A: Being in a funk from lack of success with women

B: Fucking up talking to a girl due to funk

I've had periods of my life when A->B->A->B.... I thought I'd share a trick that helped me break out of the cycle.

I was reading through books by Milton Erickson and there were a couple stories of people fucking up a given opportunity due to history. In one story, Erickson was asked to train an Olympic shooting team who had to get to a target and make something like 20 shots in a row. The first shot was easy but the pressure built and they would start missing. In another, there was a golfer with the same issue: always he could hit the first hole but as soon as he was in front of the second hole, he was off again. Erickson's solution in both these cases was to hypnotize the subject and have them play the first time over and over again. For the riflemen, he had each shot be the first. For the golfer, he told him each hole would be the first hole. Reading these stories clicked something in my head - that each approach could be my first, that the difference between an approach after a two-week funk and an approach after two weeks of success was entirely in my head, that somewhere subconsciously, I could just unclick history dependence in my head and start fresh.

It sounds strange to explain it, but this really helped me.