Approach Anxiety: Powerful strategies for eliminating fears around approaching women

What is approach anxiety

Approach anxiety is the gut-wrenching sensation felt when seeing a woman you find attractive and knowing you should go over a speak to her. It’s very similar to skydiving or bungee jumping in that a surge of adrenaline and cortisol (stress hormones) is blasted into your system, activating an intense fight or flight response.

It’s the invisible self-imposed barrier that stops 99% of men from approaching a women they find attractive in everyday scenarios.

Some believe that approach anxiety is an in-built defence mechanism that was nescessary to prevent our tribal ancestors from being ostracised. Which could result in death, as chances of surviving alone were much slimmer than being part of a group.

If a woman was to reject a man in a small tribe with a very small number of women being of reproductive age – it’s very possible that word would get out and severely damage the mans chances of successfully reproducing.

Today in the modern era we don’t have to worry about ostracisation or starving, and sprawling urban metropolis allow us to be highly anonymous when it comes to doing cold approach.

Despite this, our internal fight or flight mechanism still exists and hasn’t quite caught up with the fact that if you live in a city – you can approach large numbers of women consequence-free, providing you are smart, polite and at least somewhat calibrated.

Why does it happen

As well as potentially being part of an outdated self-preservation method, I believe approach anxiety can also be caused by the following root fears;

• Fear of rejection
• Fear of judgement from others (spotlight effect)
• Fear of inadequacy/low self-esteem (running out of things to say, not feeling good enough)

Let me ask you this… how much easier would it be to approach if there was no possible risk of rejection, no bystanders around to witness a potentially awkward interaction, and you knew there was no chance of running out of things to say or looking stupid.

Much easier right?

My experience with approach anxiety

Some people say that it’s possible to eliminate approach anxiety 100%.

In my experience this is not true, however it can be greatly reduced with time and consistent effort.

I would say that my approach anxiety now is probably 70% lower than what it was when I first started. I still feel the adrenaline, but I can act in spite of it and are no longer completely paralyzed.

This is a result of repeated action, my brain knows that even if one particular interaction goes wrong, ultimately nothing bad is going to happen – I’m still going to walk away with a smile of my face knowing I did what I could, the sun will still rise the next day and the birds will still sing.

Repeated exposure to fear will lower the stress response. You are training your brain to understand it’s a safe situation that doesnt warrant such a radical biochemical reaction.

If you’ve done any daygame/cold approach then you know the first approach of the day is always harder than the 3rd, 4th, 5th.. etc. That’s your brain adapting in real time.

Strategies for reducing approach anxiety

I’ll go into some tips, tricks and activities you can implement now to actively start reducing your approach anxiety.

Cold showers

Cold showers are able to simulate the sensations in your body felt when you are about to do a cold approach.

As you prepare to step into the cold, the fight or flight system is activated. I’ve found that adrenaline spikes later in the same day, from whatever source, are lessened after a good icy shower.

Meditation

Meditation can help calm your mind and make you much more grounded. If you have any type of OCD and/or ADHD type behaviour, which to be fair, so many people these days do, due to the excessive amounts of dopamine available (Check out Dopamine Vs. The Dopamine Detox)

In terms of aiding cold approach, regular meditation can reduce anxiety as you become better at separating your thoughts from actions.

10 minutes a day is all you need to get 80% of the benefits.

Wings

Having someone to go out with can help reduce approach anxiety significantly, I believe this is due to the following reasons.

You feel less weird

When you are out alone, the voices in your head are much louder. They will talk you out of approaching and come up with all kinds of silly excuses not to do it.

It’s also very easy to feel like an alien interloper going around bothering people, especially if you have a chain of blowouts/rejections in a row.

Thoughts like ‘What the f*ck am I doing?’ arise, which in turn ruins your vibe as you become more bitter and angry. The women you go on to speak to will pick up on this and become more likely to give you a negative response, it’s a downwards spiral.

Just having another guy out doing the same thing will make it feel much more normal.

They provide a ‘safe-zone’ to reset your vibe

One thing with beginners particularly is that when they go out to cold approach solo, after a perceived ‘bad’ interaction, it will loop continually in their heads with thoughts like;

‘What did I do wrong?’

‘I should have said this, I should have said that’

‘What did she mean by this?’ etc.

As you pass the beginner phase you’ll slowly realise that you are only 50% of the equation. If the girl is in a bad mood and gives you are negative response then it’s nothing you did. The problem is her, not you (providing this is actually the case and you’re being smart, polite and calibrated).

Recognising this stops you getting into a downwards spiral, where you feel more and more anxious and it becomes harder and harder to approach.

A wing can act like a ‘safe-zone’ for your vibe, where you can laugh off awkward interactions and bitchy responses and swiftly move on instead of dwelling on it.

They can push you into approaches

Having another guy pushing you and reminding you that there’s nothing to lose can help alot. They can provide healthy competition, you can do challenges to speak to X number of women in a certain time.

One thing that helped me and a guy I used to go out with when we were beginners, was a money trick.

We would each bring £100 and give it to the other, then we would set a 2 hour timer and with every approach we did, we would give back £10. Meaning 10 approaches each in 2 hours, or we lost money. This can be good fun and provide the kick up the ass beginners need to get approaches done.

Warm up routines

A warm up routine is something that you do before leaving the house to give you the best chance possible to succeed.

After experimenting with a few different things this is what works best for me.

15 minutes grooming – trimming beard, trimming nails, trimming nose hairs, shaving neck, brushing teeth, washing face and overall freshening up… If you look good, you feel good.

5 minutes cold shower – this gets the biggest fight or flight response out of the way and leaves you feeling amped up and energised.

10 minutes meditation – this helps with grounding, identifying voices and negative thought patterns ahead of time, so that when you are out ‘infield’ they become much easier to recognise and less ‘auto-pilot’.

After this I’d travel to the location I would be doing my cold approaches.

When I arrive I immediately set a 10-minute timer with the aim of asking 5 people for directions – it can be anyone, old people, couples, guys. It doesn’t matter, the purpose is get your mouth moving and build momentum. Your focus should be on smiling, eye contact and your vocal projection/tonality.

After a few years of trial and error, this routine works best for me to reduce approach anxiety.

Exposure therapy

This is by far the best way to reduce approach anxiety I’ve found, but of course it means approaching.

It’s no secret that repeated exposure to a stimuli trains your brain to learn that it’s not a dangerous, life-threatening situation, thus reducing the amount of adrenaline and cortisol released when exposed to the stimuli.

If you’ve done cold approach before you’ll know that the first approach is always the hardest, then it becomes much easier after that. This is your brain learning and rewiring in real-time.

There’s both micro and macro momentum.

Micro – this is what happens during the course of a single cold approach session, the first few approaches are the hardest then it will become progressively easier as you hit a flow state.

Macro – this is more of the zoomed out, bigger picture view of things. How many sessions of cold approach are you doing per week? If you go out once a month you’ll never really build any sort of momentum.

It will feel like ground zero everytime you go out. This is because your brain isn’t getting enough exposure to the fear in order to adapt and rewire itself.

If you are really struggling with approach anxiety, a guy I used to follow called goodlookingloser wrote an entire 50 day+ approach anxiety program which begins easy and gets progressively more difficult it’s quite dated now and his website sadly offline, but you can still find an archived version of the program here – https://theredarchive.com/blog/Good-Looking-Loser/approach-anxiety-program-week-1.35248

Raising your own self-esteem

Feeling good about yourself, your values and your position in the world are crucial to success with cold approach. If you feel like a loser, that’s exactly what you’ll be projecting and no attractive woman with high self-esteem wants a loser.

Do you feel good about your fitness?

Are you doing something you genuinely enjoy, or some soul-sucking job/career that you secretly loath?

Do you live by high values and morals?

Are you a good person?

Do you feel good generally, or do you go through life in a haze of fear, shame and guilt?

Do you feel like you can bring value to the women you are speaking to?

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a finished product. As long you can look yourself in the mirror and honestly say you are moving in the right direction, doing what you need to it and being proactive everyday. This is all that’s necessary.

I can almost immediately tell someones level of self esteem based on their voice, eye contact and body language. Women are much more in-tune and perceptive than men and can subconsciously pick up on this much faster and more accurately.

Having low self-esteem can manifest as approach anxiety and make you subconsciously reject yourself before you even approach. You’ll pedestalize the woman before even getting to know her, even though she could be a horrible narcissistic bitch.

You won’t even feel worthy of going over and speaking to her. If you do, you’ll be supplicating and sucking up hoping for her to validate you. This will come across as very needy and unattractive. Typical traits of the ‘nice guy’.

Supplementation

There’s a few supplements that can help lower approach anxiety but they’re at the bottom for a reason – they should be the last things to look at after you’ve done and tried everything else.

Taurine

Taurine is an amino acid that increases glycine and GABA to calm the brain.

Dosage can range between 500mg-2g and some people can find it provides a slight anxiety reduction.

Phenibut

The best way to describe phenibut is alcohol, without the sloppiness.

It interacts with the GABA-b receptor providing anxiety relief.

However it’s much harder to source these days than it used to be and the stuff that is out there tends to be lower quality, so be warned if this is something you want to try.

Dosage can range from 250mg-1g and is best taken on an empty stomach with caffeine.

WARNING: Phenibut is definately not something you can use everyday, you will quickly build a tolerance and a physical/psychological dependancy. I’d limit it to using it once per week maximum to avoid these issues.

Check out my full phenibut guide here

Overview

I believe approach anxiety is something ANYONE can get under control, providing they are serious enough about it and take the necessary action to get it handled.