New to the Forum and looking for Some Advice on my Situation

[anthonyG]

First off I would like to introduce myself.  :action-smiley-065:My name is Anthony and I am 28 and I am  single  and hail from the New York   area.

I lead a pretty stress free life for the most part  and what I do for work is play Online Poker professionally.  Now when people ask me what i do for a living and  and I tell them I am a professional poker player most do not get it. Most  think about poker in  in a different  manner  than me or fellow professional players do. Most think of poker as a game of luck but believe when I tell you over the sample of hundreds of thousands or millions of hands  there is a lot of skill and math that is involved where one can make a very nice living doing what I do. I would compare it to the stock market only you control your own destiny so to speak over a large sample size of hands played and in the end skill will win and not luck.

Now enough about me and what I do, here is my problem which pertains to my job as a poker player. I play usually 8 hrs per day 5 or 6 days a week. The action is very fast on the tables and sometimes  I will go weeks and months without losing any money. You are expected to have downswings in poker and I realize that  is part of the game but as long as you have more ups than downs you will come out ahead in the end.

But like last night I was playing a guy 1 on 1  who was a very bad player and I got up about $1000 dollars on him in about an hour of play. After that  he bought in for some more money  over a 3 hr period he won about $800 of that back. Now that is expected to happen sometimes even vs. a bad player like this  but  eventually I had to  quit him and end my session for the night because of the stress /anxiety symptoms that  were happing the last hour of my match which I will post below.

Also  the anxiety symptoms had nothing to do with  losing money. I  can win and lose thousands every day and I am fine with that. It was the nature of losing every hand for 3 hrs to a very bad player when I made all the right decisions and he made all the wrong decisions and got very lucky to win.

here are the symptoms for whatever this is. I don't know if this is anxiety/migraines/ panic attacks or whatever

1. started with light tingling in my left  arm/  eventually when I quit the match  I had a lot of tingling in my left arm

2. I developed a massive headache, mostly on left side

3.  I think my breathing slowed down a bit too and was off

That was last night. Today I have a little minor tingling in my arm and it is starting to go away. My breathing is normal and I have a bit of a headache but maybe about  10 percent of where it was last night


I have  had symtoms like this before when I used to work as  in construction and I was in charge and the job wouldn't get done on time because it was my job on the line every time.


My plan to cope with is is to not play longer than an hr or 2 at a time   vs 1 player because I don't want to  my brain to trigger  my body to react this way anymore.  This has happened 3 times and all 3 times were when I played long matches(3+ hrs) and lose to  a less experienced worse player.

Some people told me that xanax would help this but I am not big fan of taking drugs . Just looking for some potential opinions or thought on my situation

[Warbirdwf]

Did you have any issues with your eyes when your arm/hands started tingling? It almost sounded like a migrain more than anxiety.

[anthonyG]

Nah nothing with my eyes. I have talked to a lot of guys in my field who go through this type of thing and they say the best thing to do is just not play as long and I will have this happen much less. 

But when one suffers from a migraine is it normal to have your arm/hand tingle like that up and down?

[Warbirdwf]

Yes, when I get a migrain, I typically know this because I'd get tingling or even have my arm/hand or leg start to go numb. I then get what they call an aura.. You get kind of tunnel vision and lose a portion of your sight. There's arteries that constrict and this causes the lose of some of your vision. It then opens suddenly, and you get the headache and your vision clears.

[anthonyG]

Ok   thanks for the response.

Now this has happened to me 3 or 4 times and  it concerns me a little because  I know why it is happening (pretty sure it is the stress in the heat of the moment), and the longer I stay in that stressfull situation the worse it gets for me.

The first time it happened I thought I was having a stroke or a heart attack which I believe is not the case as I believe I was just thinking the worst  in the heat of the moment. But nonetheless, something like this can't be too healthy.   Outside of not putting myself in that situation again, what do you believe is the best way to deal with something like this? Any type of  remedies  to help  this and get you back to feeling somewhat "normal " again or is it just best to wait it out ?