level up Archives

Overcoming Helplessness

June 23, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

One of the most frustrating parts of trying to build an amazing life — especially when you’re working on your dating and social skills — is the feeling of helplessness. There’s this very real and very palpable sense of feeling like you’re stuck, unable to make any progress. You’ve been working as hard as you can and you have nothing to show for it. You’re powerless to make even the slightest improvement in your own life. Or, worse, you feel that you’re at the mercy of forces outside your control. The universe itself has colluded against you, specifically, and you have been singularly fucked by the fickle finger of fate. Your existence can feel reduced to a cruel prank played on you by life.

a man heckles a young boy as he throws a ball at a target to dunk the person inside — Life is a carnival, but you’re the poor bastard in the dunk tank…

It’s all too easy to believe that you have no options, that everything is pointless and there is no hope. It’s even easier to fall into despair and just give up. After all, when you’ve been trying to make things better and nothing works… what do you do next?

The key is to recognize that feeling powerless and being powerless are two very different things. You have more potential than you realize… if you only understand how to unlock it. This is the key to taking charge of your life, to shape and direct your progress and actually regain control of your destiny.

Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and stop feeling helpless.

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5 Harsh Truths About Dating (And What You Can Do About It)

June 9, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

I want to tell you some harsh truths about dating. Truths that, when you understand them, will explain why dating can be a nightmare. However, once you’re able to face those truths, you’ll find that dating will actually be simpler and more enjoyable.

And the key to understanding them starts with gambling and religious pigeons.

photo of asiatic rock dove pigeon looking angry — “I don’t see you doing the proper number of head bobs. Do I detect HERESY amongst our number?”

OK, I freely admit this sounds like I’ve had a stroke, but trust me, it will all make sense in a second.

So here’s your first harsh truth: dating isn’t nearly as difficult or as complicated as people think it is. The reason why it can be a shitstorm of Michael Bay proportions is because… well, because of people. The single biggest reason why folks would rather look into recreational dentistry than get back on the dating scene is because of the way people aren’t honest about dating. And this is a truth that crosses sexuality and gender lines; gay, pan or straight, cis or trans, guys, gals and non-binary pals… damn near everyone isn’t honest about dating. Not with others and — more often — not with themselves.

That’s not to say that people are maliciously lying. It’s more that folks don’t like admitting the truth to themselves. It’s easier to take comfort in the fictions we tell ourselves than to face the truth. Even when those lies are actually contributing to making dating a miserable experience.

Accepting these truths — and they’re not the ones you think — will change how you approach dating. And this will make dating that much easier, less stressful and more satisfying.

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How To Reset Your Love Life

May 26, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

It’s something of a truism that dating can be exhausting. A lot of times, you spend weeks, months, even years feeling like you’re beating your head into a brick wall. And to make matters worse, for a lot of people, it can feel like they’re stuck in the same routine. They want different results, but it may well feel like they can’t stop doing the same thing over and over again.

Troubled hipster leaning against wall — “Just… give me… a minute to… recover. Gonna… break through… this wall… eventually.”

This often leads to frustration, burnout, even anger. This, in turn, creates a self-reinforcing cycle; the frustration and burnout color your attitude and your interactions with others, you don’t put as much effort in and your results continue to suck. It can be maddening.

But this is why sometimes the best thing you can do to get better at dating… is to do nothing.

No. Seriously.

Dating can be rough, especially now as more and more people are getting vaccinated and coming out of lockdown. It’s even easier to be discouraged because of the pandemic. It often feels like you need to make up for lost time — a year and change that was stolen from you that you can never get back. This ends up creating a self-imposed sense of urgency that just feeds into that cycle of frustration. It’s a Red Queen’s Race, running as fast as you can and putting in all this effort just to stay in place.

What you need is a reset; an opportunity to create a state-break that wipes the slate clean and lets you start over fresh. And now is the perfect time to break out of the cycle and reset your love life… by stepping away from dating entirely.

Here’s how you can create a break in your dating struggles and make the changes that let you reboot your entire dating outlook.

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The 5 Steps To Upgrading Your Life

April 28, 2021 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of talk about how this was an opportunity to do things differently. Now that everyone was in lockdown, they had absolutely nothing else to do but work on themselves.

Screenshot of a tweet that reads: "If you don’t come out of this quarantine with either: 1.) a new skill 2.) starting what you’ve been putting off like a new business 3.) more knowledge You didn’t ever lack the time, you lacked the discipline" — Sure chief, nothing like trying to develop a side-hustle when you’re busy trying to, y’know, not die…

Sure they had to balance work, relationships, trying to meet basic needs without catching the plague of the 21st century, possibly dealing with child-care or elder care, home-schooling and the crippling stress that came with living through one of the most psychologically and emotionally taxing periods in living memory… but they were going to make it happen, damn it!

Needless to say: trying to maintain your sanity — with or without the help of your robot friends — during a global crisis is going to take up most of your emotional bandwidth. The fact that you survived to this point is a victory worth celebrating, no matter what else you did or didn’t do during lockdown.

Now that more and more people are getting vaccinated and the tide of the pandemic is slowly starting to recede, we’re all starting to take those first, tentative, trembling steps back out into the world. We’re all in the same boat of trying to dust off those unused social skills and remember how to act like people instead of the feral beasts we’ve all become.

Image of Gollum with a perplexed expression on his face — Wait, this is how people smile, right? It’s been so long…

For a lot of folks, that time in isolation means that they’ve had time to take stock, look at their lives and decide that it’s time to do things differently. Plenty of people, after a year in semi- or complete isolation are ready to make significant — even life-altering — changes to their lives.

But the question becomes: how do you radically transform yourself? How can you become a new, better person? Just as importantly: how do you make those changes stick? Following these 5 steps will help you build your best life ever.

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How To Build Emotional Strength

October 14, 2020 by Dr. NerdLove Leave a Comment

Right now everything feels like chaos. We’re living through the worst pandemic the world has seen in more than 100 years. We are less than three weeks out from an election that feels like our choice is whether to pull America back from the brink of fascism or not. Our lives have been thrown into pandemonium like we’ve never known, even as people seem to insist that we’re fools for being concerned about a virulent disease. Violent extremists are attacking innocent protestors and activists and the people in charge are hosting giant gatherings all but guaranteed to spread the virus.

And yet life stubbornly insists on continuing like normal.

This is legitimately how it feels some days…

It’s enough to make you feel like you’re going mad. Like you want to give up and just scream.

But even under the best of circumstances — when the world doesn’t feel like it’s teetering on the verge of collapse — there are times when life feels like it’s too much. There are days when you feel like you’re hanging on by your fingernails and you just want to let go. There are days when you simply don’t feel like you have the strength to keep going. Whether it’s chasing your long-term goals and dreams, finding the desire to keep moving forward, or even summoning up the courage to make the hard decisions, you will face moments that will push you to your very limits.

Those are the times when you need to have the resources to keep going. You need to build your emotional strength. You need to have the will and the strength to not just persevere but to thrive.

Here’s how.

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