The Reality Method 2.0

How to Withstand Social Pressure

Social pressure is the combined force of emotional energy and expectations.

Imagine you’re out at a bar. You’re wearing a classy new shirt that you just bought, and feeling pretty good. You’re out alone, and to your left is a pair of hot women you’re thinking about engaging in conversation.

About three meters behind you, you hear a group of people talking and joking loudly. A male voice starts making some loud comments about “fashion sense” and “really loud shirts!“. You sense that he’s probably talking about you, but he clearly doesn’t have the balls to just come up and insult you. You can tell the cute girls hear him, and they’re glancing over at you. They’re waiting to see what you do. Without warning, you can feel your face getting red. You’re blushing, embarrassed. You’re having an emotional reaction, and it’s hijacking your rational mind.

That’s social pressure at work — on a mild level. In the social microcosm of the bar, you’ve been essentially “called out” or insulted by this buffoon behind you. Other people picked up on this challenge, and they’re curious to see what you’re going to do — curl up and get embarrassed, leave, turn around and confront him, or just shrug it off. They’re expecting you to react in some way, though, maybe even hoping to see a confrontation and a fight. And you, as a social creature, can actually FEEL the pressure of their expectations.

What makes it worse is the emotional component. Obviously when people start talking about you, what they say is going to cause emotions. If they’re bad-mouthing or insulting you, it might pull up some unexamined beliefs you have about yourself, or trigger a moment of doubt, insecurity of low self-esteem. It might make you question your fashion sense. If they’re saying good things about you, that will have an emotional impact too, but probably a positive one.

All social interactions have emotional impacts, and social pressure happens when that emotional impact is strong, and your reaction or response to that emotional impact is being attended to (watched) by a number of people.

Social pressure increases with either the size of the attending crowd, or the relative value of its members. This is why it might not be a big deal to show off your juggling skills to a bunch of 3rd-graders, but you would probably feel a lot more social pressure in front of a room full of professional jugglers who are judging you.

This is why some people fear public speaking so much, especially to large groups. They don’t know all these people, but they risk looking stupid in front of them. People might laugh of make fun of them, which would cause bad emotions. Even if they didn’t, they might think bad thoughts about the speaker, and the speaker, imagining those thoughts, puts pressure on his or herself. Social pressure.

Examples of Social Pressure
There are plenty of ways you can be placed under social pressure, any day in any place.

Say you get on a streetcar or train, thinking it’s free, but at the very next stop a fair inspector gets on and starts inspecting tickets. It’s impossible to get off, so you probably start feeling embarrassed for the inevitable confrontation with the fair inspector, who is going to reprimand you (emotional impact) in front of the whole car (expectations of others).

In bars and clubs, it’s easy to run into social pressure. If you’ve just introduced yourself to a group of people, someone might say, “Will you excuse us? We were having a private conversation.” (This would be a pretty snippy, mean person). The entire group instantly looks at you to see what you’ll do; it’s likely that not everybody in the group wants to eject you so categorically. Boom, instantly you’re under social pressure, not only to deal with the emotional resonance of the implied insult (”we don’t like you”) but also to reply in a civil way.

Another thing that happens all the time is this: you approach some girls, say a group of two. They are dancing by themselves. You walk up and start dancing with them, and instantly a guy peels off the bar and zooms over. He grabs your shoulder roughly. “Dude, you’re dancing with taken girls. They’re here with us. Get the fuck off.” The girl didn’t shove you off; she’s waiting for you to turn tail and run, or handle the guy in an adult way. Basically, she’s watching to see if you can stand up to the social pressure the guy is putting on you.

Sometimes it goes even farther. You may be touching or grinding a girl at a party and some guy comes out of nowhere and grabs your lapel. It’s a super-insecure guy that she came to the party with. She’s not sleeping with him, but he’s under the impression that they’re “together” — and now he’s in your face. But now suddenly everybody in the room has stopped and is gawking at you. Is there gonna be a fight? Who’s gonna win? What’s gonna happen?

When a girl shit-tests you, it’s social pressure, especially if you’re talking to her and her friends (and their boys) are just standing there watching. Are you going to fail the shit tests and get blown out, so the entire group will get to watch you slink away with your tail between your legs? Or are you going to pass all the tests and tease the girl, and adopt her as your little sister, and then chat up the peer group as though she doesn’t matter anymore?

Social Pressure in Seduction
In seduction, you can think of social pressure as a screening tool. Sometimes the social environment naturally applies this tool on behalf of hot women, and sometimes they apply it themselves (without really knowing what they’re doing). The guys who are able to not only withstand, but harness and redirect social pressure, are the winners who get the girls. They guys who melt or cave under social pressure are the losers, and go home alone.

I hate to be so categorical, but that’s really just how it is.

Seen this way, he who is able to withstand and redirect social pressure naturally increases his value relative to others who are not able to deal with it as well. In this way, social pressure, and the act of placing it on a guy, is an act of testing his value, and/or ascertaining which of a group of guys has the highest legitimate value. It stands to reason (in a girl’s unconscious mind) that the guy with the most practice socializing, and therefore probably the strongest social network, will also be the most capable of working with social pressure.

Here’s a basic example of what I mean:

Most guys, when they’ve started a conversation with a girl, will do all the work to keep it going. They’ll run out of interesting things to say because they aren’t thinking socially and creatively, and they’ll start interviewing the girl (”So how old are you? Where do you work? Where do you live? What do you do for fun?”). Because of how boring this thread is, the girl will get annoyed and blow the guys out. Or she’ll start shit-testing him hardcore and putting social pressure on him, because she knows that if she just applies a bit of pressure he’ll blow himself out.

On the other hand, when you’ve started chatting a girl — and you can sense that she’s somewhat interested, or even attracted, or hooked — you can apply social pressure to her by just shutting up. Just lay back and stare at her….and watch her literally melt under the social pressure. “What!?” she’ll want to know what you’re looking at, or what you’re thinking, or she’ll start her own flow of boring, lame questions or commentary, just to fill the uncomfortable silence. You’ve shown you are able to take the high road by directing social pressure at her, and she has found that she has to respond or risk losing your attention.

Social pressure — like most things in seduction — is really about core value. If you know, deep down, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you are on top of this girl in an absolute value sense, and she is attracted to you, then you will be able to apply social pressure to her and have her cave. But if another guy, who DOESN’T have a secure core value, and is instead nervous and worshipful of this beautiful woman, goes up and tries to chat her and then apply social pressure to her by shutting up, she’ll just wander off, seeking other stimulus.

In a way, negs are a low-level form of social pressure, because they put the onus of a response on the girl, and she has to respond in a way that’s socially appropriate but still expresses her emotions.

Withstanding Social Pressure
As it happens, even though there’s some pretty fearsome scenarios presented above, withstanding social pressure is really quite easy, but at the same time very difficult.

It’s easy inasmuch as there’s really just one key concept to master; it’s difficult in that said concept happens to be very challenging for most of us to get a handle on.

In order to withstand massive amounts of social pressure, you must master yourself.

You must learn to be emotionally and socially nonreactive. This means that, when someone — for example — calls you out as a cheater in front of a group of people, you feel zero emotional reaction.

When someone says, “Nice shirt dude, was it on sale?”, zero emotional reaction.

When someone tells you to fuck off, these are his girls, zero emotional reaction.

When someone grabs your lapel and wants to fight, zero emotional reaction.

I’m not advocating being emotionally numb — that way leads to disaster. What I’m saying is you have to be in control of your own emotions, to the point that you’ve mastered them — and while you can feel the emotional impacts of what other people say and do, you can choose to respond however you like, rather than having the emotional impact hijack your brain and cause you to respond in an out-of-control and emotional way.

The difference is between a reaction and a response.

A reaction is something that happens without your control. Think of catching a ball that’s thrown at you.

A response is the result of a deliberate choice. Think of what you want to have for lunch.

In other words, the emotions you feel are more like the ripples caused by a pebble dropped in a pond, than the roaring waves that capsize the boat. They are still there, clear, obvious and important messages, but they do not threaten to overwhelm you.

That is what is meant by mastering yourself and being nonreactive.

When you can be nonreactive, and hold your frame even though you feel the pressure from the expectations of others around you, you will have fought half the battle.

But it’s not enough to merely be emotionally nonreactive. You must also be able to respond in a way that diffuses the pressure, and/or redirects it onto your accuser.

So, for a guy that’s halfway there, he may get called a dick, or called out in front of a roomful of people, and just be Buddha-like. He’s nonreactive, and he’s not taking anything personally. He feels fine. But since he’s just sitting there like a lump of stone, he’s not doing anything productive with the social pressure, either — and the room just stalls out waiting for the energy to change.

It’s not enough to master your own emotions, because failing to respond appropriately to social energy thrown at you is still a failure.

For more detail on how to work with the energy of social pressure, specifically in the case of social challenges from other guys, see mastering male competitors in the dating game.