Socialization progressive overload - a system for when you lack social skills / confidence

I often get messages from guys on here and it sometimes feels like it's the same guy texting me over and over from different accounts. The problem they describe is always pretty much the same. I had to overcome this issue myself and I went from a depressed loner with severe anxiety issue to someone who has no problem talking to people.

They lack social skills and thus find it hard to get out there and socialize or date women. This makes them feel depressed. Because it doesn't matter how many times you explain to your mom what a "sigma male" is, socialization is a human need. And if you don't interact with other, real-life humans, you're gonna feel like shit. Food is also a human need, but nowadays you don't get punished for being a bad hunter by starving. You do get punished for being shitty at socializing though, and that's the issue we're here to solve with a system I've developed for myself a while ago called socialization progressive overload. I'll also be showing data from my own journey.

Socialization is like exercise

The idea for this system came after watching a podcast with Derek from MPMD (I can't find the exact clip) where he mentioned something along the lines of "Talking to people is just like working out. You get noob gains in the beginning and then you plateau."

This little one-off comment form Derek got me thinking, and suddenly everything started falling into place in my mind. Talking to people is a whole lot closer to working out than Derek gave it credit for:

• You get noob gains when you first start off
• When you don't do it for a while, your social skills start to dwindle (much like strength and gains)
• It's something that the body builds on its own as it gets certain inputs from the environment. You can't think about having muscles really hard and suddenly they'll just show up. You have to lift heavy shit and the body then builds muscle as a response. Much like you can't think your loneliness and social ineptness away. You have to expose yourself to social situations. That's where the pathways in your brain get re-wired and your subconscious starts to believe that you're actually a social, outgoing guy.

Despite this being the case, no one really had a "workout system" for getting better at talking to people. So drawing on the highly effective system of progressive overload, I present a system I myself have used and it helped me (or at least was one of the things that helped me) from evolving from a depressed lonely fuck to someone that can strike up a conversation whenever he sees someone cool.

SPO

Open up Google Sheets or the Notes app on your phone or whatever works best for you and prepare a table.

For each day, you're going to have a planned goal of the number conversations with strangers you're going to have. Every day, you're going to talk to at least that number of strangers.

This is how that table might look like (after you've also entered how many people you've talked to that day):

You're gonna start with a goal of 1 stranger a day (male, female, elderly, child, doesn't matter) and you're gonna stay at 1 a day for a while. I'll explain why later.

At first, you're gonna suck at keeping track and suck at talking to people. This is my table from when I started in May 2022 (6 months before writing this post). You can add color coding, more columns for more info if you get a hardon for data like me, but you only really need the three columns I've mentioned above.

Here are the rules of the game:

1. The goal number will be at the forefront of your life for the time of practicing SPO. Hitting your socialization goal will be as important as eating food for you that day.
2. Once you set a number for a day, you can't change your goal midway through. It's very important to keep the number low and realistic to achieve (1 is more than enough to gain significant progress)
3. Consistency is more important than the total number of people you talk to. I've noticed that when I talked to a lot of people one day, I'd then get "burnout" for the next couple of days like shown here. You want to avoid this. It's better to talk to less people consistently every day than to talk to 8 one day and then 0 the next couple of days.
4. Only strangers or acquaintances you don't interact with on a deeper level count. Friends you don't talk to often also count (this will motivate you to reach out to hit your goal). Your family and closest friends don't count. If you however become friends with some of the people you talk to, re-interacting with these people does count. (this will motivate you to build a framework of friends that you can go to to hit your goal). However, feel free to adjust this rule according to your own needs. Maybe you wanna focus on strangers only. Maybe you wanna focus on girls only.
5. The conversation can be short but it has to have some substance to it. So if you're talking to a cashier, you have to go above what is expected to say when you're buying something at the store ("Good morning", "plastic bag please", "I'll use my card" ...). If she's got a cool tattoo, compliment her, maybe ask her if it means anything and go along with your day. Boom goal hit.
6. Adjust your goals. You can increase the number of people you wanna talk to, or you can focus on increasing the quality of conversation. If you're interested in picking up girls, make it so your goal only counts when you romantically approach a girl. Adjust the system to fit your needs and wants. No matter what you do though, pretty soon (around the 3 month mark for me personally) your brain will begin to re-wire and you'll realize you're not an awkward piece of shit that everyone hates. And that's the goal we're after.

I do realize this post might seem like a tutorial for autistic people, however there's an increasing number of young people who just don't know how to interact with other human beings (me being one of them). Hope this system can be of use to someone. If you decide to give it a try yourself, message me please and let me know how it went.

Regards

TLDR: Keep track of your daily interactions and force yourself to have them in order to get rid of shyness, loneliness and social ineptness.