The Past Life of Cardboard Millionaires. Twelve-year-old me was convinced my baseball card collection was going to make me rich. I still have the album of my most valuable cards from 1994, carefully sleeved, waiting for that big payday. I looked them up recently. Turns out they are worth…very little. Former AoM contributor Jon Finkel’s piece truly captures the baseball-card-collecting experience of my youth: reading the Beckett guides like they were Barron’s, the cafeteria trades, the absolute certainty that Ken Griffey Jr. rookies were basically treasury bonds. It’s a fun read, but there’s a real financial lesson buried in it. Trees don’t grow to the sky. Be wary of bubbles. For an AoM podcast deepcut, check out this 2010 interview I did about the history and future of baseball cards.

The Prestige. Kate and I have always found the world of magic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries intriguing and been especially interested in Houdini, who we wrote about back in the day. So we loved Christopher Nolan’s film about two rival stage magicians in Victorian-era London when it came out in 2006. We recently watched it again with our kids, and they were hooked too. Nolan does a great job capturing the period atmosphere. But the story about the obsession and rivalry between Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale is what makes this movie so dang gripping. Also, Nolan does his usual Nolan thing with the plot — it folds back on itself, resulting in moments of “Oh man! I didn’t see that coming!” Highly recommend watching if you haven’t ever seen it, or haven’t seen it in a long time.

Apple AirTags. I was skeptical about how much I’d actually use Apple’s AirTags, so I held off on buying them for a long time. I finally pulled the trigger a while back, and they’ve turned out to be incredibly handy. I keep one in my wallet and one on each set of our keys. The number of minutes I’ve clawed back from the “Where are my keys?!” rush when I’m running late to pick up the kids has added up. A four-pack runs around $100, but it’s a small price to pay for not tearing apart your couch twice a week.

The Firm by John Grisham. I’m working on a future AoM piece that’s had me revisiting bestselling novels from the ’90s, which gave me an excuse to finally read John Grisham’s 1991 breakout work, The Firm. As a law grad, I found Mitch McDeere — a hungry young associate seduced by the money and prestige of a too-good-to-be-true Memphis firm — pretty easy to relate to. Grisham knows how law firm life actually feels, and he uses that authenticity as the foundation for a gripping, fast-paced thriller that has you going from Memphis to the Cayman Islands to Florida. Good vacation read. You can knock it out in a week. Going to watch the film adaptation starring Tom Cruise and a bunch of other big stars like Gene Hackman, Wilfred Brimley, Ed Harris, and Tulsa’s own Jeanne Tripplehorn.  

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Ex Libris: The Nicomachean Ethics and Sunday Firesides: Intimations of Immortality.

Quote of the Week

Sin has many tools, but a lie is a handle that fits them all. 

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, writer, and one of the most influential spiritual voices of the 20th century — a man preoccupied with solitude, silence, and the demands of the inner life.

He’s best known for his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which traces his restless youth and eventual conversion to Catholicism.

As I mentioned in last week’s Odds and Ends, I recently re-read this book and enjoyed it. It’s full of interesting spiritual insights. But I also picked up something else Merton mentioned: a simple, practical trick for falling asleep.

Thomas Merton’s Trick for Falling Asleep When You Can’t Fall Asleep

Merton discovered the technique during his undergraduate years at Columbia University in the mid-1930s. He was doing what a lot of college students do: trying to find himself. He dabbled in Marxism and jazz. He also read hundreds of texts on what he loosely called “Oriental mysticism,” or what we now call Eastern philosophy.

While Merton came to regard most of this phase as shallow and misguided, one thing he got out of it stuck with him for the rest of his life: a trick to fall asleep when you can’t fall asleep.

In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton describes the process thusly:

You lie flat in bed, without a pillow, your arms at your sides, and your legs straight out, and relax all your muscles, and say to yourself:

‘Now I have no feet, now I have no feet . . . no legs . . . no knees.’

Basically, you imagine your body disappearing, beginning with your feet and slowly working your way up. You imagine each of your body parts “changed into air and vanished away” — shins, knees, thighs, hips, abdomen, arms, hands, shoulders, repeating the absence of each part to yourself until it genuinely feels “gone.” You keep moving up your body until you drift off to sleep.

Merton noted that this technique usually worked for him, unless he hadn’t fallen asleep by the time he got to his head; when that happened, “Instantly, chest and stomach and legs and feet all came back to life with most exasperating reality.” Fortunately, he’d typically be conked out by the time he made his torso “disappear.”

Why Imagining Your Body Disappearing Can Help You Fall Asleep

Merton theorized the technique worked because it was a type of auto-suggestion or just plain old muscle relaxation. When you’re nice and relaxed, you usually fall asleep. He wasn’t wrong.

Most insomnia isn’t a body problem. It’s a brain problem. Your mind latches onto something (like a work email, a conversation that went poorly, whatever) and starts chewing on it. The harder you try to stop ruminating, the louder the mental chatter gets.

Merton’s technique solves this with a kind of cognitive sleight of hand. It gives your brain something specific and repetitive to do. “I have no feet. No feet. No legs.” The task is engaging enough to occupy the part of your mind that wants to spin out, but boring enough not to fire you up. You’re crowding out the rumination without replacing it with anything that requires actual thinking.

There are a couple of variations on Merton’s technique that you can also try.

I’ve long done a version of this method that comes at it from a related but opposite angle.

When I was a kid, I watched a show called Under the Umbrella Tree. One episode featured Gloria the Gopher having problems falling asleep. Her solution: she went through her body parts one by one, saying goodnight to each of them. “Time to go to sleep, leg. You’re getting heavier and heavier.” It made an impression on me and I started doing it, and I’ve been using this trick ever since.

I find imagining that each of my body parts is getting heavier and heavier easier to conceptualize than imagining that each part is disappearing. Though I’ve had the same experience as Merton: while I usually drift off to sleep by the time I get to my torso, if I reach my head, whatever relaxation I achieved instantly reverses and I’m wide awake.

You can also try the method that was taught to Naval aviators during WWII, which might solve the problem Merton and I have encountered. With this technique, you imagine each of your body parts going absolutely lax and limp, starting with your head instead of your feet; you first relax your scalp, forehead, jaw, and even your tongue, lips, and eyes, before you start moving down your body.

All of these approaches get you to the same sleep-inducing place: a relaxed body and mind. Experiment and see which one works for you; you’ll be sleeping with the beatific stillness of a monk in no time.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When I first started the AoM podcast nearly 18 years ago, many people didn’t even know what a podcast was. This was a time before Conan, the Kelce brothers, and your sister-in-law all had a show, and there were only about a hundred thousand podcasts in existence.

Today, there are roughly 4 million.

That’s a lot of options for the limited slots you’ve got available in your listening time.

So today, allow me to offer 7 reasons the AoM podcast deserves one of them:

1. There’s no fluff. A lot of podcasts open with ten minutes of the hosts catching up about their weekends before they get around to the reason you hit play. You won’t get that on the AoM podcast. It’s all meat, and meat that’s been edited carefully and ruthlessly; we not only cut filler like ums and uhs, but longer stretches that didn’t end up going anywhere.

The result is a tight, value-packed show where everything left in is worthwhile.

2. The episodes don’t run longer than an hour. I don’t have two hours to sit and listen to a podcast, and I’m guessing you don’t either. The AoM podcast respects your time: in addition to being tightly edited afterwards, the rigorous preparation I do before each interview (starting with the fact that I actually read the guest’s entire book!) allows me to draw out the guest’s best insights in a focused way. Our episodes thus come in under an hour, while still capturing someone’s most useful and interesting ideas.

You can often digest an entire episode on your commute, listening to half on the way to work and half on the way home.

3. I let the guests talk. I’ve listened to interview podcasts where the host brings on a Nobel Prize-winning expert and then treats them like an Ed McMahon sideman — talking over them, interrupting mid-sentence, or turning every answer into a segue back to themselves: “That reminds me of something that happened to me.”  

My philosophy is simple: if I’ve invited someone on because they’re the expert, I should get out of the way and let them be the expert. One of the most common compliments I get about the show is that guests actually get to talk.

4. Limited, predictable ad placement. Some podcasts cram in as many ads as they can and scatter them wherever. You’ll be in the middle of a fascinating story and suddenly there’s an ad for a mattress. We run ads in just two predictable places: at the top of the show and in the middle. And when that mid-roll break comes, I announce it so you’re not caught off guard. 

Instead of trying to maximize revenue by maximizing ads, we aim to keep them tasteful and minimally intrusive. (I realize many people would love a show with no ads, but some advertising is necessary to keep a free show running.)

5. Non-political. Politics and current events seem to make their way into nigh near everything these days — from entertainment to sports to podcasts that are ostensibly about other things. But the AoM podcast doesn’t get political. That’s intentional. The world’s got enough bickering, hot takes, tiresome slants, and blowhard pontificating. I want the show to feel like a break from all that, where the focus is on timeless stuff that doesn’t fit into partisan categories and remains evergreen.

6. Family friendly. In a time when many podcasts come marked with the explicit E symbol, you’ll never hear strong profanity on the AoM podcast. You won’t be hit with crude content, either. You can play it in the car with your kids without keeping your hand hovering over the volume knob. And you won’t hesitate to pass an episode along to your sons or nephews.

7. Genuine variety. We’ve covered history, fitness, personal finance, philosophy, literature, marriage, parenting, mental health — and a lot of territory in between. Last week the subject was the mystery of courage; this week, it’s about healthy bowel habits. 

This isn’t a podcast that hits the same topic over and over and over again. You’re not going to get bored with it from week to week, and odds are there’s something in the archive that speaks directly to whatever you’re currently interested in. 

Because of the wide variety of topics the AoM podcast delves into, listening to it regularly is a chance to improve every single area of your life.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably the kind of guy who’d get something out of the show. So open your podcast app, search “Art of Manliness,” and hit follow.

That way, the next time you’ve got a drive, a walk, or a spare stretch of time, you don’t have to think about what to listen to — you’ve already got something worthwhile queued up.

Follow the AoM podcast on Apple Podcasts

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Follow the AoM Podcast Podcast Addict

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Pooping. Everybody does it, but a lot of people are embarrassed to talk about it. That’s a shame, my guest says, not only because your digestive health is incredibly linked to your overall health, but simply for the fact that there is much happiness to be found in an easy, worry-free constitutional.

Harvard gastroenterologist Dr. Trisha Pasricha is the author of You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. Today on the show, Trisha and I have a fun and frank conversation about the art and science of bowel movements, including the color of healthy stools, how often you should be pooping, if laxatives are safe to use, the food to eat that’s even better than prunes for getting things going, why you feel the urge to go poop at Barnes and Noble, the wonders of the bidet, the danger of using your smartphone on the toilet, how to get more comfortable pooping in a public restroom, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Top 10 Toilet Books
• AoM Article: Be a “Regular” Guy — Tips for Improving Your Daily Constitutional
• The Squatty Potty
• “Mariko Aoki phenomenon” — where individuals feel an urgent need to use the bathroom when entering a bookstore
• AoM Article: You Need to Eat More Fiber

Connect With Trisha Pasricha

• Trisha’s website
• Trisha on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The psychologist John Gottman famously spent decades watching couples fight in his Love Lab at the University of Washington. He’d wire them up with physiological monitors, point a camera at them, and ask them to argue about some real issue in their marriage while he and his team looked on.

After observing thousands of couples, Gottman and his team identified four specific communication behaviors that reliably predicted — with 94% accuracy — whether a marriage would survive.

The topic of the argument didn’t matter. A couple could be arguing about sex, money, chores, kids, or in-laws. The content of the argument didn’t make a difference in how likely a couple was to still be married over the following years.

What did matter was the extent to which four communication patterns showed up.

Gottman called them the Four Horsemen of the Marriage Apocalypse.

Here’s what they are and what to do about them.

1. Criticism

A lot of arguments in a marriage are about things that one person in the relationship isn’t happy about. Maybe the wife spends too much money at Costco or maybe the husband leaves the toilet seat up.

Gottman and his team noticed two ways couples approach these relationship frictions: complaint or criticism. Complaints are healthy. Criticisms aren’t.

A complaint targets a specific behavior: “You didn’t call when you said you would.”

A criticism targets the person: “You never think about anyone but yourself.” “You always do this.” “You are so inconsiderate.” Globalizing language — “always,” “never” “you are”— is what tips a complaint into criticism. It takes one incident and turns it into a generalized assessment of character.

When a conversation veers into criticism, the issue that started it tends to disappear. When you call your wife a reckless, thoughtless overspender, she won’t be thinking about her overspending. She’ll be defending her worth as a human being, which means the overspending problem isn’t going to get solved. You’ll be too busy arguing about her character. She’ll likely get defensive (more on that below) and start dredging up some negative character assessments of you.

Gottman’s antidote is what he calls a “Gentle Start-Up.” Say what your problem is, how it’s upsetting you, and what you’d like your spouse to do to resolve the issue.

“I start feeling stressed about our finances when I see how much you’re spending on Amazon. Can we take a look at our bank statements together and see if there’s a place you can cut back?”

Works a lot better than: “You’re a selfish spendthrift who doesn’t care about our family’s financial future.” That just kicks off a fight.

2. Contempt

Gottman identifies contempt as the single strongest predictor of divorce in his research, and it’s different from the other horsemen because it isn’t really about what your spouse did. Rather, it’s a stance you take towards her.

Contempt shows up as sarcasm, eye-rolling, mockery, and hostile humor. When you argue with contempt, you’re not arguing with an equal; you’re treating your wife as someone beneath you. No one likes to be treated as less-than.

Contempt often accumulates from resentments in a relationship that never get addressed. Basically, you’ve got a beef with your wife, you haven’t told her, and the more you stew on it, the more your negative feelings toward her deepen.

Contempt is also fed by a perception problem that Gottman’s research turned up: unhappily married couples undercount their partner’s positive behaviors by roughly 50%. Your spouse can be doing plenty of things right, but you simply don’t register them. You start to spin a negative narrative about her lack of caring and investment that doesn’t match reality.

In either case, your problem with your spouse can spread from being about a specific issue, to becoming what you feel is an indictment of their overall character. You start to have a lower and lower opinion of them. You begin to lose respect for them. A bit of disdain creeps into how you view them, and comes out in your interactions, especially your arguments.

So how do you stop contempt?

First, if you’ve got a problem with your spouse, instead of stewing on it and not telling her, and thus building up your feelings of contempt, address it. Don’t let things fester! As communications expert Joseph Grenny said on the podcast: you can “tell the health of any relationship by looking at one simple thing: the lag time between when people see [an issue] and when they say it, between when they feel it and when they discuss it, between when it’s a concern and when it’s a conversation.”

Gottman also suggests creating a culture of appreciation in your marriage. Actively work to notice what your spouse does right and express your gratitude for it. Tell her thanks for picking up the slack with the kids while you were sick or that you appreciated how she defended you in front of her mother. Deliberately look for the qualities in her that you respect; a healthy marriage is ultimately a mutual admiration society.

3. Defensiveness

Defensiveness is what happens when your spouse brings up an issue and it triggers your self-protection instinct. Instead of engaging with what they actually said, you deflect. The complaint doesn’t get addressed; instead, you’re managing a perceived attack on your character.

Defensiveness shows up in a few recognizable forms.

The most common is counter-complaining: your spouse brings up one issue, and you immediately bring up a grievance of your own.

“You never text me when you’re running late” gets met with “Well, you never tell me when your plans change.”

Now there are two unresolved complaints on the table instead of one, and you’re both more frustrated than when the conversation started.

Another version is what Gottman calls “yes-butting.” You appear to agree with your spouse’s point before immediately negating it.

“You’re right, but if you hadn’t scheduled three things on the same night, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The “yes” is a feint. What follows the “but” is the real message, which is that this is actually your wife’s fault.

A third version is a claim to innocent victimhood — the “I can’t believe you’re treating me like this!” posture that shifts the focus from the original complaint to the injustice of being complained about at all.

All of these maneuvers feel justified from the inside. That’s what makes defensiveness so hard to catch when you’re doing it. Maybe your spouse does share some culpability, and maybe her complaint was delivered too harshly. But while you’re busy making that case, the original issue doesn’t move toward resolution, and your wife comes away feeling like you didn’t hear a word she said — more alone than before she brought it up.

The antidote is taking responsibility for your piece of the problem, even if it’s small. If you genuinely think you’re 90% not at fault, even acknowledging the 10% you do own can stop the conversation from turning into a tit-for-tat exchange of recriminations.

“You’re right, I should have texted when I realized I was running late” doesn’t mean you’re conceding the whole argument or agreeing that your wife handled it perfectly. It means you actually heard her — which, more often than not, is all she wanted.

4. Stonewalling

Stonewalling is when one spouse shuts down entirely during an argument or discussion — goes quiet, looks away, leaves the room, gives one-word answers, or just starts scrolling on their phone. From the outside, it reads as indifference or contempt: I don’t care enough about you or this conversation to even engage.

Gottman’s research found that’s usually not what’s happening at all.

The stonewaller is, in a way, too engaged — they’re overwhelmed. Gottman calls it flooding, or Diffuse Physiological Arousal. When your heart rate climbs past around 100 BPM during an argument, your sympathetic nervous system — the same one that kicks in when you’re being chased — takes over. In that state, you genuinely cannot process what your spouse is saying clearly or respond to it without making things worse. If you’ve ever been in a heated argument where you felt like you literally couldn’t think straight, that’s flooding. The body has essentially gone into survival mode, which isn’t a good mode for working through marital conflict.

Men tend to flood faster and stay flooded longer than women, which is why around 85% of stonewallers are men. Worth knowing so you can watch for it in yourself. Because from your spouse’s perspective, the stonewalling looks like you’ve checked out, which typically causes her to pursue the issue more aggressively to get some kind of response, which floods you further, which makes you withdraw more. It’s the whole “my wife is nagging me” dynamic — except what she’s actually doing is trying to get a human response from someone who has gone completely offline. The cycle tends to end with both people feeling awful and nothing resolved.

The antidote is to take a timeout from the argument. Literally say “I need to take a timeout for a few minutes so I can think about what you said/get my emotions under control.” Then go do something else. Take a walk or do a chore. Just something to let your nervous system settle. Once you’ve calmed down, come back and actually talk things through

It’s advisable to tell your spouse you’ll need to use this technique from time to time during a calm, copacetic moment, rather than in the middle of an argument; just let her know, “I have a hard time responding well when things get heated, so when we’re in an argument, I might need to step aside for a little bit to process things.” This disclosure will likely be met with appreciative respect. But if you decide to leave an argument in the thick of it, without having given this heads up, your spouse may feel like it’s just another act of uncaring avoidance, which will make them angrier.

What Happens Between the Arguments Is More Important

The Four Horsemen show up during conflict. Now that you know what to look for, you’ll be able to rein them in when you see them pop up in your next marital spat.

But the even better news is that you don’t need to be perfect about eliminating these negative communication patterns altogether. Gottman’s research shows that what happens in between arguments — even the most heated ones — has an even more profound mitigating effect on the damage they cause.

When a marriage has at least five positive interactions for every negative one — giving the couple a surplus of positivity in their “relationship bank account” — it can absorb occasional blowups without it affecting the relationship’s happiness and strength. But when a marriage runs a relational “deficit,” every argument can feel fraught, like it’s a referendum on the sustainability of the relationship, bringing it closer to dissolution and creating lingering cracks of alienation.

So spend less time focusing on your communication style, and more time making continual deposits in your relationship bank account (here’s a list of specific ways to do that). Prioritize daily connection — plan good times, have fun together, and offer plenty of affirmation. And start doing a weekly marriage meeting — it will help you check off much of the above advice, from discussing issues promptly to sharing regular appreciation.  

Keep your relationship bank account flush, and the next time you and your spouse fight, even if the Four Horsemen do show up, they’ll quickly gallop away.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Your wallet is an essential part of your EDC. It carries your identification and your means of payment. In the past few decades, wallet profiles have been getting thinner and thinner. Men don’t want to sit on a George-Costanza-sized lump all day. Moreover, carrying too much stuff in your wallet can be a security risk: if you lose your wallet and it contains sensitive information, you put yourself at risk for identity theft. 

So what should you put in and leave out of a wallet to ensure you have the essentials, while also keeping things streamlined and reducing your security risk?

Below we share the items you should sometimes, always, and never keep in your wallet. 

Sometimes

Some items should only be kept in your wallet on an as-needed basis. Keeping them in your wallet all the time creates a higher security risk, and they needlessly take up space.

Health insurance cards/Medicare cards. A thief can use your health insurance card or Medicare card to get procedures done in your name, potentially sticking you with the bill, messing up your health records, or even increasing the cost of your insurance. You only need to bring your health insurance card to your medical appointments. You usually don’t even need it then, as the doctor’s office keeps a copy of your card on file, but every once in awhile they update their records and want to see your card again, so it doesn’t hurt to always bring it. 

You might think that you need to always carry your health insurance cards on you in case you end up making an unexpected visit to the emergency room. Not so. A hospital will still treat you if you don’t have your insurance card. You’ll just need to get the hospital your insurance info later.

Save space in your wallet and reduce your fraud risk by carrying your health insurance cards only when needed.

Medical debit card. Your medical debit card is another sometimes item for the same reasons your health insurance card is: to avoid medical fraud and reduce your wallet profile.

Gift cards. You might keep a gift card in your wallet just in case you decide that today’s the day you’re finally going to hit The Cheesecake Factory for dinner. But, you’re probably not, so it’s just taking up needless space in your wallet. What’s more, gift cards don’t need IDs to be redeemed, so if your wallet gets stolen, a thief could use that $100 gift card from Grams to treat themselves to a cheesecake-crowned feast. Only put a gift card in your wallet when you know you’re going to use it in the immediate future.

Always

Driver’s license. Got to have this on you by law when you’re driving. Getting pulled over when you don’t have your license may just lead to a “fix-it ticket” where if you later show proof of your valid license, the citation will be dismissed. But you definitely want to skip having to show up in traffic court to get that taken care, so always keep your license with you.

Credit card. Don’t carry multiple credit cards. Just keep one in there that you use the most. Stick with a credit card accepted at most retailers, like Visa or American Express. Not only will this reduce bulk in your wallet, but if you lose your wallet, you won’t have to cancel multiple cards. 

Debit card. Debit cards are essential for making payments from your checking account and withdrawals from ATMs. Ensure you have fraud alerts and daily spending limits to reduce debit card fraud.

Cash. A man should always have some greenbacks on him. Carry $100-$300; enough to cover most cash-only transactions that may arise, but not so much that you’ll lose big if your wallet gets stolen. 

Never

Social Security card, birth certificate, passport card. No brainer. You rarely need these documents for identification purposes, and they can all be used for identity fraud. Keep them at home.

Passwords. Don’t be a dummy and store passwords for personal or work services in your wallet. You’re just asking to become a fraud victim. Protect your online privacy. 

House key. If your wallet gets stolen, the thief will now have both the key to your house and (thanks to your driver’s license) its address. Bienvenidos thief! Mi casa es tu casa!

Blank checks. If your wallet gets stolen with blank checks, you risk being a victim of check fraud. 

Receipts. Because federal law prohibits businesses from including identifying/sensitive information on receipts, it’s highly unlikely that they could be used by criminals who get ahold of your wallet. But they pointlessly take up space, so get in the habit of discarding those you’re sure you don’t need for returns or for your records, and filing away those you do. If there is any chance the receipt does contain sensitive information, shred it.

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in March 2023.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Lost and Gone Forever by Guster. If ever there was a band made for college radio, it was Guster. I don’t know how many college radio stations still exist, but the band’s appeal endures — especially on their best album, 1999’s Lost and Gone Forever. It features their early acoustic sound: warm harmonies, clean guitar lines, and plenty of hand percussion (bongo-heavy Guster was the best Guster). There’s emotional depth running through even the more upbeat songs, and the slower songs carry a reflective, wistful mood that conjures up poignant and nostalgic feelings — even when you can’t name exactly what you’re connecting them to. Particular standouts: “Happier,” “Two Points for Honesty,” “Either Way.”

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A good fitted baseball cap should feel like it was made just for you. You don’t want it awkwardly perched on top of your head or uncomfortably squeezing your temples. You want it to fit like a broken-in pair of gloves or boots. 

The problem is, hats don’t come that way off the rack. Even if you pick the “right” size, you’re working with standardized measurements trying to fit a non-standard head. And most brands only size in quarter- or half-size increments, so the “right” size is usually just the closest size. Add in stiff materials and factory shaping, and most caps start out feeling a little off — a bit too tight or loose.

The good news: that slight mismatch is fixable. You can usually dial in a hat that’s just a little too big or too small. 

Materials matter in how much play you’ll have: wool caps will stretch and conform more easily, while polyester blends tend to hold their shape. Either way, don’t rush the break-in process. The best results come from a mix of light intervention and regular wear. Over time, the hat will do what it was meant to do: mold itself to you.

In addition to getting a hat to fit nicely on your noggin, breaking it in also involves curving the bill (we’re no fans of the flat brim at AoM). The same easy-does-it principle for breaking in the crown applies to breaking in the bill too: while the methods above can accelerate the process, you don’t have to force it — a natural curve will come gradually just by working it with your hands over time.

With that in mind, use the guide above to fine-tune your cap. And if you want to go deeper, check out our full-length article on breaking in a fitted baseball hat.

Illustrated by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Courage is one of our most prized and celebrated virtues. But once you really start exploring it, the nature of courage is surprisingly hard to pin down.

Here to help us explore the fascinating complications of courage is William Ian Miller, a historian, professor of law, and the author of The Mystery of Courage. Today on the show, Bill explains how centuries of philosophers, soldiers, and storytellers have approached courage and the hard-to-answer questions its manifestations raise. We discuss why courage has long been ranked among the highest virtues, the relationship between fear and courage, the fuzzy line between courage and cowardice, the association of courage and manhood, whether or not courage is domain specific, the difference between offensive and defensive courage, whether martyrs are courageous, whether deeds with evil ends are courageous, how fear, shame, and honor shape brave action, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Road to Richmond: The Civil War Memoirs of Maj. Abner R. Small
• If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O’Brien
• Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
• The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
• AoM Article: Developing Manly Courage
• AoM Article: 9 Ways to Become More Courageous
• AoM Article: Courage Vs. Boldness — How to Live With Spartan Bravery
• AoM Podcast #380: How to Increase Your Courage and Bravery
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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I’ve been writing about testosterone on this site for over a decade because testosterone is an important part of a man’s overall health and wellness. It helps with strength and muscle mass, strengthens your bones, improves your sexual health, and boosts your mood.

You’ll find a lot of information out there on the interwebs about how to increase your testosterone naturally. Cold showers, taking testosterone-boosting supplements, and even exposing your balls to red light.

But after talking to experts on the podcast about testosterone and reading a ton of research on the topic, the conclusion I’ve come to is this: hormone health comes down to consistently doing the boring stuff.

Several years ago, I spoke with fitness coach Vic Verdier on the podcast about how men can combat the fall-off in vitality that can come with aging, including the natural decline in testosterone. His answer was taking care of the fundamentals.

Vic uses an acronym he calls SEEDS to capture the basics of what you need to do to keep your T-levels healthy. It stands for Sleep, Exercise, Environment, Diet, and Stress.

Let’s talk about each of the testosterone-improving components of the SEEDS framework:

Sleep

A large portion of daily testosterone production happens during sleep. So if your sleep consistently sucks, your testosterone drops. When researchers at the University of Chicago restricted young men to five hours of sleep a night for one week, their testosterone levels fell 10-15%. Aim for 6.5 to 9 hours a night.

If you’re looking for ways you can improve your sleep, check out these AoM articles and podcast episodes:

• What Every Man Should Know About Sleep
• 22 Ways to Get a Better Night’s Sleep
• 45 Tips — That You Haven’t Heard a Million Times Before — to Improve Your Sleep
• What to Do When You Can’t Sleep
• How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes or Less
• The Importance of Building Your Daily Sleep Pressure
• Podcast #661: Get Better Sleep by Stressing About It Less
• Podcast #1,055: Sleep Like a Caveman

Exercise

Exercise helps to boost testosterone by increasing muscle mass and decreasing body fat. Carrying around too much body fat isn’t good for T because body fat converts testosterone into estrogen; the less fat we store, the more T we have.

Two forms of exercise are particularly helpful for increasing testosterone. The first is lifting heavy weights with compound lifts that target large muscle groups, such as the squat, deadlift, and shoulder press, and taking adequate rest between sets. The second is HIIT or “High Intensity Interval Training,” which calls for short, intense bursts of effort, followed by periods of less-intense recovery.

But beyond regimented exercise, Vic recommends just staying active throughout the day. Your body wasn’t designed to do 45 minutes of structured exercise while being parked in a chair for the other 15 waking hours. Walk. Do yard work. Play catch with your kids. All those little “movement snacks” can keep your body running like a finely tuned machine, including the parts that manage hormones.

Environment 

Vic’s specific point here is about sunshine and vitamin D, which is closely linked to testosterone production. If you’re spending most of your waking hours under fluorescent lights and only seeing the sun through your windshield on the commute, you’re probably falling short. So get outside more. Eat lunch in the sun. Take your phone calls on a walk. If you live somewhere that gets dark for months during the winter, use some tactics to get more sun during this cold and dreary season. It may be worth supplementing with vitamin D3. But actual sunlight on your skin is the goal.

Besides helping with vitamin D production, getting outside can also help manage stress, which, as we’ll see in a second, is another important factor in hormone health.

Another factor to think about when it comes to your environment and healthy testosterone levels is to make sure you’re not bathing in T-killing chemicals. Pesticides and industrial chemicals can dampen testosterone (and can cause cancer), so definitely limit your exposure to that stuff. Wash produce thoroughly, eat/drink from glass or stainless steel containers when possible, and limit use of products with heavy chemical fragrances or pesticides around the home.

You also want to reduce your exposure to xenoestrogens that are found in a lot of consumer products. Xenoestrogen is a chemical that imitates estrogen in the human body. When men are exposed to too much of this estrogen-imitating chemical, T levels can drop. The problem is xenoestrogen is freaking everywhere — plastics, shampoos, gasoline, cows, toothpaste. You name it, and there’s a good chance there’s xenoestrogen in it. I wouldn’t spend too much mental bandwidth trying to buy products that are completely xenoestrogen-free. Just don’t microwave your food in plastic containers and don’t lick your CVS receipts, and you’ll probably be fine.

Diet 

You don’t need to do any special T-boosting diets like eating Ron Swanson amounts of eggs or consuming three Brazil nuts before you go to bed because the selenium will boost testosterone production while you sleep.

Just eat a balanced and varied diet. Get enough protein. Get enough carbs to fuel workouts. Get a moderate amount of fat for hormone health. Research suggests that about 20% to 40% of your calories should come from fat for healthy testosterone levels. Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables to get the micronutrients your body needs for hormones. If your diet is solid, you’ll probably have no reason to supplement.

Diet can also help with fat loss, which will help reduce estrogen and increase T. For help with nutrition, check out these articles and podcast episodes:

• How I Used the AoM Podcast to Lose 20 Pounds in 3 Months
• How to Eat What You Want and Still Lose Weight
• Podcast #1,011: Lose Weight and Keep It Off With Flexible Dieting
• Podcast #721: The Psychology of Effective Weight Loss
• Podcast #636: Why You Overeat and What to Do About It
• Podcast #475: How to Lose Weight, and Keep It Off Forever

Stress

Cortisol and testosterone compete for resources in your body. When cortisol is jacked up all the time from work, doomscrolling, or a schedule crammed too full, testosterone suffers. I think managing stress is particularly important for guys in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who are running hard and wondering why they feel depleted. Vic’s prescription is to build a life with some margin. Give yourself some time to chill the heck out. Take up a hobby. Become a cinephile. Download the Headspace app and meditate if you have to. Getting better sleep will also help with stress, so make that a priority.

None of these are exotic interventions for boosting T-levels. They don’t require a lot of time or money or exposing your balls to red light. Do them consistently, and your hormone health should be fine.

But…

If you’re doing all of this consistently and you still have symptoms of low T (low energy, brain fog, declining strength, low libido, low motivation), get your levels checked and talk to a doctor about whether testosterone replacement therapy makes sense. But make it the last option, not the first. Get the basics right and your body will usually handle the rest.

More testosterone-related AoM podcast episodes:

• Podcast #893: Optimize Your Testosterone
• Podcast #761: How Testosterone Makes Men, Men

For more tips on maintaining your edge as you age, listen to our whole podcast with Vic Verdier:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.