doesn’t seem like the other person felt the same connection. It’s confusing and frustrating. Or maybe you actually rarely feel like your encounters with new people go well in the first place. You often feel awkward when meeting new folks, and thus aren’t particularly surprised when they aren’t interested in getting to know you better. Either way, the issue ...

How to Survive a Mugging The Best Mugging Defense of All: Avoid Being Mugged in the First Place Stay in populated areas. While pickpockets like crowded areas, muggers prefer to attack individuals when they’re by themselves. It reduces the chances of witnesses. So rule number one of avoiding being mugged: stay in populated areas, and don’t go out alone. Stay in well-lit areas. Again, muggers like to do their work where they can’t be seen, so if you’re out and about at night, stay in well-lit areas. When you park your car at a store, park it underneath a light. Avoid dark alleys and the like. If you are out at night, keep a tactical flashlight on you. It allows you to identify potential threats and bright light can momentarily disorient attackers. Stay discreet. “ Gray man ” is a phrase you hear a lot in the tactical world. It means dressing and acting in a way that doesn’t bring much attention to yourself. To avoid being mugged, be the gray man. Don’t wear anything...

Should You Train When You’re Sick? You wake up one morning, and you don’t feel very well. Maybe your sinuses are stuffed up, or perhaps you’ve got a little diarrhea. You’ve scheduled some barbell training or a run for later that day, but you’re thinking about bagging the workout so you can just focus on recovering. Is that the right call? Should you skip an exercise session when you’re feeling sick? Short answer: no, you probably don’t need to skip your workout. When You Should Definitely NOT Train the only times you should skip a workout due to sickness is if you’re running a fever above 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit or you’re regularly vomiting or having diarrhea. "According to sports medicine doctor Lewis G. Maharam, exercising with a fever can cause your already high internal body temperature to increase, which will only make you feel sicker." Isolated bouts of vomiting or diarrhea by themselves typically aren’t reasons for skipping a work...

Getting Ripped vs. Getting Strong When most dudes have the come-to-Jesus moment that they need to start exercising and eating right, their primary motivation is usually to look good, and looking good usually means being lean and “ ripped .” They want the hot beach bod with abs you can grate cheese on. But they also want to be big and strong. Really strong. “Strong AF,” as they say on Instagram these days. After scouring the interwebs for plans that will simultaneously get them ripped and swole at the same time, these would-be Adonises get to training. They’re at the gym six days a week, beast-moding a different body part each day. They take the obligatory locker room selfie of their after-workout pump and post it to Instagram (#transformation #beastmode). They drink their protein shake within the magical one-hour window after working out so their muscles absorb as much of it as possible. (Some really jacked guy on Instagram mentioned doing that in his sponsored post ...

Decluttering Your Digital Life Recent years have seen a boom in books (and articles) about being digitally mindful — putting down the smartphone, closing the computer, and engaging with real-world, tactile things. All this content makes the case that our devices are sapping a bit of our soul. This isn’t to say that the digital revolution is a bad thing, just that it needs a little more mindfulness than simply picking up the latest iPhone and diving into the digital ocean with reckless abandon. In reading these commentaries on the effects technology is having on our lives, and considering both the negative and positive sides of the coin, it occurred to me that perhaps the best way of thinking about how we should engage our digital spaces, is to compare it to how we inhabit our physical ones. In the same way that “analog” possessions are neither good or bad in and of themselves, but only detract rather than enhance our lives when they become too great in number, req...