Sit somewhere with nothing to do and count how long it takes before you reach for your phone. For most men it is under a minute. Waiting is the skill modern life has removed most completely, and it is the one this domain is built on. You go out in weather, you stay still longer than is comfortable, and you either come back with something or you do not. The higher self is measured the same way, not by how hard you tried but by what you brought home.
The outdoors does something to attention that nothing indoors can match. In one study, people who took a fifty-minute walk through an arboretum improved on a demanding memory test by about twenty percent. The same people walking the same distance through downtown showed no improvement at all. The woods are not relaxing the way a couch is relaxing. They restore the specific kind of attention that work drains, and a hunt is that walk stretched across a day and given a purpose.
We are not interested in trophies. The value is in the waiting, in staying productive when the weather turns and the animal does not show, and in the plain accounting at the end of it: did you provide, or do you have a story about trying. That is the same discipline as supporting a family through a long stretch, and most men find the second gets easier once they have practiced the first.
Survival is the other half, and it is mostly attention too. Knowing where you are, what you have, what you will need in six hours, and staying calm enough to act on it. Those are the same skills as running anything.
What men tell us afterward is that they can sit still now, they notice more, and they came back with something.
Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, Psychological Science (2008)