I’d like to discuss something most guys know very little about but which has a big impact on how you perform when it comes to learning to pick up women. In my line of work, helping men to ‘remember’ everything they learn so they can retrieve it in the moment they need to remember it is vital.
State dependent memory is a curious beast. Very simply put, we have a far better ability to recall information when in the same state we were in when we first learned it.
The word ‘STATE’ can mean lots of things.
Firstly, emotional state.. When we are happy we find it harder to recall moments of unhappiness, when we are unhappy we find it hard to recall moments of happiness. What I learn when I’m depressed, come more easily to me when I’m depressed than when I’m happy. What I learn about women in a relaxed environment doesn’t come to my mind when I’m nervous and in front of a woman.
Secondly, Location plays a much larger role than most of us realize. What we learn in our bedrooms, we recall very well in our bedroom and not nearly as easily in a night club. In fact our brain actively has a mechanism that screws us in this department. Who has ever walked form their bedroom to the kitchen to do something only to get there and wonder what the heck we were doing there? Scientists have found that the simple act of walking through a doorway causes our brain to dismiss the information it was processing until we walk BACK through the door, it’s built that way to save cognitive energy. This effect even takes place if we look at a computer screen and walk through an imaginary door!
Thirdly, there is cognitive state. Remember cramming for exams by drinking 6 coffees in 2 hours? I certainly do! The problem is that you need to be hopped up on 6 coffees for your exams in order to have a high retrieval rate of the same information. This applies to all drugs such as Nicotine, Alcohol, Caffeine, Marijuana, Cocaine etc.
1) LAY OFF THE THEORY – AT LEAST AT HOME
The majority of guys in the attraction community are theory junkies and who can blame them? They feel a distinct lack of knowledge on the topic of picking up women so they want to fuel their brains with everything they can get their hands on. There is so much info out there one hardly knows where to start.
There are a lot of reasons why I think too much theory reading is dangerous, but I want to stay on topic. Let’s say Thursday night you are lying in bed reading some great techniques to build attraction with women. You are in a calm and relaxed state, you are in a quiet environment and you are lying down, also you haven’t had a drop of alcohol in probably a week. Then the next night you go out to a club, it is loud, it is busy, lights are flashing, you are a bit nervous so you have a beer to calm your nerves, you find a cute girl to approach. You talk to her for 5 minutes then walk away. Did you use any of the ‘attraction’ material you learned? I’d fall off my chair if you said yes because the odds are you didn’t even THINK of it.
This is the problem of learning in a completely contradictory state. It’s one of the many reasons you have to rely on learning while picking up rather than learning in an external safe environment. It’s one of the primary reasons I leave most of my ‘how to’ coaching until guys are out in the club feeling nervous already, I don’t bother with it in the classroom, I give them other activities to work on there. But out in the club, that’s when I fill them with knowledge because they are in the exact state they need to be to recall it when needed.
2) LAY OFF THE BOOZE – YES ALL OF IT
I’m not a fan of alcohol for a HUGE range of reasons. In case you didn’t know, I stopped drinking when I was 21, which is mostly related to meditation and a desire to always be at my most effective. However, there’s a very good reason I forbid students to drink while they are trying to pick up women (even if it’s not a practical session).
Now I mentioned intoxication state already. However most of us don’t realize how delicate our body’s learning states are. Let me explain. What you learn at 0.05 alcohol level (a couple of beers), has the same impact on your memory retrieval when sober as though you had learned the information in a completely different environment.
It’s worse than this… What you learn with a blood alcohol of 0.1 you will struggle to retrieve as well at 0.07 AND 0.13. So guys who drink a lot have their learned skills spread out over a huge range of blood alcohol levels meaning most of the time they don’t remember much useful at all in the moment they need the knowledge most.
If you make a deal with yourself to leave all drinking out until you have done all of your approaches, you will remember a lot more of what you learn from your approaches. This most importantly applies to the sub-conscious learning that teaches us vital skills such as social calibration, humor, and teasing.
3) PICK THE SAME PICKUP PRACTICE SPOT FOR A WHILE
Yes I know variety is the spice of life, and who wants to simply get good at only one venue, isn’t the idea to be good with women anywhere you go? Just read on and hear me out.
By going out regularly to approach women in the same venue, you are giving your body the ability to learn the skills necessary to attract women in the shortest possible time span since all of your learning AND memory retrieval is occurring in the same place over and over again. Guys who constantly jump from one venue to another have to (to some degree) re-learn certain lessons they learned at the old venue because the brain deemed the old knowledge only useful for the old venue. It’s one of the good reasons why we struggle mentally when we shift from day to night game or vice versa. The fundamental skills are the same but we never believe it because the venue is drastically different.
Now regarding the concern that you will end up only being good in one location, remember that state based learning isn’t the only important factor to the learning process. The truth is that regardless of state, repetition will burn memories and associations into our brains very effectively. There’s a reason that everyone knows that repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition causes our brains to form deep neuro-chemical channels, which allow us to easily call on skillsets no matter what environment we are in – Similar to how we quickly adapt to driving a different car in a different country on the wrong side of the road with barely any thought.
Don’t worry about being locked to meeting women in one location. Get women successfully in that location then broaden your horizons. I promise it will make your life much easier.
