“Action over anxiety.”

My mom has told me this since I was a kid, and it is still something I am trying to put into practice effectively when met with challenging situations. It is the most forgiving way I can think of to get yourself in the mental headspace you are talking about without the “time to nut up” connotation.

(This is not an idiom, just something I realized as a parent.) Sometimes, being an adult means “reaching into the shit.”

Shit has to be dealt with. My kids - as babies - could not deal with their own shit. It was my job and responsibility as their parent to clean up that shit. And sometimes something would get dropped in the shit. And you gotta reach in.

Nobody likes dealing with shit. Everyone tries to take as little shit as they can. But some days, no matter how I feel - it’s on me to reach into the shit.

I prefer to think of it as “the only way out is through” or “the only path is forward.”

For some problems it won’t matter how people feel or even who is at fault. What matters often is how you begin to work through it. Once you’re out of the hole you can reflect.

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

not an exact fit, but i think about that sentence often

Nowadays I say “this shit ain’t nothing to me” or “it is what it is” a lot. I never thought about it being more gender neutral until this post though.

The issue is the “man” up aspect. There are ABSOLUTELY times when you have to… Well, man up, nut up… Whatever. That’s a fact of life - some situations require you to stop being a child, and instead face it like an adult would.

We run into issues with it being ‘man’ or ‘nut’ - these are gender-loaded terms, which imply that females aren’t able to do the same thing. Do I think anyone actually means that when they say one of those things? No. Do I think a lot of reactions to them are overblown? Yes. We should still be cognizant of what the language we choose to use may say subtextually though.

There’s another parallel issue to the advice to man up. That’s that a lot of times, the people who get that advice HAVE BEEN manning up, and the advice giver is seeing them in a moment where they’ve been worn down and just need a quick whinge fest before going back to manning it up. Situations like that imply that having any emotions other than “git er dun” is a bad thing and you should just STFU and work.

As far as giving others advice goes, generally speaking unless they ask you for advice, don’t. If someone’s just coming to you with some venting about a thing and you tell them whatever version of “man up” you want, even if it’s applicable, it comes across as dismissive. The person may not want advice, they may just want to unload a bit. If you can’t do that without offering advice, then it’s best to state that.

I don’t remember the details but there was an Internet story about a dude who’d say “man up” and people explained why that was a problem and he updated to “fortify”. And I really like that, because it kinda suggests also getting help where you need it to build up your defenses in order to face the thing you need to face.

Toughen up

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“”““Nonspecific gender person who is typically relied upon to get things done without considering their own feelings on the matter – up!””"

Technically what you’re describing is discipline. It takes a lot of will power to just make yourself do something. You can take pride in that. Call yourself disciplined, principled, stoic.

In fact, you might broaden your perspective on this particular subject by looking into stoicism. It’s like a “manly” mindset but without the gender or toxicity attached.

I think part of being a man is not caring what other men define your manliness as.

If you have an idea that “manning up” involves some change in machismo, I think that might be a little toxic. But, if in not caring that your behavior made other men think about, caused friction, and was then interpreted as machismo, that’s better in my book.

If you like the sense of machismo and that phrase helps you as an imaginative aid, then why not. But I think it can be more constructive if you can interpret manliness independent from machismo

“I have to get over this some time, why not now?”

~ Louis Wu, from Ringworld, written by Larry Niven.

“Because I’m not ready” is also a valid answer, but it gets your brain moving towards the goal I find.

Put on your big girl panties