The secret of human bipolarness
It’s not always smooth running… occasionally you have a hiccup.
You have a half-arsed night out with a handful of sets, maybe lethargic reactions and maybe no closes. Afterwards you may think about all the opportunities you should have taken up, all the things you know you can do but for some reason on that night did not. Maybe you even realise later you had passed up an easy shot at a lay which you know you could have secured with skills you have displayed on other nights; but on that night things just weren’t clicking, and you just weren’t on…
When you have a night or two like this it’s not just a case of taking away what areas of improvement you can, realising where you could have done something different or better, etc. There’s more at work here than just technique… there’s a naturally flowing PUA form – sometimes you’re on, sometimes you’re not. The importance of understanding this is to know that a bad night is just a one off, and that relatively poor nights are just bound to happen. There are two varying factors which affect this.
The first is your base emotional state. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t, to varying degrees, have a fluctuating emotional state – I call it human bipolarness. Literally everyone I know has a few days when they don’t feel as great as usual, and other days when they feel totally on top of the world. This doesn’t just apply to PUAs, or even self-development enthusiast, this is even the case for chodes, normal people, etc. Even people whose life remains the same day after day after year still have these peaks and troughs in emotional state. So it’s important to realise that if you’re having an off night, or maybe have just been feeling down for a day or two, it’s possibly just a natural fluctuation that you’ll come firing out the other side of imminently.
There’s a number of things you can do to minimise the troughs in this regard, some of which you may want to consider are:
1) Regular exercise
2) Keeping in good shape
3) Eating a healthy balanced diet ensuring no deficiencies particularly in things like Vit D, Zinc, Mag.
4) Mindfulness Meditation
5) Cleanliness (surroundings and personal hygiene)
6) Cut drug/drink intake; including illegal drugs, minimising caffeine, alcohol, quitting smoking, etc.
The second major cause of performance fluctuations is experienced due to a function of how humans perform when learning to master any particular area. The journey to mastery is not a straight line of progress; it’s a curvy peak and trough style graph. This is why perseverance is held in such regard with highly successful people, because it will be at a time when you are apparently doing worse than you were previously that suddenly your ability will shoot through to the next level. Many highly successful businessmen experienced a time of relative poor performance just before they had the defining success of their careers.
The only solution to this kind of fluctuation is perseverance. It is simply a quality of the human condition that your ability level will fluctuate as you take on new information and apply that information in field.
Understanding of this isn’t really that important, the only important thing is to realise that improvement is not an ever-growing graph. You have ups and downs, so be ready for them: whenever you feel that progress has been slow, or that things haven’t been working out for the best, that’s the time to really dig in, to push like hell, and to come catapulting out the other side.
RagsToRiches
Totally agree man. For those who want to go more into this I’d recommend reading ‘Mastery’ by George Leonard, it covers the kinds of peaks and troughs you go through, persistence etc.
A sense of perspective definitely helps in all this, being able to take the off-nights as just that. If I have one bad night it doesn’t even bother me, I fully accept it’s just a bad night (going out 3+ nights a week helps with this). However you do need to know when some help is needed, and for this I have a rule of three.
If I have 3 consecutive really bad nights/weeks/whatever, it means something’s genuinely up and it’s time to hit the theory. A system like this helps avoid knee-jerk reactions to bad nights, but helps me cut off problems before they get too bad.
Tim over at RSD has an interesting point about this: the bad nights get better. The bad nights you have starting out might be getting blown out 20 times in one night, the bad nights you have 3 years in might be struggling past LMR or going for that threesome.
I’d go even further than this though. I think once you’ve got some years under your belt your ‘bad’ nights are actually better than the average or even good nights starting out. On bad day now I’m still waay more pimp than I was 3 years back.
Good points mate, particularly about the “offnights getting better.”
It was not too long ago I remember my off nights being 8 pints, no approaches (maybe 1-2 shitty ones), and walking home at 2am feeling like a sack of shit. This was only back in Feburary/March last year.
Sometimes you just have to look in your recent past to see how much you’ve improved.
I had an offnight on Wednesday.
~10 sets, one beer, and a couple of probable SNL ops which I didn’t lead well enough.
Wow… a night like that I would have only drempt of last year really.
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