I severely underestimated the stress of this Eurojaunt. I’m essentially on a nearly two week holiday from my stressful corporate sales job. Besides daygame, I planned a host of activities to do during the mornings: gym, reading, catching up on personal email, writing, reflecting on my life and goals.

None of that happened.

The daily > 6 hour long daygame sessions took an unexpected toll on both my mind and my body. Mentally I’d say I’m doing fine. I’m not more stressed than I am on the clock. I learned how to deal with work stress by maintaining healthy routines. However, the daygame roller-coaster and several poor decisions plunged me into a downward spiral.

My first big mistake was asking a smoking girl for a cigarette during an idate. Things quickly went downhill from there. My addiction to nicotine flared up, and I have been smoking as a Turk ever since. I managed to not smoke for three days when, during another instant date, I fell for the same mistake.

Besides smoking, the over-excitement from the dopamine releases from sets during the day, made it almost impossible to sleep. Combined with the smoking and heavy drinking on dates, I was averaging less than 5 hours of sleep per day. On occasions I only went to bed as dawn was already breaking, sleeping well into noon. As I wanted to hit the streets at 2 PM, going to the gym or a café was no longer possible.

I really can’t go on like this if I want to daygame well into my thirties.

What can I do better?

There’s a couple of things I can improve from today onward. I’m pretty good at resisting cigarettes until I get drunk on dates with a smoker. If I can just stop myself from asking for a cigarette¹ I’ll be in a good place. Luckily, all of my wings are non-smokers.

Most of it boils down to emotional control: I’m still too invested in individual outcomes too soon in the set. I’m thinking about the texts I sent and the replies I did or did not receive. There’s a lot of good practices that I apply to my job that I can and should apply to my daygame during a Eurojaunt.

Concretely, this day I will refrain from drinking coffee, smoking, and alcohol for at least a day. As I’m nearing the end of the trip, I’m going to dial down the amount of hours I spend on the streets, making time for the non-game activities I planned for this trip.

I’m getting quite tired writing this post, so I’ll likely revisit it later to finish fleshing out my thoughts and approach.