The Reality Method 2.0

Overcoming Anxiety

A lot of guys I know struggle with anxiety with women.

Although most commonly this anxiety is restricted to just meeting a woman for the first time, a lot of guys also have anxiety about performing in bed, pleasing her, etc. etc.

Not that all guys feel it to the same extent of course, or at all, but I think there’s more of it flying around than there should be.

Some of that fear, I think, is caused by the media — with sex harassment lawsuits flying and women slapping and hitting men being seen as “humorous” on prime-time sitcoms, but I’m not going to get all political here.

Instead, I want to write a quick article on overcoming anxiety.

Now I have struggled with anxiety in my own life in a big way, starting when I was very young. I grew up in a pretty chaotic household and that, coupled with what was probably an organic (genetic) predisposition to a generalized anxiety disorder, well, I was a pretty worried little guy.

I have since come to live a pretty peaceful, serene adult life, thanks to a lot of different interventions. One of the most valuable to me, which I am going to share here, is the simple 10-point Anxiety Scale.

The Scale
With anxiety of any sort, and certainly with conversational or “approach” anxiety, one has to be able to accurately rate oneself on a sort of internal scale that is nonetheless objective.

The best in my opinion is a simple scale that runs from 1 to 10:

1 - Not anxious or worried at all
2 - A tiny bit of worry creeps in
3 - A bit more worry, extremely low-level worry, barely noticeable
4 - Worry is joined by actual anxiety about concrete outcomes
5 - Anxiety is now physically manifest in the body (with clear location)
6 - Anxiety becomes higher, to the point that I self-identify as feeling anxious
7 - More outward physical signs of anxiety, sweaty palms, increased heart rate, etc
8 - Mental “catastrophizing” begins, brain fills with a litany of potential (but unrealistic) horrors
9 - Anxiety almost paralyzing, rational thought becomes difficult
10 - Pre-frontal cortex (rational thought) completely hijacked, emotional looping, body locks up, instinct takes over — full-blown “panic” mode

Your scale may look different, but the 1 to 10 self-report rating of anxiety is a useful technique, nonetheless.

Applying the Scale
So take for instance chatting with women, or just going out in general. Upon arriving in a given venue or location, you can silently ask yourself, “Where does this environment place me on the scale?” With a 1 being probably your living room and 10 being something like a war zone.

Similarly, when thinking about approaching a given woman, you can ask the same question, “What level of anxiety does approaching this woman inspire in me?” If you keep an eye on that numerical level, and focus over time on slowly stepping it up from low levels to higher, retreating when anxiety becomes overpowering, you will find that, over time, your overall level of anxiety in these types of situations will drop, and your level of comfort will grow commensurately.

So, things that used to cause a “7″ or “8″ on the scale will eventually only cause a “4″ or “5″, and then a “3″ and “2″ and “1″.

This is basically a gradual de-sensitization technique just like the technique where acrophobics (fear of heights) are put in virtual reality “high” environments, or gradually taken up to higher and higher places, retreating when the fear becomes overwhelming. Over time, your mind gets used to the idea of the fear or anxiety-causing stimulus, and becomes desensitized to it.

Incidentally, with women, what also happens is that as you go out and meet more women, and get more experience, and happen to have some success, you gain confidence that way as well, which provides concrete counter-examples of all the anxiety-causing catastrophes that you imagine could happen.

A corollary to this technique is to start chatting with women first in low-stress environments — coffee shops, bookstores, libraries (or whatever might be considered a low-stress environment in your locale) — before graduating to more high-pressure approaches like nightclubs and bars, where there are more demands for a woman’s attention and the consequences of “failure” are more obvious.

Sexual Anxiety
I think the biggest pressure put on most guys during sex is the pressure they put on themselves. Pressure to perform, to be the “best” she’s ever had, to impress, to satisfy and please, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to lay blame at men’s feet — in fact, I think a great deal of the pressure we internalize started as external pressure, initiated by the media — which is always yakking about how INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT IT IS to please a woman and how RARE a female orgasm is…but given that a lot of us do feel this way, it’s up to us to take steps to alleviate it.

With sexual anxiety, I think The Scale above can help, but I have some more concrete suggestions, rules of thumb if you will, that I typically play out with a new partner to absolutely 100% preclude myself from feeling much anxiety (even if I feel pretty confident going in to the encounter).

#1. Foreplay forever. From an anxiety standpoint, what seems to happen with foreplay is that it gets the girl so excited (the foreplay, not the anxiety), that eventually she will reach her horniness “limit” and will practically rape you. This is great because, not only will she not care about your size at that point, but your responsibility for “making sex good” goes way, way down. Sex is good for women in proportion to how horny they are; foreplay makes women horny; QED.

#2. Slow down in proportion to how much anxiety you feel. One of the things anxiety can do is make us just want to get something over with as quickly as possible. When applied to sex, this attitude rarely pleases women. Going along with the suggestion above, this will often have a powerful effect of reversing the frame so the woman feels she is chasing you to get sex, further taking pressure off you to perform. When I was very young, I used this technique SO HARD that one particular woman got literally MAD at me for delaying sex…but I had built up so much attraction in her that she stuck with me anyway until I finally gave it up.

#3. Flip the script. Not to get grossly personal here, but whenever I find myself — shall we say, lacking — during sex, I just look at the girl expectantly, like “Now look what you’ve done. You better fix this.” It’s a harsh truth, but a truth nonetheless — if I’m not sufficiently aroused to do the job (so to speak), it’s because the girl isn’t arousing me properly. It’s her issue, not mine. I don’t instantly heap shame and self-abuse on myself because I’m “not a man” or “can’t get it up”. That’s absolutely ridiculous. I know better: I know that my arousal levels are directly related to how physically and mentally attractive a woman is (and her technique, to some extent). Women put pressure on US to get THEM aroused, why shouldn’t we return the favor? It’s just how I think about it.

Those three rules, put together, have pretty much erased any sexual anxiety I used to feel. Nowadays I’m much more afraid of getting bored during sex, and/or having bad sex, than I am of some oblique arbitrary “not measuring up”.

The fourth rule, if I was to include one, is just to develop core confidence — get really good at sex. But of course you can’t do this until your anxiety is low enough to start having some sex in the first place, and even the most well-read Anatomy and Physiology professor will suck in the sack if he lacks practical experience.

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That’s it. Hopefully something above has helped. I personally believe anxiety is a huge unrecognized and unspoken affliction in the modern world, not only in men but in everyone — but especially among men with regards to women in Western societies. It shouldn’t be so.