Every day you put your money at risk. Your goals and aspirations are on the line. Preparation needs to be sharp. Adaptation and continual improvement are required.
The drumbeat of variance is constant–you can make the right decision and still lose. Perfect execution gets punished, again and again and again, straining even the strongest mind and breaking weaker minds with more obvious issues with fear, anger, confidence and discipline.
The cumulative stress and intensity of trading and playing poker is far more taxing than the usual 9 to 5 job, so why don’t you treat recovery that way?
As we head towards the summer months in the northern hemisphere, it’s a good time to think about how to manage this intensity because mental fatigue is often harder to spot than physical exhaustion.
It shows up subtly: slightly slower reactions, a bit more second-guessing, a reduced ability to stick to your plan, shortcutting your decision-making, being more easily distracted, or allowing fake intuition to deceive you.
In trading and poker, those small degradations compound quickly, eroding performance while evading detection. What feels like a minor dip in focus can quickly snowball if the game changes, or losses quickly mount.
Further compounding the risk is the fact that denial and lack of awareness can block you from being honest about a drop in performance.
Exhaustion is further taxing.
Your mind uses cortisol and adrenaline to compensate, but they’re finite resources that should only be used sparingly. Instead, they’re often relied on daily–especially as time away from trading and playing often feels like you are shirking what needs to be done.
But if you don’t rest, you risk mental and emotional issues coming out, and further diminishing performance. When your mind is weakened by fatigue, you struggle to defend against FOMO, revenge trading, and overconfidence. This is why your C-game is more likely to show up when you’re tired or burned out.
Fatigue makes you weaker, triggering larger emotional reactions that you’re less capable of defending against–you make mistakes, have bigger losses, and the chaos can quickly snowball session over session, day over day.
This topic is especially important for those competing in the World Series of Poker (WSOP) now, because without optimizing recovery you may be unknowingly setting the stage for a bloodbath.
Recovering + Expanding Capacity
Professional athletes these days are often criticized for taking too much time off for recovery. I’m not suggesting that you take excessive time away and become too soft on yourself. Your success depends on capitalizing on available opportunities as much as you’re physically, mentally, and emotionally able to.
But you can’t ignore your limits–that’s too costly–but understanding and embracing your limits allows you to get paid to rest.
If it helps, think of this as a form of risk management. The goal isn’t immunity from the strain. It’s to steadily acclimate to it and expand your capacity, like building physical muscle or endurance. To do that well requires a strategy to keep the stress/pressure from overwhelming you. When you do, the intensity that once felt like a burden becomes an asset–fuel to reach your highest level.
You can be spontaneous based on how your day or session is going, taking breaks and preserving mental capital when the market is not providing any opportunities or you’re card-dead. Or, you can have a more structured approach that is tailored to your current capacity and the timing of when you trade or play poker.
Stepping away before you feel exhausted keeps your mind sharp, avoids self-inflicted setbacks, and makes recovery far easier. Create clear stopping points based on time, number of trades or hands, even emotional state.
Just because you recognize the signs of fatigue doesn’t mean you need to take a break immediately. It tends to be the lack of awareness and denial that does you in.
If you are honest with yourself, aware of your diminishing energy, and actively trying to push yourself, you can keep going and prioritize recovery later. (When it’s time to recover, avoid screens, let your mind decompress by journaling your thoughts and emotions. That’s often the most avoided task, but has incredible benefits.)
A simple way to know when it’s time to step away is an increase in B-game or C-game mistakes. A couple of mistakes are fine, no one is perfect, but when they increase in frequency, it can be an indication that the mind is no longer capable of defending itself.
If you’re in the middle of a poker tournament, especially at the WSOP, you have to fight through and worry about recovery later.
When you have a choice, the benefits of rest are undeniable–that’s not weak to admit, it’s just good risk management.
If you’d like my blog delivered right to your inbox, click here to be added to the list.
