Blog for whoever

Jennifer, Alison, Phillipa, Sue, Deborah, Annabel tooooooo.

I have nothing particular to write here. All I know though is that recently I've been reading MGOP 1 and 2, and it talks about the importance of a warmup and especially cool down to expel thoughts. Otherwise, thoughts swim around your mind as sorta like unconscious phantoms, shutting off your higher level brain functions as they go.

I seem to be trying to 'remember' a lot of stuff at the moment. I have various technical goals, pertaining to things like 'look at our range, look at it from their POV, trust our instinct', but it's highly inefficient to have all these floating around, unlearned to the level of unconscious competence. Instead, I should basically just be entering a state of relaxation and confidence, and they would flow naturally from deep recesses within my mind, or something.

I've really been neglecting mental stuff of late, and sorta dealing with it by getting better at quitting. I'm not THAT good at quitting either though! I've hard a bit of a mental epiphany today, as it relates to something I learned during my years of anxiety suffering.

Basically, anxiety happens because of a secret lack of self esteem. Until my counsellor person pointed it out, it had never actually crossed my mind that I lacked self esteem at all. Just knowing that went a large part of the way towards fixing it, but beyond that it became simply a job of telling myself the opposite of whatever my anxious thoughts were telling me. 

So for example, in a certain situation like someone about to tell me a joke, I used to go into absolute meltdown, especially if they prefaced it with something like 'omg this is soooooooooooo funnnnnnnnyyyyyyyyyyy'. Thoughts would come in like 'fucking hell Dan ur in meltdown, ur not even gna listen to the joke, you're INCAPABLE of listening to jokes'.

Then the punchline would come and inevitably I hadn't listened to a single word of it, and a stupid fake laugh would come out. The experience reinforced the whole anxious experience.

All I actually had to do, was practice countering those (almost unconscious) thoughts when they came in, with positive ones. So, I would say 'no Dan, you CAN listen to jokes, you're a very capable person'. This worked in the short term, and slowly but surely over time the need to 'manually' tell myself those things dropped away.

So I feel like poker mental game is very similar. Without proper awareness, our mind tells us all kinds of things, such as 'you're not good enough for these stakes, you'll probably run bad, that last mistake shows you can't cut it'. Often these thoughts are so ingrained that it's hard to shake them, but literally (so goes my theory) all we actually have to do is counter those thoughts with overwhelmingly positive ones. 'I CAN cut it' 'that mistake doesn't mean I'm not capable, everyone including Sauce makes lots of mistakes' 'runbad is an illusion, money is an illusion', but most important are the ones pertaining to our self esteem while we play poker. 'You just made a mistake, but you're so sick good that this is just going to make us play even better', etc.


So yeah, that's all. Gonna work on this stuff.