CHAPTER 6: GET HAPPY

(THE MENTAL HEALTH TRAIT)

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

—Albert Camus

The hardest part about happiness for most guys is that they don’t actually understand what it is. Young guys especially think it means they have to be super jazzed about everything, like a cheerleader or a spazzy life coach on a manic upswing. That is totally wrong.

The last twenty years of positive psychology research has shown that happiness is really just an overall sense that life is going well. It’s not mania. It’s not Gary Busey running through the streets or Tom Cruise jumping up on Oprah’s couch and Tebowing at her feet. When it comes to mating, it’s not even acting like you’re in love when you’ve met a woman you like.

Happiness is mainly just quiet contentment. It’s appreciation for her presence in your life, the enjoyment of the food you are tasting or the beer you are drinking. Fundamentally, happiness means getting enjoyment out of your daily activities and your life.

We’re not telling you that you can’t be sad. It’s okay to be sad sometimes. Sadness is a legitimate emotion with real functions in life. Don’t be ashamed if you’re sad, for whatever reason. But feel it, deal with it, and then move on.

Because if you’re trying to create new relationships with women—short-, medium-, or long-term—sadness is not an attractive strategy. Women don’t adopt boyfriends out of pity (they do that with puppies); they want a guy whose happiness cup overflows into theirs. Enjoying life is hugely attractive to women and a signal of good mental health.

Unfortunately, most guys take their mental health for granted. Women don’t make that mistake because they are even more vulnerable to male strangers and have a lot more to lose. That’s why women care just as much about the state of your mind as the state of your body.

When they see us lose our temper a little, they worry we might become dangerously aggressive. When they hear us say something oddly irrational, they worry that we’re weird (“psychotic” in scientific terms). When they can tell by the smell that our bodies or clothes are unwashed, they worry we’re getting too depressed to take care of ourselves.

Often they can judge our level of mental health even faster than they can judge our level of physical health (you can hide a belly, but you can’t hide crazy), so you need to pay attention to this area. Everything we do or say is a potential clue to the state of our mental health, and women feel instinctive fear, anxiety, social avoidance, and sexual disgust toward guys who show signs of poor mental health.

On the positive side, some of the most sexually attractive traits that men can display to women—traits like happiness and its companions humor, resilience, playfulness, and openness—are surprisingly reliable clues of good mental health. Happiness and a good sense of humor are a guarantee of pretty good mental health because every mental disorder undermines the ability to display them. (Depressive shut-ins won’t even answer the door to your knock-knock jokes.) Emotional resilience in the face of stress and setbacks is a powerful indicator of emotional stability, maturity, confidence, and optimism—and of not being anxious or psychotic. Guys with autism, severe PTSD, or catatonic schizophrenia aren’t very playful with women, so playfulness means you’re probably clear of those problems. Openness to new ideas and people means you probably don’t have paranoid schizophrenia or social anxiety disorder.

For every mental disorder that can disrupt how your brain works to fulfill its adaptive function (which is fundamentally what mental health is), we’ve evolved a set of behavioral displays to show that we don’t have that disorder. That’s why women care so much about your happiness and mental health; these traits—happiness, sense of humor, openness, emotional resilience, playfulness—are honest signals of sanity.

They are the opposite of crazy cues. They’re at the heart of human sexual attraction and human courtship and are some of the things women want most in men—even though we often don’t realize it.

That’s how evolution works. It keeps track of the links between the specific dysfunctions and the dysfunction-denying displays of excellence (through our unconscious and evolved preferences) so we don’t have to. In fact, for each dimension of mental illness and mental health, there’s a continuum of how well your brain works, from the very impaired, dysfunctional, and dangerous (serious mental illness) through normalcy (ordinary mental health) to the very attractive, highly functional, and beneficial (strong mental health).

Most guys who chronically struggle with women have mental health that floats between mildly harmful dysfunction and average function. Your goal as a man should be to identify where you sit along this functional spectrum and then to put in the work to improve your position (which we will show you how to do) by moving toward the attractive end.

WHY WOMEN CARE ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH

Many researchers now see evidence for a “general mental health” factor, with two major subfactors: internalizing disorders (worrying too much about what’s inside your head: anxieties, depressions, phobias, delusions) and externalizing disorders (acting out too much toward other people and temptations: addictions, impulsivity, psychopathy, crime). Guys who score high on internalizing tend to end up living in their mom’s basement; guys who score high on externalizing tend to end up living in their state’s penitentiary. Some guys score high on both and bounce back and forth between family care, psychiatric clinics, and prisons.

From a mating perspective, the general mental health factor is one of the first things that women evaluate in men. Good mental health means a guy probably has good genes and will make a good partner and potential father. Bad mental health means he’s a time suck and an energy sink and very possibly dangerous. Nobody wants to hook up with the depressed guy at the bar, let alone date him or, god forbid, marry him. Chances are those issues are going to be annoying and exhausting to deal with, which is why you have to deal with them first.

Besides poor mental health being a pain in the ass to deal with, the other reason mental health is so important to women is that it is substantially heritable—both the negative aspects and the positive aspects. If a woman chooses a guy with more issues than National Geographic and they have kids, even if she’s able to get rid of him eventually, she won’t be able to shed the antisocial, violent, destructive sons he leaves behind. On the other hand, if she chooses a guy with great mental health, she’ll probably get happy, funny, emotionally stable, adaptable kids who make it much easier to be a mom—and women evolved to understand this instinctively even if they don’t want kids yet.

Women have favored happy guys for thousands of generations; no doubt because they make better partners and providers. There is nothing attractive or effective, after all, about a man who responds to adversity by turtling up under the covers and listening to Coldplay on a loop. This evolutionary preference away from depression and toward happiness has resulted in much lower rates of depression in men than in women. Thus, when women see these positive mental health attributes, they instinctively see a more effective (and thus attractive) man.

Fortunately for women and men alike, many poor mental health traits can be managed and dealt with, and good ones are easily improved.

IMPROVE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH

Your brain does not have different rules than the rest of your body. It is a physical organ—just like all the other systems in your body—and its operation is directly tied to your overall health. And just like other parts of your body, there are things you can do right now to start getting better and seeing improvement, and there are things that take more time.

THINGS YOU CAN CHANGE RIGHT NOW

The first three things you can work on right now to improve your mental health are the exact same things we outlined in the previous chapter to improve your physical health—sleep, nutrition, and exercise. These are the most important life changes that good psychiatrists and clinical psychologists recommend for their clients. They know that improving your physical health is usually more effective than any psychiatric medications or talk therapies that they can offer.

1. Get More Sleep

Tired brains don’t work right. There are numerous studies showing that plentiful sleep improves mental health and sleep deprivation impairs it. The reason torturers around the world use sleep deprivation to drive people crazy is that it disrupts mood regulation, kills emotional resilience, induces psychosis, causes hallucinations, undermines your sense of identity, and destroys your capacity for rational thought.

And you’re probably doing a lot of that to yourself already, just by staying up too late. GET EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP EVERY NIGHT!

2. Eat Better

Malnourished brains don’t work right either. Eating better will have a huge impact on your mood and stress tolerance. The standard American diet (SAD), full of processed sugars and grains, is so toxic to your mental health that it’s hard to be anything other than moody and depressed on it. There’s also a ton of new evidence that reducing sugars and grains in your diet changes the whole ecosystem of bacteria that live in your gut, which reduces systemic inflammation throughout your body and brain and recalibrates your hormone levels, elevating your mood.

Most Americans eat their feelings—they try to improve their moods with carbs. This “Donuts against Depression” strategy only works as long as the sugar high lasts, and then the mood crash comes—with extra guilt and self-loathing from the weight gain. So try this for the next week instead. (Geoff loves this one.)

Every time your mood feels a little low, don’t eat any carbs. Instead, eat some bacon. Get a plate, put three layers of paper towel on it, put four to six slices of good quality bacon on top, and then add another three layers of paper towel; microwave for three to five minutes until soft and warm. Eat it while watching some stand-up comedy clips on YouTube. We’ll bet you feel much better throughout the week. And you’ll probably lose a pound or two of fat if you’re eating bacon instead of sugars and grains.

3. Exercise More

Exercise makes you feel better. The best studies show that regular exercise improves your mental health about as much as the best antidepressants and mood stabilizers—at a much lower cost and with fewer side effects. (Exercise is pro boners, not boner pills.) Strength conditioning may be especially useful in regulating hormones and mood—whereas chronic cardio imposes signals of stress and desperation on the brain.

It’s not so much that exercise boosts mood; it’s that a sedentary lifestyle kills mood. The “normal” modern American lifestyle of sitting in cars to drive, sitting at desks to work, and sitting on sofas to watch TV is outright “depressogenic”: it generates some level of clinical depression in almost everyone who does it a lot. Regular daily exercise was the prehistoric norm, not the exception.

4. Get More Sunshine

Exposed to sun, your body produces more vitamin D, one of nature’s most potent antidepressants and health boosters. You can take vitamin D supplements, but they don’t work as well as sunshine. Your best bet is to get at least 30 minutes of sunshine per day—especially if you live at high latitude with dark winters. The same sun exposure that helps cure seasonal affective disorder can improve anyone’s mood.

5. Do Lots of Small Spontaneous Things You Enjoy

Researchers have discovered that a reliable way to cultivate your own happiness is to fill your day with lots of little experiences that make you happy. Do 3–5 small, enjoyable things spaced throughout each day that distract you from grinding duties and that hit your stress reset button.

This creates a happiness feedback loop of anticipation, enjoyment, gratitude, and spontaneity. Focus on things that increase your social engagement and support rather than undermine your other mating and self-improvement goals—including cultivating the other traits and proofs:

• Call an old or distant friend and catch up (social proof).

• Learn a new exercise (physical proof).

• Email a favorite author or respected mentor (intelligence).

• Take your dog to the dog park and get some sun (social proof).

• Watch comedy videos (intelligence).

• Play catch with a friend (physical health, social proof).

• Practice a skill (material proof, willpower).

• Volunteer for a cause you believe in (willpower, social proof).

It’s important not to sacrifice all of your small enjoyments like these in pursuit of larger, longer-term goals. Don’t buy the Puritan myth that success requires shame-based self-control and brutal self-denial—or the myth of the American Dream that career success and wealth will produce sustained happiness. [We will talk more about this in Chapter 8: Get Your Life Together (The Willpower Trait).]

In fact, studies have shown that big accomplishments produce surprisingly short periods of happiness—maybe a week, maybe a month—before the mood-boosting effects fade. Goals and ambitions are important, but not because they’ll increase your long-term happiness or mental health. They’re important because they’re worth achieving, they make your life better, the process of working toward them makes you happy, and they attract women, friends, and status.

Don’t miss the enjoyment trees for the success forest. Your long-term success will depend a lot more on your long-term mental health than on accomplishing 10 percent more work today. Take the time to reboot your brain on a daily basis.

6. Do Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation is the fastest and most powerful way to improve your mental health. We know it sounds like some convoluted New Age mumbo jumbo that only Buddhist monks and yoga-loving soccer moms would do, but it’s our secret weapon for feeling happy, stable, and centered, and it can be yours too.

Meditation isn’t a long, arduous, uncomfortable process. At its most basic, it’s three steps:

1. Find a quiet place.

2. Sit there with your eyes closed.

3. Focus on your breathing.

As you focus on your breath, practice letting your thoughts and feelings come and go as they will, without judging them, reacting to them, or clinging to them. That’s the mindfulness part. It sounds easy, but it’s actually a real challenge to stay focused on breathing without getting caught up in your inner monologue.

The first time, try meditating for just ten minutes. Every time your mind wanders away from your breath, just make a mental note, like Oops, silly three-pound sportsbook, there it goes again wandering off, kindly forgive your brain, and focus back on your breath. Count how many times your mind wanders. It’ll probably be at least fifty times in ten minutes if you’re not used to meditating. If you can get that down to less than ten times in ten minutes, you’re approaching Zen master level. If you get it down to zero times in ten minutes, you’re brain-dead, and you need medical attention.

If your friends make fun of you for meditating, give them the Buddhist dare: “Don’t just do something; sit there!” Give them this ten-minute mindfulness challenge, and ask for their count of mind-wandering episodes. If they keep making fun of you, get better friends. (We’ll get to this in a minute.)

The science of meditation is very clear and provides overwhelming evidence: even twenty minutes a day doing mindfulness meditation increases happiness, vitality, emotional stability, and focus. It also decreases irritability, anxiety, depression, blood pressure, and the stress hormone cortisol. Meditation induces a physiological relaxation response in your body that counteracts daily stress.

Mindfulness helps you develop the same skills taught in cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most effective psychotherapies: accepting your negative thoughts and anxious feelings as they come and go without taking them too seriously and then moving past them.

Not many women will list “a guy who does regular mindfulness meditation” as a mate choice criterion in their OkCupid profile, but they will all appreciate the happiness, adaptability, resilience, awareness, and playfulness that it bestows on you.

MENTAL HEALTH IMPROVEMENTS THAT TAKE MORE TIME

Some activities that improve your mental health take a little more time and a bit more emotional, physical, and financial investment. Once you’ve incorporated the shorter-term mental health improvements into your life, consider adding these.

1. Improve Your Circle of Friends and Your Social Relationships

People tend to turn into the average of the five people they spend the most time around. If your closest friends and colleagues are depressed, anxious, or delusional, you’ll start converging toward their mental illnesses. Whereas if they’re upbeat, confident, and rational, you’ll raise your game just by being around them. You know why Mormons are so goddamn chipper? They’re surrounded by other happy Mormons.

Spend time around the people you respect and want to be like. It can take time to find these people and develop relationships with them, especially if you’ve spent too long with shitty people, but it is crucial to your happiness and mental health. Just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a lowering tide makes them all run aground.

List the five people you spent the most time around in the last month—not just coworkers you sit near, but people you talk and hang out with. Then put a plus sign (+) next to each person who increases your happiness and a minus sign (-) next to each person who decreases your happiness.

Now the key step: Spend less time with the minus-people and more time with plus-people. Do this exercise every month as long as you live, and you’ll see a dramatic improvement in your well-being.

2. Move to a Better Place

Apart from WHO you spend time with, WHERE you spend your time also has a huge impact on your mental health. If you live in a country, city, neighborhood, or house full of miserable people, it’s hard not to be miserable.

If you get depressed living in a dark, cold, rainy climate, then move somewhere else. If you feel anxious living in a fast-paced city full of strangers, move to a friendlier, more relaxed town. If you live in an apartment complex full of random loser meth-heads, just fucking move out of Indiana. If your housemates suck, move to a better house with cooler housemates.

For some of you, moving isn’t realistic right now. You’re either too young or too broke. Don’t worry, we understand; we’ve been there. The important thing is to make this one of your long-term goals, because at some point you have to take responsibility for your environment as a key part of your mental health.

Later, in the chapter on mating markets, we’ll give you some advice on where to move to maximize your mating opportunities with the kinds of women you favor. Just bear in mind that you will not be a positive, attractive guy if you live in a place that makes you miserable.

3. Get a Good Therapist (if needed)

If you know or think you’re struggling with mental illness, you need to understand two things:

The illness isn’t your fault, but it is your responsibility: Don’t beat yourself up about having a medical condition that happens to affect your brain. Some people are born with physical vulnerabilities; you might have been born with an emotional or cognitive vulnerability. It’s a roll of the nature/nurture dice. It probably arose from some combination of genes, random errors in brain growth before and after birth, and recent stressors or traumas. It could have happened to anyone, and in fact, most people have some sort of mental health issue.

Psychotherapy can be useful if you find the right therapist for you and your condition: A good therapist can also help build your emotional intelligence and self-control and help you construct a romantically attractive life and identity, not just solve specific mental problems. Tucker has benefited from seeing a psychoanalyst regularly. Geoff has benefited from individual and couples therapy. It’s the twenty-first century. We all know that we all have issues. There’s no shame in hiring a trained professional to help you with yours and to improve your mental health and your life skills. In fact, many successful women won’t date a guy unless he’s had some therapy. Why would they want his unresolved issues derailing their relationship?

DISPLAY YOUR MENTAL HEALTH

Women can’t get inside your head and evaluate your mental health directly. So they have to rely on honest signals to evaluate it indirectly, based on your actions, mood, and behavior. We’ve extensively covered the five basic mental health attributes that women rate as highly attractive, but we’re going to restate them here so you don’t forget:

1. happiness and contentment

2. good sense of humor

3. playfulness

4. openness

5. mental resilience and adaptability

These are some of the most-desired traits that women all around the world look for in men. They are all fun for women, but they’re not superficial fun.

Rather, women evolved in such a way that these traits feel fun to them because they signal your mental health—which is a deadly serious aspect of your mate value as a man. These traits show you have good genes and good partnership abilities and would make a good dad.

1. Be Happy

Some of the best ways to display your happiness with a woman are also the best ways to improve your happiness when you’re by yourself.

Fill your day with lots of little things that make you happy—and then smile about them with the woman who’s there. If bacon and eggs makes you happy, make two plates for breakfast after she stays overnight and enjoy them together. If you love great coffee, spend a little extra time to figure out your favorite style, and spend a little extra money to get the good stuff; then explain to her, with enthusiasm, why you love it. If having sex with a hot woman makes you happy, enjoy the hell out of the sex, and let her see and feel your gratitude (just don’t get it in her hair).

Happiness is really a matter of taking care of yourself. It’s about figuring out what actually makes you happy and doing it. If you can keep yourself happy, it demonstrates self-insight (you know yourself as a man) and self-compassion (you’re kind to yourself), and predicts how kind you are capable of being to a girlfriend, to kids, and to other people.

Women often say that a great smile is the most attractive part of a man’s body. This isn’t because evenly spaced white teeth are so important in chewing food effectively. It’s because smiles reveal happiness, happiness reveals mental health, and mental health predicts everything good in life. If you do nothing else to improve your mental health signals, just practice feeling genuinely happy by treating yourself well.

2. Be Funny

The human capacity for humor probably evolved at least partly through sexual selection (i.e., because women liked it) as an indicator of mental health, verbal creativity, and social intelligence.

Being funny requires you to understand other people’s beliefs, assumptions, desires, fears, and values. You also have to understand social norms and how to violate them in a lighthearted, nonthreatening way. It requires a quick wit, active listening, and engagement. It’s hard to do if you have any of the major mental disorders. Depressed guys don’t make jokes. Schizophrenic guys don’t make jokes anyone can understand.

If you can be funny and witty in one-on-one conversations with women, it’s almost a guarantee that you don’t have major mental health problems. Being playful on a date shows warmth and engagement. Making fun of yourself shows a resilient self-confidence that narcissists, psychopaths, and depressed people don’t have. A guy who can mock his own foibles without showing low self-esteem is very attractive to women because they can be confident he’s not one of those toxic, dangerous guys.

To put it another way, the psychiatrists we know often make observations like this:

If I’m seeing a patient and they were doing badly, but then they come in and suddenly they’ve got a good sense of humor, I know they’re getting better. If they can make me laugh, I know the medicine’s working. Their mental health is improving.

If you are painfully unfunny, all is not lost. As you improve your mental health, you can also improve your sense of humor. Some people can even learn to be really funny.

Improv comedy classes are a great way to do that. They help you observe and understand people (the core of all humor). They make you better at conversation and social interaction. They break you out of your shell so you’re less stiff and more playful. And they’re a great way to meet women.

Practically speaking from a mating perspective, being funny only requires you to make a few jokes per date. You don’t have to be Louis C. K. (even if you look like him). We know you can learn to do that.

3. Be Playful

Whereas humor is being playful with language, playfulness is being playful with everything else in life. Humans are a weirdly playful species. Other primates are playful when they’re young, like human children are, but when they hit sexual maturity they become deadly serious and just stop playing. Alpha male gorillas are not frisky, jolly, or lighthearted. Try giving one of them a wet willie and see how long you can keep your face attached to your head.

Humans are unique in that we keep playing into adulthood. We have fun with each other. We play games and sports, and we tease each other. We’ve extended the juvenile primate playfulness into adulthood—partly because it’s so attractive to mates and so useful in raising kids.

Women adore guys who can switch from serious maturity to playful immaturity and back again, as the situation demands. It’s the best combination of the mature male status and young male rebelliousness—like taking your date to a museum and talking thoughtfully about the great artists of the Italian Renaissance but admitting that the works of Peter Paul Rubens are your favorite because of the subject matter, the composition, and all the big ol’ titties.

There are lots of ways like that to be playful. It just requires reawakening your inner eight-year-old kid, combining it with your inner fourteen-year-old goofball self, and mixing in a dash of adult observational comedy. Here are some specific situations where you can practice playfulness with women. (We’ll cover these situations and others in depth in Chapter 19: Dating Women.) Use these as inspiration to come up with your own ideas:

The Three Graces, Rubens (1639)

The Chuck E. Cheese’s gambit: Your culture’s taught you that dating involves a certain set of fairly serious and expensive activities—dinner, movies, concerts, trips, etc. These things can be pleasant, but they don’t typically result in a couple rolling around laughing their asses off. Take a chance, and bring a woman to a place that’s actually hilarious, like Chuck. E. Cheese’s. It’s full of games, kids, and activities that you can play with and against the woman you’re with.

You might get some weird looks at first—both from your date and the kids’ parents—but if you can tap into that childlike side and really have fun playing skeeball or redeeming reams of tickets for silly toys and trinkets, you can bring your date along with you into that playful mindset. Most women are tired of being so serious with men. They want a chance to feel like a kid again too.

Make stupid, self-deprecating jokes: Making fun of yourself and doing undignified things are great ways to show your playful side. If a woman balks at going to Chuck E. Cheese’s, tell her not to worry “because no one can see if you’re not wearing pants inside a ball pit.” Or tell her you just want to recruit some child labor for your shoe factory. Tell her the only way you can get sexually aroused is by crushing the dreams of innocent children at Pop-a-Shot. You get the idea.

Obviously, you need to gauge how playful a woman is before making ridiculous jokes like this, but the point is that playfulness is disarming, it releases the dating tension, and it shows that you’re open, adaptable, and happy.

Teasing: Teasing is a combination of humor and playfulness directed at the other person. If you’re good at it, it can be very effective and attractive because it shows your confidence, social savvy, and awareness of social norms and how to playfully violate them.

Teasing can be tricky, however, because guys who don’t understand women can overdo it and make women cry or come across as real assholes.

Imagine you’re walking down the street with a woman, on your way to dinner, and you see a filthy homeless guy rooting through a garbage can. You should position yourself between him and her so she feels safe, but you can also use the opportunity to tease her by saying something like, “Wow, it really has been all downhill for your ex-boyfriend since the breakup, hasn’t it?”

You’re not really making fun of the homeless guy or even your date—you’re teasing her about her past choice in men (which she’s probably appalled by anyway) and making an awkward situation a little lighter.

Goof around when you’re killing time: As you get into longer-term relationships, you’ll spend a lot of time doing mundane stuff together, like going to the DMV or shopping at Target. These can either be tedious chores that make you grumpy around a woman or ripe opportunities for playfulness that make you more attractive to her—especially when she’s probably equally bored.

If you’re at a store like Target or Walmart, go to the dairy case and ask one of the employees where they keep the Fabergé eggs. Grab a ball from that big wire display case full of bouncy balls in the toy section and play catch with little kids who are sitting in the cart with their parents. If a kid wants a sugary cereal and his mom says no, when the mom isn’t looking pass by and put eight boxes of Froot Loops in the cart. Try on ridiculous clothes in the clothing department, and then ask random people how you look in them.

All these things are fun ways to kill time. They violate some social norms and our “scripts” about how shopping is supposed to work. But nobody’s harmed and people are amused.

Obviously, you want to keep in mind where the line is between playfulness and creating a public nuisance. It’s one thing to grab a rubber ball and bounce it around the store. It’s another to grab a baseball bat from sporting goods and play Home Run Derby with the cabbages in the produce section. From experience we can tell you that watching cabbage turn into coleslaw at 85mph is a lot of fun, but it’s also a misdemeanor.

Playfulness is a mindset. It’s about seeing the objects, people, and situations around you as occasions for fun rather than as serious burdens to cope with. Remember how when you’re in love, the world is your playground. Women like you to have a little bit of that attitude all the time.

The key to playfulness in mating is reading the situation and the woman. The safer she feels with you, the more playful you can usually be.

4. Be Open

Openness is a general mindset that proclaims, “That looks cool. I’ve never done that before. I’ll give that a try.” You can demonstrate openness by exposing yourself to new things, foods, people, places, and cultures without getting overwhelmed, stressed, or destabilized.

Openness is attractive to women partly because it shows your ability to judge risk rationally and your emotional resilience if things go wrong. Many mental disorders undermine openness: depressed guys get stuck in ruts; socially anxious guys won’t meet new people; paranoid guys won’t visit new places.

Also, openness is a reliable test of your good judgment. If you’re highly open-minded but you haven’t yet become psychotic, that means you’ve exposed yourself to a lot of ideas but your brain hasn’t been infected by stupid memes such as cultish religions, pseudosciences, conspiracy theories, or political extremism. So your mental health must be strong. People low on openness usually realize unconsciously that they’re too mentally fragile to handle such novelty and variety.

Giving new stuff a try is the heart of displaying your openness. You can easily do it in many situations:

At the bar: Ask the bartender for the best drink she can make; if you like beer, try one you’ve never had before; if there are cocktail specials, order one of those. Openness isn’t about liking any of them; it’s about trying them to see if you might like them. If you don’t like one, try a different one, or go back to drinking vodka sodas.

At a restaurant: Broaden your palate. Ask the waiter for the best dish on the menu; try dishes with descriptions you don’t understand; order an entrée with a meat you’ve never had before. Experiment! Food isn’t just fuel, it’s an experience. And the more varied experiences you have, the more open you seem to a woman.

Movies: Watch a movie you’ve never heard of; see a foreign film; broaden your horizons. If you only like action movies or comedies, see a drama if that’s what your date is interested in. She wants to see how you react outside your comfort zone; your willingness to try it shows openness to accepting and handling risk.

Music: You think you know which genres and bands you like, but have you ever really explored the musical landscape? Sign up for one of the streaming online music services (Pandora, Spotify, Rdio), and every day pick a random new genre and a random top station or artist within that genre. Just listen to it for at least fifteen minutes, without judgment, as if the most beautiful woman in the world really wanted to listen to it while you drove back to her place after a date. Most of the genres and stations you won’t like, but you’ll at least learn what “night ragas,” “canciones románticas,” and “tropical house” mean. And you’ll probably find at least a few genres and artists that you never would have discovered otherwise. That’s openness.

Being highly open shows her that you can adapt to dramatic new life changes, such as living together, moving to a new city, getting married, or having kids. If you’re a young guy and you’re already set in your ways, that’s scary to a woman. It signals that you don’t have the mental health—the adaptability, resourcefulness, and resilience—to build a new relationship and a new life with a woman. And it means that you won’t grow as a person—what she sees is what she’ll get in you, as a boyfriend or husband, forever and ever.

5. Be Resilient and Adaptable

Mental resilience is a form of emotional intelligence. Apart from humor, play, and openness, guys can show off their mental health by displaying resilience and adaptability.

Mature, mentally healthy men deal with challenges that would make unstable boys crumble. Displaying resilience is not as simple as being funnier, more playful, or more open, however. You can’t just roam the streets with a woman looking for adversity to persevere against, like some weird combination of a Spartan warrior and Mahatma Gandhi. Rather, resilience is about preparing yourself mentally for challenges of all stripes that may arise.

If you’re driving down the highway with a date and a tire blows out, are you going to slam on the brakes so that your car spins into other lanes? Are you going to have a panic attack and call your mom to ask her what to do? Do you even know where your spare tire and jack are?

Here’s the thing: you don’t actually need to know how to change the tire yourself; you just need to know how to calmly, quickly, and effectively solve the problem. Displaying your resilience in a situation like that is not about the precise method of problem solving; it’s about the fact that you solved it at all.

Your general adaptability and resilience are the main things that women want to see—not your specific skills in cranking a tire jack and torquing a lug wrench. If you fail to respond adaptively in a stressful situation, it’s not like your date is suddenly going to hate you. She just won’t be as attracted to you because your effectiveness in handling situations like these will generalize across all areas of life.

Fortunately, just as you can practice humor with your guy friends, you can practice resilience in your ordinary life. If you’re out by yourself headed for lunch and the place where you wanted to eat is closed, don’t berate yourself for being unprepared or cuss at the world for being unfair. Think, How would James Bond handle this? (or whoever your strong, effective male idol is). How would he show resilience and adaptability in that situation? He would probably think, Not a big deal. I’ll just go to the OTHER strip club in town with the free lunch buffet. If you get into the daily habit of thinking through trouble spots and responding with some version of Oh, it’s not a big deal. How else can I solve this? then by the time you’re actually on a date with a woman and something goes wrong, your resilience and adaptability will be good to go.

If you’re not quite there yet, however, there is a very simple way to practice your resilience and adaptability with women: STOP. FUCKING. COMPLAINING. There are few things more unattractive to a woman than a man who complains about everything instead of either grinning and bearing it or (ideally) solving his problem.

“These people are stupid.” “This service is awful.” “I hate romantic comedies.” “Nobody in this town knows how to drive.” “There’s no good music anymore.” Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch.

Constant complaining and cynicism are not only signs of poor resilience, but they set a negative frame around your entire mating interaction. Instead of thinking “Yes we can!” you’re thinking “Just say no!” Instead of looking for the silver lining, you’re staring into the dark cloud or an abyss of bottomless misery. No woman in her right mind wants to deal with that kind of negativity—it’s just not healthy, mentally or otherwise.

Takeaways

• If physical health is the bedrock of mating success, mental health is the foundation. Without it, nothing works; with it, everything in life gets easier, better, and happier. It’s especially valuable in amplifying all the other traits and proofs that women like, and it reveals good genes, good partner potential, and good dad potential.

• Mental illness is instantly unattractive to women, and they can often sense it even before they notice anything about your physical health. They’re not showing some arbitrary prejudice or cultural stigma; they’re avoiding the very real risks and costs of interacting with guys who may be delusional, irrational, emotionally unbalanced, or otherwise dangerous—and who could pass on those problems to their kids.

• You can improve your mental health in many ways. Some are the same tactics for improving physical health: sleep, nutrition, and exercise. Others involve daily self-care: enjoying small pleasures, planning happy activities, doing gratitude exercises, and doing mindfulness meditation. Others require more dramatic life changes: making better friends, moving to a better place, learning more about your issues, and doing psychotherapy. If you have serious issues, find a good psychiatrist who knows their meds and a good clinical psychologist who does evidence-based treatments.

• The reliable signals of good mental health are some of the most attractive traits that women desire: