Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Approach Anxiety and Variability

Short Post today, I've been reading a great book called "The Willpower Instinct" which is all about willpower and the nueroscience behind how we do or don't have the willpower to pursue our goals.

There was an interesting piece which relates to why I think it's hard for guys to get into the swing of doing consistent approaches.

The piece was on variability which basically means how much difference there was between the behavior on a day to day basis. In one example in the book, they talked about someone who was trying to quit smoking. If they started by trying to quit all together, the chances of them quitting were almost zero, however if they tried to just smoke the same amount of cigarettes each day almost every participant reduced and then eliminated their smoking.

The reason was variability if someone smoked 12 cigarettes one day they have to smoke 12 the next and the next. Same with 4 etc... So it made it easier to reduce it since it was no longer one extra cigarette which is easily rationalized but 1 cig a day.

I think this relates to approaching and AA because guys will not approach any women all week then try to approach 12 women a night on the weekend which oftentimes they fail at because it's such a change from their day to day average of approaching no women.

So what I recommend is if you have AA trying to approach the same number of people every day in the beginning even if that just means talking to one girl a day you will start to develop the habit of talking to girls and can eventually add on to that in the same way that smokers toned down their habits.

There's a lot of good neuroscience explaining why this works better in the book, but I'm too lazy to find quotes or experiments if you want more info I highly recommend the book even though I'm not even halfway through it.

JS- The King of Content

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:23 AM

    Could you clarify the following sentence a little?

    "So it made it easier to reduce it since it was no longer one extra cigarette which is easily rationalized but 1 cig a day."

    I didn't understand this.

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  2. Anonymous5:40 PM

    I'll comment on the smoking example. I used to straggle with smoking quite a bit. When I tried reducing how much I smoke, it never worked. If you have 3 cigarettes a day, it is easy to justify the 4th and 5th one. Once I decided to smoke cold turkey, it was much easier. First week was unbearable, but after that it was a cake walk.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:18 AM

    @"I'll comment on the smoking example. I used to straggle with smoking quite a bit. When I tried reducing how much I smoke, it never worked. If you have 3 cigarettes a day, it is easy to justify the 4th and 5th one. Once I decided to smoke cold turkey, it was much easier. First week was unbearable, but after that it was a cake walk."

    Same here.

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  4. Ablaze8:22 AM

    Thanks Sinn. I needed to hear this.

    The Game Acceleration Doctrine helped me a lot with this. In fact, there was a time when I was on information overload and it was the only book that I allowed myself to read to get myself in the swing of approaching.

    Hands down, one of the best books I've read in the community.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @"I'll comment on the smoking example. I used to straggle with smoking quite a bit. When I tried reducing how much I smoke, it never worked. If you have 3 cigarettes a day, it is easy to justify the 4th and 5th one. Once I decided to smoke cold turkey, it was much easier. First week was unbearable, but after that it was a cake walk."

    Same here.

    ReplyDelete