Dealing with high harm avoidance

Funkimonkey · 2019-07-21T11:29:11+00:00

This is great stuff man. A lot of my students struggle with this. Have you found anything to help with this?

FairAnalyst · 2019-07-21T14:56:24+00:00

A lot of this comes down to reinforced negative thinking. You're in this feedback loop of wanting to do something, getting a negative thought, believing in the negative thought, and then not doing it. And your animal brain goes 'hah, I'm right.'. You're rewarding your animal brain for giving you shitty advice.

There's 2 ways you have to attack this sort of thing.

The first is you gotta break the reinforcement cycle of negative thinking and start a reinforcement cycle of positive thinking. This is pretty easy, its just catching yourself when you get a negative thought and replacing it with a positive one. Like this:

- See a girl

- Will wait for perfect moment to approach

- Catch yourself thinking this "Wait this is just bullshit approach anxiety/bitch butterflies"

- Reframe with a positive frame "Opening a girl right now is better then waiting and losing her. I rather open shitty, then not open at all"

The second is you gotta take control of yourself. Most people get by life on autopilot and just follow the flow, go with their feelings, etc. You can't do that if you're doing something hard like PU - because every day your body/mind will say 'No more, you gotta stop! This hurts!' - you gotta take control and go 'fuck you, I'm doing it'. Think of athletes or body builders who push themselves hard everyday and their body fights them. You're not an animal, you're not controlled by your animal instincts, so when you see that girl - go and talk to her.

The third element is training. You set a goal for yourself. Ideally 5-15 approaches in one setting is the optimal range, but I've found 10+ ideal. You stay out till you hit that number, all approaches count. You don't get to go home till you're done or 12 hrs have passed. First you'll prolly end up going all 12 hours, with like 0 approaches or something. Go home and write in a log how you can improve next time (and make sure you do step 1 for all negative thoughts). Eventually you'll start approaching, but maybe 3 for 12 hours. Keep going and eventually you'll figure out how to approach 10 in 2 hours or less.

If university is in session, and you go out every day, you can go from a 0 approacher to a high velocity one in probably less than 2 weeks. It is crucial to learning game to learn how to get over approach anxiety and have the ability to open a lot. Game requires a lot of trial and error learning and the more you open means you're gonna get better faster.

caesarfecit · 2019-07-21T23:57:22+00:00

My theory on harm avoidance is that it comes from high serotonin activity, not high serotonin levels. When is this the case? When your brain is low on serotonin and therefore hypersensitive. It makes even more sense if you think of it in terms of balance between serotonin and dopamine levels. A brain high in serotonin and low in dopamine is risk-embracing, positive in its outlook, more energetic and motivated and more sensitive to cues of interest and desire (i.e. reward), rather than approval and validation (i.e safety). High harm avoidance, you get the reverse.

This also ties into Jordan Peterson's lobster theory, about how the dopamine-serotonin balance in lobsters mediates their sense of position in the dominance hierarchy and their willingness to compete for status (i.e. fight for territory). Neither he nor I are saying that human brains work exactly the same as lobsters, but it's certainly possible that this dynamic still persists in the human limbic system, but linked to different things and in conjunction with other, more evolutionary recent NT feedback loops.

It's also my suspicion that the average woman is higher in harm avoidance. Because those behaviors you describe are how many women behave, and that's why they're unattractive.

Now as for how to fix that, here's my ideas.

Face your fears. Nothing builds confidence and breaks inhibition like developing your courage. Everyone has things they don't like doing, or things that make them feel uncomfortable, incompetent, or awkward. If we as a species accepted that, we'd never have done all the awesome shit we have. There's no big secret to developing courage, it just comes from doing the things you're afraid of.
Meditate. I believe meditation has the effect of balancing our neurotransmitter soup and helping our brain get back in sync. I also suspect is has an effect of raising serotonin, but that's speculation. What I can report is that first, the more and better you do it, the more reward you get from it. And it seems to catalyze a lot of good things like delaying gratification, more balanced mood, better sleep, more mindfulness and presence of mind.
Practice process over outcome. I used to hate job hunting for a long long time. I thought it was broken artificial process filled with stupid people and almost ritualistic processes that are ultimately meaningless (like cover letters and bullshit interviews and the bullshit questions). I still don't think I'm wrong about that, but what changed is I stopped making it such a big deal. And it was like a switch flipped and I started firing out resumes like crazy. Maybe I didn't go balls to the wall and give my best effort on every job application, but better to send off a resume than nothing at all.

EarthWarping · 2019-07-21T19:32:16+00:00

Yeah it’s the fight or flight response.

pugonbeacon · 2019-07-21T23:09:46+00:00

This is the last place I thought I'd see Ray Peat mentioned.

Insanity_-_Wolf · 2019-07-22T04:10:53+00:00

Yes! FACE YOUR FEARS

smorrow · 2019-07-22T16:39:46+00:00

Or maybe "It doesn't matter if I fail, if I approach then I win because I gain experience"

Here's the thing, though: I already believe that. I still can't do it. As a handsome guy who knows how to look at a woman, I've seen girls over the years that would have let me open by pretty much walking up to them and kissing them. Couldn't approach those girls either.

Title	Dealing with high harm avoidance
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	31
Comments	37
Date	July 21, 2019 9:25 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/seduction
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/cfx8n3/dealing_with_high_harm_avoidance/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/seduction/dealing-with-high-harm-avoidance.1294640 https://theredarchive.com/post/1294640

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