How to Deal with Anxiety as a Poker Player

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Professional poker players are often prone to stress and anxiety, which can negatively affect the results of your game. This article is as clear as possible and will simply help you identify internal and external sources of anxiety and learn how to resist them.

1. What is anxiety

Anxiety is an internal state in which a person's future is seen as something dangerous for the individual. 

It feels like an inner emotional experience associated with a premonition of danger or failure. Unlike fear, which arises from specific causes and is associated with a threat to a person's life, anxiety is of an indefinite nature, and it arises with an imaginary threat. The skill of detecting anxiety is useful for a poker player, since it can become the basis of tilt. And it leads to a sub-optimal psychological state and, as a result, failures at the tables. 

• For example: anxiety when making not the best decision at the game table, thoughts about what opponents may think of you and how  they will act in the next draws.

2. Types of anxiety

In psychology, there are two types of anxiety:

• Situational anxiety is an emotional reaction in stressful situations, which is characterized by gloomy premonitions, subjective feelings of tension, nervousness, anxiety and is accompanied by the activation of the autonomic nervous system.
• Personal anxiety is a negative emotional experience of expectation and uncertainty, a feeling of helplessness. In other words, it is an individual psychological feature, manifested in the tendency of a person to often experience severe anxiety on relatively small occasions.

Signs of high anxiety

1. Constant anxiety, tension.
2. Feeling of an unknown threat.
3. Autonomic chronic reactions: increased heart rate, redness of the skin, increased breathing, increased sweating, raise blood pressure, reduced peristalsis of the digestive tract, etc. 

What does anxiety affect?

Like any unresolved psychological situation, anxiety has implications for your psyche:

1. Self-esteem is a decrease in self-confidence and self-confidence.
2. Relationships with other people - difficulties in building communication with friends, colleagues, loved ones. Increased anxiety leads to isolation of the person.
3. Productivity level - spending a large amount of resources, reducing the level of productivity.
4. Level of health - occurrence of panic attacks and neurotic diseases.
5. The occurrence of depression - often background anxiety — is a signal of the onset of depressive disorders.
6. Eating behavior - often, in order to protect against anxiety, a person overeats or, conversely, is malnourished. This is due to the distortion of the image of the real "I" of a person.

​​​Anxiety is a blockage that prevents a person from living a free and vibrant life. Psychologists note a direct link between increased anxiety and the formation of new fears. A person is a hostage of a vicious circle — anxiety and experiences, and in the case of a poker player, you can find yourself in a deep tilt. Alexey Exan13, a tournament poker coach, tells more about the state of the tilt in a series of psychological videos "7 reasons for your failures". There are several factors that affect a person for anxiety to occur. You can already read and track what you need to work on. Biological conditions: features of the nervous system, high sensitivity.

Social factors

1. Difficult childhood - difficulties in communicating with parents, the absence of parents or one of them, upbringing in adverse conditions.
2. The basic lack of security is a constant change of conditions, a lack of constancy.
3. A high level of expectations - from others since childhood.
4. Hard boundaries in communication - closed communication with others — communication only with a certain circle without going beyond it.
5. Poor health - persistent illnesses, colds, etc.

​​​​All these factors form a stable basis for the formation of anxiety, so you need to work with them. 

We share a list of books that will help identify signs of anxiety and provide tools to combat it:

​​​​​​Reading these books on your own will give you a deeper understanding of your anxiety. However, for a more thorough study and reduction of the issue, it is better to contact the professional psychologist of the MTT of the Exan13 School Sofia Okhrimenko.