Inner Game: Recognizing Negative Thoughts

Anxiety with women, particularly with approaching women you've never met before, is the biggest challenge most men face when they are trying to improve their inner game. It can cause high stress, anxiety, fear, depression, and leave you feeling drained at the end of the night. When tackling your approach anxiety, you have to begin with what's going on inside of your head. You are feeling fear and approach anxiety for a reason. It's not there because some guy in a huge top head told you that you are biologically hardwired to fear approaching women. The real reason is because you are insecure, and insecurities come from years of social programming. Take, for example, a boy who grew up being picked on by people. He is much more likely to grow up with terrible approach anxiety and poor inner game due to years of society teaching him that he's not good enough. Another example could be a boy who grew up with a father who always told him that women are not to be trusted. That boy will likely grow up not trusting women. In your situation, whatever it may be, you now have some sort of insecurity or insecurities that cause you to feel approach anxiety.

Recognizing negative thoughts is the key in finding what is causing your inner game to sink. Anytime you feel a negative emotion, be assured that a negative belief is causing it. Before you can change your negative beliefs into positive ones, you first have to find out what are your negative beliefs. You do this by recognizing when you feel a negative emotion and writing those thoughts down. At a later point, when you are feeling comfortable and you are not feeling the effects of strong emotions, you can sit down and go through each and every single negative thought. Ask yourself why you felt this way. Your mind will come up with lots of excuses and reasons to justify your approach anxiety and negative inner game. All of these justifications will be the reasons why your inner game is failing you.

The next step is to tackle these negative beliefs one by one. Take the time to grind out why those negative beliefs are false and only serve to hinder your inner game. If you really sit down and think about all the things that cause you approach anxiety, it's not hard to discover that most of your negative beliefs are blown way out of proportion and are simply not true, at least not true at all times. You will feel so much better once you realize these inner game flaws are mostly wrong and may bring a fresh new prospective on your dating life.