Why doing nothing makes you feel so bad

[everywomanshero]

There is reason why your emotions seem to plague you with guilt when you sit on the couch for the 3rd Saturday in a row. The term is cognitive dissonnance.

Cognitive dissonance means your beliefs, attitudes, and actions are not consistent.

When you believe you should be approaching women and you rarely do, you're creating an inconsistency between your beliefs and your actions. It happens because you know better, but do the wrong thing anyway.

Just imagine if you had eaten a high fat mousse when you were on a diet. You would probably feel bad about it. BUT not nearly as bad if you had thought it was low fat initially and only later realized it was high fat. The reason is you didn't know any better, so it couldn't be avoided. So do what you know is right, and you won't have to feel the guilt anymore regardless of the immediate outcome.

Now here's a twist in cognitive dissonance as it applies to us. Have you ever noticed that when you spend too much money on a woman sometimes it doesn't pay off? I have found a possible explanation for this. In studies when people are offered either 20$ or 1$ to lie about a boring task being fun, how they rate the task is different. (note: these studies are older, so 20$ then is like 80$ now). So when the people were paid 20$, they had no dissonance. They felt the lie was justified by the compensation and thought no more about it. When given only 1$, that wasn't sufficient to tell a lie. After all, they aren't cheap or willing to lie without good reason. What ended up happening is the 1$ people backwards rationalized due to this injusitification effect that the task must be somewhat enjoyable and that's why they told the lie. In other words, when women receive injustifiable monetary/asset rewards for having spent time with a guy, it is possible that they attribute other reasons for this like it must have been fun. I believe this is often the case.

 

[Panda 2000]

Great post, backing material up with psychology is always a plus. And psychology is fun too.

About the cognitive dissonance, yeah, I can understand how it makes people feel bad. But what I don't understand about people, and sometimes about myself even, is *why* they do not act in consistence with their ideals and wants. Why do people who want to do something rather stay home and just think about that more. Why do some guys stay at home and sit behind a computer or something when they really, really want to hit it up with girls? I mean you could write it off as lazyness, but that just isn't a satisfactory answer for me. Anyone got any ideas?

I think it may be some kind of fear of failure resulting from the initial low self esteem. Or just that some people think about their wants so much, fantasize about them, that their subconscious thinks the needs are fulfilled but their consciousness, their super-ego, clearly says otherwise, thus resulting in guilt.

 

[everywomanshero]

I think it could actually be a form of self-esteem protection. Look at it this way, if they stay home and mentally masterbate what they *could* do if they *just really tried*, then they never have to face the failure (or maybe the sting of rejection). Picking up women (ability to) is important to most men's self-esteem, so it's not something we can easily confront failure for. If men just really didn't give a rats ass, ironically, they'd probably not hesitate to give it a go.

I don't really have a great explanation for this, but I think it could have something to do with wanting to protect the self-esteem they do have and not being very humble individuals. One part of the Christian bible I actually like is (paraphrased) God resists the proud but greets the humble. Ok the part about all plants are for mans use is pretty cool too!!

 

[Panda 2000]

Yeah, plants rock.
Could be a fear combined with low self-esteem protection and I think that is the case where most guys wanting to pick up girls start hesitating, like you and I said. And we all know what hesitation is.
But what baffles me is that such behaviour does not only translate to the pick up artist scenario. It translates to many peoples' wants and needs. Usually when people want to achieve something which is in their eyes great. Like someone wanting to become a writer, a painter, a musician etc. Always wanting but never actually getting around to doing it. But if I put myself in the shoes of those people, I think it just might be fear of failure (which would usually stem from low self esteem problems) and fear of change. If you're pretty comfortable, instead of changing your whole life to fulfill a need (although it may be a strong need), you just start fantasizing and projecting it in your mind, thus partly fulfilling it while not changing anything in the comfy world you've placed yourself in.