Social Pressure Lock up

Social pressure is that voice in the back of your head that tells you not to do things. The feeling inside your body, when you're acting in a way that's outside the permissions and behaviors you allow yourself to act through. Most people feel social pressure when doing things like talking too loudly or vulgarly in a restaurant or elevator, approaching strangers, dancing in public, getting rejected in front of people, getting embarrassed etc... Social pressure is the way that social anxiety works it's magic. The more social anxiety you have, the lower your tolerance will be to social pressure. All of this excludes actual medical problems, which should be treated with a visit to the Dr's office, not a seduction blog. Taking that into account, there are a lot of different social situations that can cause us to lock up socially and not have full grasp of our facilities and or seduction knowledge,such as...

Lock up when social pressure is applied involving competition with other guys. This is one of the most common ones and something I dealt with. This is the feeling of not wanting to outrightly game the girl in front of another guy for fear of a confrontation, or getting made fun of, or feeling bad because you lost the girl.It causes you to sit there like a chode instead of manning up and trying to get the girl back.The solution is to re-frame the situation in your head as not being social pressure, but being friendly and adding value. Then systematically applying techniques once you've established rapport with the guys. This is where a simple question like " How do you guys all know each other?" or " How did you all meet?" can go a pretty long way to establishing who's available and who's not. Then it's crucial that you learn to avoid competitive frames. It's not important who she likes more, it's only important to find out if she likes you. Try to ignore the fact that the other guy is even there, if they aren't dating. A lot of people think you have to try to attract mixed groups first, but as AFC Adam talks about the truth is you have to establish comfort first. Meaning that they want to have a conversation with you before anything else. You can retroactively cause attraction once the comfort is there.


Approach Anxiety is another sort of lock up. You see the girl, you clearly feel a want to approach her, and yet your legs stay rooted in place. You've memorized your openers and have a great idea on what to say to tease her, but you still don't approach. For whatever reason the social pressure of having to approach a stranger shuts down your control over your own body. There are a ton of ways to deal with approach anxiety from getting into state, to dealing with inner game issues, to alcohol. But the point is that AA is one of the most common types of lock up due to social pressure. I know it's related to social pressure because it is scarier to approach larger/mixed sets than it is to approach all girl two sets. I've never had a student who has asked if he can just stick to mixed 8 sets :) The more people, the more social pressure , the bigger chance of lock up... Like, I don't know stage fright.

Some people also lock up in situations of intense negative social repurcussions such as an exercise Moxie came up with where you say the most offensive thing possible and then try to recover from it. Now we can rationalize that instead of doing this social pressure experiment, you could just approach the women you are attracted to every time and play every set as hard as you could, which would lead to better results. But you still lack the social freedom to do whatever you want to amuse yourself.

Desensitization to social pressure is the most common route which allows you to build up to things that are more intense than approaching those sets so that your body starts to function normally in those situations. Because there is a physical as well as a mental component at play here. The physical component can feel like melting ice in your chest, butterflies in your stomach, a heaviness in your limbs, inability to speak or control your vocal cadence etc... But it stems from something called your anterior cruciate cortex. A part of your brain that reacts to social pressure with something very close to physical pain. It's not all in your head. That's the good news. The other good news is that by systematically exposing yourself to more and more social pressure, you feel it less and less. Like a Muy Thai kickboxer who whips his shins with bamboo to deaden the nerves, you can burn out your social pressure sensors preventing lockup and increasing your game exponentially.

S