This is a good Jordan Peterson talk relevant to daygame winging and state-crashing – particularly the opening minute. Most consistent daygamers are familiar with the following cycle, one that hits especially hard when euro-jaunting:

1. Two guys fly out together, share an apartment. Full of optimism
2. They hit the streets. Collect numbers, wait to see what hits
3. Guy A gets laid
4. More streets, more numbers, more filtering.
5. Guy A gets laid again. Guy B still struggling despite doing equally good street work
6. Guy A buzzes with enthusiasm. Guy B crashes

Intellectually, we all know the stats. We know that daygame success is like a poker player waiting for his big hand, and he can be getting ante’d away by the crappy cards until that happens. Sometimes you get your luck early (like Guy A in this example), sometimes late, and sometimes not until the next euro jaunt.

Knowing all this intellectually doesn’t make it feel any better. Jordan Peterson explains why this is not a problem of mental constructs (i.e. how you process and interpret reality) but is actually neurochemical. It’s your body’s natural changes to your brain chemistry that state crash you.

In the video he’s talking about dominance hierarchies. When your brain tries to regard itself in the face of difficult problems, it will defer towards the group conclusion. If you rise up in the dominance hierarchy, that is the group giving a favourable regard to you, which you can then give to yourself. Here is Peterson’s key contribution:

Your brain then rewards you with serotonin.

You get more ‘feel good’ chemicals, lower neuroticism (i.e. “in your head” self-talk), and your body language and facial expression naturally reflects it (which girls notice, putting you on a roll). This is when daygame becomes extremely good fun because you are in a virtuous circle of success driving serotonin production which itself drives success.

When you’re euro-jaunting with the wing, you are in a dominance hierarchy of two [1]. If he starts pulling away, your brain will reduce serotonin production and give you the symptoms of state-crashing.

People chase pleasurable stimuli. It’s a form of self-medication. I think every intermediate daygamer comes to understand the value-tap / state-crash dynamic and it’s tempting to take advantage to give yourself a boost to serotonin and thus improve your results and mental state. In the virtual realm, this is why so many pricks are trying to one-up each other on forums puffing themselves up with (often imaginary) successes. They are trying to climb a rung or two higher up the dominance hierarchy and get a serotonin boost.

I go into detail in Daygame Infinite about how wings should behave to avoid such problems and I list out three pages of dirty tricks to watch out for so you don’t get value-tapped and, for the conscientious among you, so you don’t value tap your wings. It’s also why I promote the “daygame river” type of daygame that sidesteps these silly dominance games in the first place.

If you’d like to get good at daygame, you can’t be without Daygame Infinite, the cutting edge textbook for street pick-up instruction.

[1] If you obsessively compare your results against other bloggers and forum guys, you have a virtual dominance hierarchy to compete with too.