“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.

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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.

Rise to the occasion

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 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.

In Swedish we say “Har du tagit Fan i båten, får du ro honom i land”.

In English it would be “If you put Satan in your rowboat, you’d better row him ashore.”

Your feelings are valid. Job still needs doing.

You don’t get to the Promised Land without going through the Wilderness. You don’t get there without crossing over hills and mountains, but if you keep on keeping on, you can’t help but reach it. We won’t all see it, but it’s coming…

Just keep swimming…

“Your feelings matter, but your actions matter too, and you choose those.”

“The only way out is through.”

“What can I do to improve my situation.”

Don’t let douchebags scare you away from this, but this is basically stoicism. It’s not that your feelings don’t matter, it’s just that sometimes you actually can change your situation and it’s good to do that then

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.

Put on your big girl panties

As High King Margo puts it:

“LIFE IS PAIN. OVARY UP.”

Gee, it doesn’t fit you, it leaves out your whole gender? Take another look at yours. If you want something more neutral, and with a little softer edge,

“Sometimes you just gotta suck it up”

implies you understand that what they are facing sucks, doesn’t suggest they’re not a man if they fail, and doesn’t imply that female=worthless.

There’s the old Nike slogan “Just do it” that captures the idea while having positive connotations.

I don’t know that there’s anything quite as punchy, succinct, and general-purpose as “man-up” that doesn’t have the sort of macho bullshit connotations, and if there is, it’s probably some sort of psychobabble that wouldn’t mean much to most people who need to hear it.

I’m also not a fan of the phrase itself, but the general sentiment represented by it has gotten me pretty far in life.

I’m not a religious person at all, but in certain contexts the “Prayer for Serenity” can kind of get you to a similar place.

For the SciFi nerds, there’s Dune’s Litany against Fear, or Yoda’s “Do or do not, there is no ‘try’”

There’s also “mind over matter,” you can’t necessarily help what all the synapses and hormones and such in your body are making you feel, but you can sure as hell help what you do about it.

And of course from the advertising world there’s Nike’s “Just do it”

There’s also some echoes of it in things like “be the change you want to see,” or “if you want something done right you have to do it yourself,” or “fake it til you make it”

Something else that has stuck with me is something one of my instructors said a lot when I was training to be a 911 dispatcher “don’t do nothing.” Make sure that whatever the problem is, you’re taking positive steps to address it. You can’t count on things resolving themselves, and you can’t count on someone else fixing it either, you have to be the one to make things happen.

Again drawing from my own life experiences, I was a boy scout and the scout motto is to “be prepared” which I find pairs nicely with the saying that “people don’t rise to the occasion, they fall to their level of training.” Do what you can to prepare yourself beforehand, and everything will fall into place a lot easier when the time comes. That can mean physical or mental training and practice, or it could be something like getting your clothing, gear, tools, meal prep, cleaning materials together the night before and setting up alarms, reminders, notes, etc. to keep yourself on track.

For people inclined to read up on some philosophy, ancient Greek stoicism had a lot to say about things like self control and virtuous living, and daoism/taoism which has concepts like “Wu Wei” which is tricky to translate and keep the meaning intact, but it means something like “effortless action” it’s kind of a mix of just doing what is needed as it comes up without having to think about it too much, and a bit of, like God said to Bender in Futurama “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”