I took a step outside and sucked down a deep breath of the sweet New England spring.
“When do you want to start?” my soon to be boss asked.
I smiled ear to ear for what was surely the first time in a long time.
“Tomorrow”
We concluded the details as I enjoyed the radiant warmth that suffused the air, with each breath promising a new wave of excitement.
In that moment, I wasn’t angry that my girlfriend had broken up with me. I wasn’t sad she was no longer there. I didn’t care what she was doing.
She wasn’t on my mind at all, because my mind was somewhere else entirely, far removed from the crushing depression I had been feeling for the past month.
I had forgotten how good it felt to achieve a major goal.
Over the next two months, I doubled down on working towards my goals. One after another I checked them off with a ruthless efficiency that startled me.
This had a side effect that I wasn’t expecting either. I felt happier than I had in a long time.
It was at that moment I realized the truth: men are not meant to be idle.
It’s amazing the difference that a little progress can make in your mood. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Go clean your house.
And by clean, I mean really clean it. Vacuum the corners you’ve been avoiding, and throw away the rancid PF Changs box hiding in the back of your fridge. Get underneath your bed and declutter your closet.
Almost immediately, you should start feeling better.
If you really need a kick in the ass, do something you’ve been procrastinating on and you’ll feel more at ease.
Working on things makes you happy, especially if what you’re doing has great meaning to you. It also makes you more attractive to women and help you get over your breakup faster.
The problem is that too many of you aren’t doing things. You’re sitting around at home playing video games, jerking off to porn, boozing it up, and watching shitty Netflix shows.
There’s a time and a place for these things, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not every day, and it’s most certainly not after a breakup.
If you want to start feeling better NOW, you need a routine that focuses on action. If you don’t have a routine, you’ll have a much easier time copping out of what you need to do, and we don’t want that.
The Pillars Of A Kick-Ass Routine
There are 8 “pillars” to any good routine. They are:
- Physical Fitness
- Nutrition
- Sex
- Social activity
- Responsibility
- Growth
- Reflection
- Rest
Your individual routine will need to address all 8 of these, otherwise, you won’t be fully satisfied. A great way to tell if your routine is lacking by listening to your gut.
What happens is you’ll feel like you’re getting things done, but you’ll have a lingering sense that something is missing. When you feel like this, you need to re-evaluate your routine.
In the short term, it’s okay for your routine to be unbalanced. Hell, I would even argue it’s normal. After a breakup, I highly recommend you allocate more time to your physical life (which we’ll talk about below) before you do anything else.
But in the long term (1+ year), your routine needs to come into balance otherwise your long term happiness will suffer.
Otherwise, how you allocate your time will depend on your personal goals. For example, right now I spent a lot of time doing growth work, and outsource the majority of my day-to-day responsibility because who really wants to do their own accounting?
Definitely not me, and it took me getting a degree in finance and accounting to know that. #CPAbsolutelynot
Building Your Routine
This pyramid showcases what I call the 3 levels of reality. Each level builds upon the level beneath it. The higher up you can reach, the happier you’ll be overall. It’s what I use as the basis for building a daily routine.
The pyramid above shows how you should distribute your time after a breakup, and it’s no accident that your physical needs are what we address first – because that is what will make you feel better the fastest.
The three levels are:
- Physical Reality: How well your body and health are maintained.
- External Reality: Where you interact with others to advance your goals.
- Internal Reality: Where you connect and actualize your purpose.
The perfect routine will address every element on this pyramid, while properly allocating time to each level.
Before we talk about each reality, let me share an important insight with you that you should always remember.
Men crave tangible physical progress in life. If you’re robbed of your ability to do something tangible, you will feel unhappy!
If you take two guys that are beaten up over a rough breakup and have one of them sit around watching Netflix while the other gets his ass to work, the second guy is not only going to get over his breakup faster, but he’s going to attract a higher caliber of woman.
You want to be the second guy, if you aren’t already. You do that by understanding the 3 levels of your reality and basing your routine around them.
Your Physical Reality
Building the right routine is a lot like building a house. You need a strong foundation if you plan on building up.
Your physical reality is that foundation.
When it comes to building your post-breakup schedule, the first thing we need to start with is our physical reality. Breakups often do as much damage physically as they do mentally. I’ve seen a lot of guys gain weight, while others like myself lose it because of poor exercise and nutritional habits.
Eating poorly also impacts your mood and severely curtails your performance in the gym and in life.
This, in turn, leads to a diminished sex life – which is made doubly worse because you’re no longer having sex with your girlfriend.
Without getting your physical reality in line, you won’t be able to heal the mental damage done by the breakup, because your body will be constantly suffering.
For most men, the best way to address the physical reality is really simple, especially now that you’re single.
Get a gym membership and go lift 5 times a week while working in yoga 3-4x a week. 1 or 2 nights a week you should meal prep nutritionally complete meals that you can grab on the go.
Also: drink a lot of water. It’ll keep your skin clear, and help keep your energy levels and mood up. Even slight dehydration is associated with depression.
And don’t fucking skip breakfast. Eat something. I know you motherfuckers get hangry like I do, and by eating you’re doing a community service.
With that charitable contribution out of the way, you also need to be aware of your sleep.
I don’t know what it is about breakups that cause guys to stop sleeping, but I’ve noticed a pattern where guys will stay up until 2-3AM and then won’t wake up until noontime. Don’t do this! You’ll consistently feel like shit.
That said, you need to figure out how much sleep you need and make sure you get it every night. Focus on going to bed and waking up at the exact same time. I can’t tell you how much of a difference it makes once you’ve done this for a few weeks in a row.
I highly recommend going to bed around 10:00 PM and getting up around 5:00 AM if you can manage it.
Finally, sex. It’s impossible to fully cover this here, but what I do recommend is shooting for sex at least 2x a week. For most men, this is a decent baseline for peak happiness and function.
For a lot of you, I know this is easier said than done. I’m working on a series that will help you with this scheduled to be released next year.
In the meantime, if you need help with this, schedule a session with me through my coaching program and I’ll help you get two new girls in 45 days so you’re meeting your sexual baseline.
Your physical reality can and should goals attached to it – like losing weight or gaining strength – but you should always keep in mind that even in the absence of a goal, you must maintain your physical reality at all times. There is no excuse for slack in this area!
Once you dial in your physical reality, your brain will be operating at peak efficiency – and ready to take on the challenges of the next tier.
Your External Reality
Once your physical reality is in check, you’ll have a much easier time dealing with your external reality.
Your external reality is where you really interact with other people in a meaningful way, so it’s important that your body is operating at peak performance. That alone will give you a leg up over 95% of the population.
When considering a routine, you should always start your External Reality by scheduling yourself for your “responsibility” work. These are tasks like school or your job that won’t advance you further in life. Batch these tasks together and try to knock them all out at once.
Most people get stuck in “responsibility” work. Responsibility work doesn’t make you happy, but you will be unhappy if you slack on your responsibilities. So don’t fucking do it.
That’s why a good routine helps you eliminate these day to day recurring tasks as quickly as possible so you can get to the good stuff.
Social activity and growth work are two of the fundamental pillars for male happiness – and you want to make sure you’re spending enough time doing both.
However, you need to carefully balance social activity so it doesn’t get in the way of growth work or your physical reality.
The best way I’ve found to do this is to block off one or two nights a week where you give yourself the night off from everything else to spend time with your buddies – otherwise, you can easily find yourself slipping into a lifestyle that won’t get you anywhere good.
Drinking every night, doing a fuck-ton of drugs, and constantly blowing money in the club does feel great in the moment, but in the long term, they won’t help you get over your ex.
What will, is focusing on growth work.
Growth work will get its own article in the future, but you can define it simply as work you do today that will continue to benefit you in the future.
For example, if you take an hour to sweep your floor, you’ll benefit immediately but in a year it won’t matter that you swept the floor.
If you took that same hour and invested it into working on a business, learning a new skill, improving your network, or something similar, then it’s considered growth work.
Doing a fuck-ton of growth work is one of the hidden secrets to getting your ex-girlfriend back. I talk about it in my complete guide to the no-contact rule, but the gist of it is simple. Your girlfriend broke up with you because her attraction to you plummeted.
If you want to re-attract her successfully, being the same guy you were before just won’t cut it. She was attracted to that guy at one point but is not anymore.
But, if she comes back to find you as the guy who has improved across the board, she’s far more likely to give you another shot, and you’ll very likely do a much better job with her because of the improved confidence that comes from working on yourself.
It also makes you considerably more attractive for when you want to date again with new women.
Growth work is extremely important, and you should try to fit as much of it into your schedule as possible.
Your Internal Reality
We stand apart from the other creatures of flesh because of our capacity for higher thought and the reflection that comes with it.
Rest and reflection characterize your internal reality, and you’ll need to budget time for both to ensure you’re truly aligned with what you need to be doing in order to achieve your goals.
However, too much rest will make you into a lazy fuck, and too much reflection will get in the way of you doing growth work.
Rest and reflection are best accomplished at the same time, because you don’t need as much rest as you think.
Journaling is the best way for you to reflect in a constructive way, and it just so happens I’ve written a very detailed article about it which you can read here.
When building your routine, budget time at night to journal and then count that as your rest.
Putting It All Together
Here’s an example of the routine I was running back in 2016 that I used to crush some serious post-breakup depression.
Your routine only needs to be as precise as you need it to be. Some guys need an ultra-specific, military-style routine with strict time stamps, while other guys do better with a more loose style. What I’ve found is codifying your schedule helps improve your discipline in doing it.
I had set two primary goals, which were to dramatically improve my skills with women and to grow my Amazon business to $15,000 a month in sales.
Monday-Friday:
- 5:00 AM: Wake up and get dressed
- 5:15 AM: Workout (Monday-Saturday)
- 7:00 AM: Breakfast (Protein Shake)
- 7:30 AM: Shower and get ready for work/school
- 8:00 AM: Work/school
- 11:30 AM: Lunch
- 5:00 PM: Snack
- 5:15 PM: Daily assessment/completion of outstanding responsibilities
- 6:30 PM: Dating hour – finding new women, scheduling dates, and going on dates (growth work)
- 7:45 PM: Dinner
- 8:30 PM: Work on my Amazon business (growth work)
- 9:30 PM: Journaling/reflection time
- 10:00 PM: Sleep (I only would stay up later if I had a woman over).
Saturday:
- 5:00 AM: Wake up and get dressed
- 5:15 AM: Workout
- 7:00 AM: Breakfast (Protein Shake)
- 7:30 AM: Shower
- 8:00 AM: Work on my Amazon business (growth work)
- 11:30 AM: Lunch
- 5:00 PM: Snack
- 5:15 PM: Daily assessment/completion of outstanding responsibilities
- 6:30 PM: Dating hour – only finding new women/scheduling. Don’t do dates on Friday or Saturday.
- 7:45 PM: Dinner
- 8:30 PM: Work on my Amazon business (growth work)
- 9:30 PM: Journaling/reflection time
- 10:00 PM: Sleep
Sunday:
- 5:00 AM: Wake up and get dressed (in my freaking Patriots sweat pants)
- 5:15 AM: Read (I spent a lot of time reading industry materials for Amazon)
- 7:00 AM: Breakfast (Protein Shake)
- 7:30 AM: Shower
- 8:00 AM: Rally my buddies for a day of football and fun
- 9:00 AM: Plop my ass down on the couch and continue working on Amazon
- 11:30 AM: Lunch
- 1:00 PM: Football with the homies
- 3:00 PM: Snack
- 7:45 PM: Dinner
- 9:30 PM: Journaling/reflection time
- 10:00 PM: Sleep
Talk soon my friend,
Coach Jack
PS: Need help processing the breakup so you can get back to feeling like yourself again? Click here to learn how I can help you.