My Mental Game During COVID
I’ll start with a simple disclaimer. If you’re looking for poker content or a data analysis today, you might want to skip over this post. Instead of diving into numbers like I normally do, I hope to reflect a bit more and talk about mental health — specifically my own over the past few months. I’ll get back to data-focused posting next time.
It has been a few weeks since I‘ve posted anything. That’s partly because I was on vacation visiting family. When I came back, I had a busy couple weeks trying to catch up at work. Additionally, my family and I are moving to Michigan and have been preparing to put my house on the market. So I haven’t had much free time these days. But that’s ultimately just an excuse. The reality as to why I haven’t posted much is that I’ve been struggling with depression.
I’m definitely not comparing my challenges to those that many others have had as it relates to the ongoing pandemic. I realize that I’m pretty fortunate, all things considered. My family and I are healthy. We have secure jobs that let us work from home safely. So things could certainly be a lot worse right now, but I have had mental struggles throughout this timeframe that has affected my life and attitude towards things.
I was not caught off-guard by the length of this pandemic’s effect on society. I’m not an epidemiologist, but I can read and interpret data well. By the beginning of March, it was easy to see the exponential growth in the spread of the virus. By the time the country started shutting down, I was already mentally preparing for a longer grind where a lot of life might be changing for a while.
My first instinct to combat the inevitable depression from being stuck at home for en extended period of time was to increase my motivation. I thought that if I could implement a structure to keep busy with projects, I’d stay productive and keep my spirits up. I quickly realized that not only would I have much less free time, but my days would also become increasingly complicated.
I haven’t shared much about my non-poker career on the site — only that I manage a business analytics team for a Fortune 500 company. My team’s job is to use first- and third-party data to answer the questions of our organization’s leaders. The work is interesting, I have smart and talented colleagues, and I’m treated incredibly well. I‘m given the autonomy to run my team how I see fit to best support the organization. I also had the flexibility to work remotely whenever I wanted long before the pandemic. Overall, I couldn’t ask for anything more out of my professional situation.
Shifting to a remote working environment wouldn’t be hard under normal circumstances. But everything became incredibly difficult when we had to take our 4 and 2 year old daughters out of day-care in March. My wife also has a full-time job, so all of a sudden, we had this big monkey wrench thrown into our days. We had to somehow continue staying productive in our day jobs while educating and entertaining our kids. This basically meant trading parenting duties back-and-forth while the other was usually in the basement office on Zoom meetings and working.
I think that we’ve done as well as possible given the circumstances, but there’s just not enough time in the day to get all of our work done during the daytime hours. My kids get up at 7:30 am. From then until the time we put them to bed at 8:30 pm, I’m mostly either working or doing things with my family. There’s very little time for anything else.
As it turned out, there were some other things I did during the daytime prior to the pandemic that have been severely impacted since March:
I no longer have a commute to work. This is a good thing on the surface. After all, I now have an extra hour free. However, losing my commute actually turned out to be a net negative. That 20-30 minute drive to-and-from work was a therapeutic hour every day I spent alone with my own thoughts. I listened to podcasts and did my best thinking during that time. Finding a time to replace that has been challenging.
I no longer go to the gym. Every morning, I went to the gym to lift weights for an hour before work. Most of my workouts utilized racks and revolved around barbells. I’ve tried to replace them at home with dumbbells and bodyweight exercises in the basement. I’ve also incorporated running, biking, and a mix of other things to maintain a variety and stay active. But I often end up with work or family conflicts that cause me to squeeze in abridged workouts or miss them entirely. I also miss lifting heavy stuff.
I no longer have down-time during the days. My job tends to be cyclical with the amount of work I have during any given week. Some are packed with meetings and deliverables, while others are somewhat lighter. When the lighter weeks occur, I used to have extra non-work time while my wife was still working and the kids were at day care. I used the majority of this time for my non-solver poker study. This included watching training videos, reading books, discussing concepts on forums, working in Excel, among other things. This free time has been non-existent during the pandemic timeframe. Lighter weeks these days just means that I don’t have to pick up my work computer after the kids go to bed.
Working after my kids go to bed happens often. To try to stay as caught up as possible at my job, my wife and I generally finish both of our respective work for the day after 9 pm. Everything else, including the items above, playing poker, advancing my research, catching up with friends via Zoom, or relaxing and spending time with my wife are also jammed into that timeframe — and they’re all competing for a few hours before bed.
All of this has been tough to balance. I tried my best to keep up during the first couple months, but I have continued to fall into these mental ruts from time-to-time where I am filled with constant anxiety and a lack of motivation.
I just got myself out of one that lasted about 10 days — the longest one I’ve experienced thus far. When describing it to a friend over a Zoom call, he knew exactly what I was talking about. “Oh, you just went through the hell zone,” he replied. I hadn’t heard that term before, but the name is 100% accurate. When in that mindset, I have this overwhelming feeling of worthlessness. My energy levels are super low, and I feel depressed all the time. I’ve slipped into this “hell zone” several times over the past few months. I’ve noticed that each subsequent one has lasted longer and has been harder to drag myself out than the prior one.
After turning the corner this most recent time, I realized that I need to put more focus on my own mental health to keep myself from slipping backwards again. I’m not quite sure exactly how to do that, but I do know that putting a ton of pressure on myself to max out productivity isn’t helping. While that’s how I’ve always lived my life, these aren’t normal circumstances and I shouldn’t expect to be able to do all the same things.
I know that I can’t create more time during the day. I am struggling enough as it is to keep up at my day job, which is what pays the bills at home. I also obviously can’t (and wouldn’t want to!) cut down on the time I am spending with my wife and kids. When looking back on the things that I’m miss the most, it’s the alone-time. As an introvert, I need that time to replenish energy levels. Creating more of that time for myself must be a priority if I’m going to stay healthy and focused.
As a result, I plan to cut down on my new posts on this site for the short-term future. My original goal way back in January was to post here 3-4 times per month. While I’d love to do that and will try to do so again in the future, I don’t think that’s very feasible at the moment. Going forward, I think a more realistic goal for me is to aim for 1-2 posts per month. I believe that this will result in less rushed, more thoughtful content. And at the end of the day, I would much prefer to focus on quality over quantity anyways.
I have plenty of ideas for posts. I keep an ongoing list that of topics that I could spend the next year writing about. I have thought about a deep dive on 3-bet formations for a while now that I’d like to dive into shortly. I’m also starting to think through building a mass solve to analyze turn situations. Finally, I plan to continue to develop video content on my YouTube channel. It all just may not come out as quickly as I would like it to.
If you have any thoughts or experiences of your own, leave a comment below. You can also contact me here or reach me on social media using the icons above. Thanks for reading.
-Lukich