I suffer through crazy anxiety and I love the game of poker, but sometimes it gives me anxiety. Even when I'm playing online.


I haven't been putting in volume or working. Even though I have savings I still get concerned about my future.


I think the best way is to analyze if I'm just trying to make money or can I play to have fun and to maybe go down to lower stakes where I don't feel the pressure.


Even in live I get anxiety from playing chess, and other games at times and just in overall life and whatever you guys recommend that would be great guys.

I drink beers

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I have serious anxiety over regular intervals. Online poker exacerbates slightly, live tournaments feel the opposite -- too much fun to doubt myself. That might be the one place I don't have any anxiety.

I've found that applying a ton of effort to correcting anxiety is pretty much all I can do. That includes monitoring my diet and bio-rhythms (carbs in the morning = bad), regular meditation and mindfulness, and also allowing myself enough isolation to cope by myself without life/people interacting.

I'm pretty sure my doctor won't prescribe more useful meds due to a misunderstanding of addiction. Drinking beers could be a good solution, I wish alcohol agreed with me.

To op: Anxiety effing sucks, man. It's not worth feeling this way to play recreational poker no matter how fun it can be. Find a better game for you.

Anxiety is quite a serious thing.

A friend of mine suffers from it and is a poker player. But to be honest we haven't discussed it too deeply.

Depending on the severity of your symptoms seeing a specialist could be the best thing to do.

A mindfulness-based approach could also be of real benefit. And it is what I suspect would provide the most valuable understanding of the issue at hand.

As far as exercises go, from what I have come across, I believe Chi Gung could be of real benefit.

Every specific fear you approach instead of avoid will abate ,,, which brings with it also a lessening of the generalized sense of fear (which is anxiety.) So, if you have any phobias, expose yourself to them. Not your penis, your mind. Your vagus nerve, your amygdala, your central nervous system via awareness. (One has to be specific with the proudly non-psychological types.) Fear is a basic human emotion. Make an enemy of it and it haunts you from the shadow. Befriend it and you take the drivers seat. There are great books out there on fear. One is by Thom Rutledge, Embracing Fear. If you don't enjoy reading there are mini books on the subject too, where for reading 10 or so words on a mini page, you can gain a new foothold against fear.

Sorry if my post will create more anxiety for you in other areas of your life, but at least it will help with poker anxiety.

There are a lot of really bad things that can happen to you (all of the ones listed below actually happened to my friends or relatives and are not some made up scenarios):
1) You can get stabbed to death by some random crackhead trying to rob you at a truck stop
2) You can have a child born with a paralyzing nerve disorder that prevents them from ever leading independent life (making you a lifelong caregiver as well)
3) You can have a skiing injury that makes you wheel chair bound for the rest of your life (after essentially leaving the first half of your life as a bro type of dude very serious about health and fitness)
4) You can have melanoma that is not correctly diagnosed in time and as a result die in your 40's and not get a chance to raise your daughters you care deeply about

All of the above are truly terrible things that could happen to one

What is the worst that can happen when you play poker? You simply lose a buy-in or two or three (and eat Chinese food instead of Filet Mignon). Big f***ing deal! You are not an MMA fighter or a football player, where a wrong move can have lifelong ramifications (think Ryan Shazier).

If your anxiety extends to other areas of your life, such as public speaking or approaching strangers of opposite gender - think about the above as well. What is the worst that can really happen?

Hmm, if your not playing too high up or anything, you might just fear looking like an idiot. I have had similar anxiety in the past, mostly live. But if you don't look dumb every once in a while, you're just a boring old nit lol, and you're probably not improving very much or quickly. You gotta experiment, mess up, try risky plays, in order to really learn this game and gain the confidence you need to excel imo. Also it's just a game, try to have fun and learn.

You need to rewire your brain, study up on affirmations. I've used them to rewire my brain to deal with social anxiety.

fear and anxiety is just part of the game, embrace it. play lower, being over-rolled allows you to play the game the way its meant to be played (agro, balanced), without the money screwing w your decisions. the only way to win is to get in there and battle

FWIW i know exactly how you feel, i get this too