Understanding Approach Anxiety
First things first, what is approach anxiety and what causes it? Approach anxiety is caused primarily by two types of conditioning. The first is social conditioning and the second is biological conditioning. There really isn't much we can do about the biological condition, however it is an important element to understand.
Hundreds or thousands of years ago when a man was sexually rejected by a woman, it would have a very negative effect on his chances to mate with any of the women in his "tribe". Due to the tightknit nature of the tribal system a man's failure was magnified. Basically if he was turned down by one woman it would be assumed there must of been a good reason and therefore every other woman in the tribe would be much less likely to accept his advances.
The above shows an example of "heard theory" and is an important aspect of human psychology. Namely that the large portion of the population believe something, generally speaking, an individual will believe it's true, or at least be more likely to believe it's true.
This long-standing social conditioning has actually developed the biological conditioning. This partially explains why some people are naturally more outgoing and some people are naturally more introverted.
In modern times there is much less risk involved with approaching or speaking with a woman. If you speak to a woman and get rejected the odds that it will have a drastic effect on your ability to find another woman, in general, are extremely low. It may have an effect within her immediate social circle, however in modern times most social circles are not nearly as isolated as they once were. The fact that we understand this biological element is outdated however, doesn't necessarily make it any easier to deal with.
Next we need to talk about the social conditioning. The social conditioning aspect is much more dynamic and is something that we learned over the course of our lives. We get this social conditioning both through our own experiences and by observing the experiences of others.
Every time we approach a woman or watch someone approach woman we learn something based on the outcome, this is the basics that build our social condition in regards to approaching women.
Maybe you've been turned down by women before, maybe you've seen friends turned out by one before. Some of us made even been ridiculed for trying, or seen it happen to friends. This can cause a very strong aversion to approaching women in an attempt to preserve ourselves from the potential negative outcome.
Over the course of this series of posts I will go into more depth on how you can tame these feelings. This will include both material to make you question your social conditioning and action points to help you build new social conditions that will be much more helpful for you in achieving your goals with women.
So in a nutshell, approach anxiety is a perfectly normal thing to feel. We do not however, have to be slaves to it. There are ways we can poke holes in these often firmly rooted beliefs that cause the feeling and once we do that we can, by taking the appropriate actions build a new set of social beliefs.
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