Cant sleep...

I’m lying in bed pretty comfortable, I am warm, I have electricity, heating, access to the internet, a new iPhone, a TV and a laptop. I’m really lucky. Im grateful for the access I have to all of these modern comforts as, If used correctly they hold the ability to aid me in my journey to get better at poker and to improve my life. My parents are alive and fairly healthy, they have some terrible habits which I hate (smoking, drinking, lack of proper exercises) although at the minute everything is fine. We are all pretty comfortable financially compared to the majority. Yet here I am struggling to sleep. I wonder why. What’s on my subconscious mind that is keeping me from sleep when all my conscious mind is telling me is to go to sleep? I’ve exercised, ate pretty well, studied, played a fair bit of poker albeit poorly and meditated yet I’m still struggling to sleep. Maybe its the poor performance at poker… I made a terrible mistake again. I know not to bluff people who can’t fold semi-decent hands, I know that the best way to exploit the majority of players I play against is to just extract as much value as possible when I have a good hand. It’s not by bluffing people who do not know how to fold. Yet here I am, having done it again. Maybe its the fact that I haven’t done this for a while? Wrote things down and journaled my feelings that is. When I first started I wrote down all my mistakes, I posted them on my instagram and I discussed them with friends. Over the last few months I’ve done this at a far lesser rate. I’ve really shy’d away from posting on my socials lately. I get the feeling when other people see me posting they automatically feel like I am showing off somehow, or I am posting for a bit of attention. Which I am a little I suppose but mainly I feel like I do it to be held accountable. If I post on my story one day about a mistake and then a few days later I’m doing another post saying about how I’ve made the same mistake then I’m going to feel a new level of stupid. Even if people aren’t assed, even if they’re too busy with what’s going on in their own heads what’s going on in mine is a feeling of “Oh I can’t make that mistake again because 250+ people might know how much of a fucking idiot I can be”. From that I get motivation to not make that mistake again and continue to get better. Same goes for when I post about my wins/loses, I don’t want to continually be posting about losing so it gives me more motivation to get better so I can get back to posting about winning. It’s all about a feeling of accountability. Don’t get me wrong between my family and friends there is a certain level of accountability to be gained but putting it out there publicly to an open account where anybody can see is a different level of me being held accountable I believe.

Reading this back just makes me think that I’m being a bitch, I’m worried about my parents and how they live their lives and I’m not happy with how I’ve been progressing at poker. I’m also my biggest critic and worst enemy rolled into one. I’m fully aware of the fact that if I told myself this time last year how well I would have performed up until this point I would have never believed it was possible, yet here I am at 5am in the morning beating myself up about it all. My brain works in mysterious and annoying ways. I frustrate the shit out of myself.

The magic of writing out how I feel is already beginning to work, I know what I have to do. On the sleeping front no screens or vaping a hour before bed, read a book. On the parent front just help out more and maybe get them more engaged with positive lifestyle changes. On the poker front just get back to publicising my mistakes and errors so I hold myself more accountable thus less likely to make them in the future. Then on the being overly critical of myself side of things just keep doing the things which show how much I really care about myself, exercise more, read more, write more, speak more, keep things in perspective more. Stop judging myself against the person I want to be and just judge myself against the person I was yesterday and if I can just keep improving, even just 0.001% a day then I will get to where I want to be.