Please share your thoughts about motivation and anxiety in the game of Go, related to playing online or any other aspect, and solutions you have created to help.

Some thoughts:

Playing online, specifically online, is the quickest way to improve. You can't improve only by doing tsumego. It has to be a combination. It's like football training: you have to have your "skin in the game" (I hate that BS business lingo... but it's not wrong). You have to risk spraining your ankle if you want to win your next match.

For several months, I have not felt like playing online. After self-diagnosing this feeling, it draws parallels with anxiety disorder. The anxiety of making a mistake. The anxiety of wasting other people's time or annoying others. The anxiety of not improving, or de-ranking, or disappointing oneself with a bad performance. That feeling of detachment: I'm playing the most stimulating game in the world with someone who I can't see, who I don't know, who I will never speak to again. Many bad feelings. Procrastination takes over. Oh, I must tidy my room instead of playing Go. I must read the newspaper first. I must have lunch. I must play a computer game instead. I must do tsumego problems and study professional games instead of playing. I must post on a Go forum.

Actually I love playing in real life tournaments and at the Go club. So, it's specifically the lack of motivation due to anxiety about playing online. I struggle with this tug of war: the desire to get better, the lack of desire to adapt myself. The outright jealousy of hearing people say: "I played for 10 hours yesterday, it was great". "I've ranked up to 2000 on Go Quest". "I played my 1000th online game today".

Actually, I don't have any solutions to these issues so I'm posting here to ask how you, I don't know, became braver, bullish, stoic, motivated. Or maybe: how you trained yourself to train yourself.

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12k: 2015.08.11; 11k: 2015.09.13; 10k: 2015.09.27; 9k: 2015.10.10; 8k: 2015.11.08; 7k: 2016.07.10 6k: 2016.07.24 5k: 2018.05.14 4k: 2018.09.03 3k: who knows?

Habits are powerful. Decide up front, when you’re not feeling anxious, what your playing schedule will be. Setting the bar low and not being too ambitious may help for a more realistically achievable plan.

Then do it. Don’t tell yourself you “should” stick to your schedule. Tell yourself that you “must”.

Later on in the week, you’ll probably be anxious and not want to play. Doesn’t matter. You’ve decided your plan already, so do it.

It’s really hard to follow this advice - I don’t always follow it, myself. But if you can, the power of doing a habit regularly will accumulate over time, and will change you.

Good luck.

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be immersed

Easy: I don't play online.

Easy: I teach beginners and I enjoy watching them progress from taking 13 stones to giving me 2 or more.

Easy: Go is recreational and social for me. If it gets uncomfortable, I'm out.

I avoid playing against 5k-1d because their go is incomprehensible to me. That used to really piss me off. I matured and this character flaw of mine does not bother me any longer. I appreciate the skills and knowledge they have acquired and I enjoy watching them play each other but playing go with them is a waste of time for both of us. They cannot teach me anything because they do not have the patience or ability to dumb their go down to my level. That's okay, I possess highly advanced, professional-grade skills in other areas of life and career they can never aspire to achieve.

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David Bogie, Boise ID
I play go, I ride a recumbent, of course I use Macintosh.

That's funny, because I keep seeing your signature and subconsciously thinking that you're one dan!

Curious why there is an upper limit. So 5k-1d is incomprehensible, and 2d-whatever makes more sense? Or did you mean that, depending on the player, starting from somewhere around 5k, and certainly by 1d rank, you are no longer able to appreciate their motives?

Can't help the feeling that something is wrong here. Why force yourself into something you don't enjoy?

I don't see why you think you have a problem. You have opportunities to play on a real board, so you don't really need to play online. According to your profile, you are 5k EGF, which is the median level of competitors in Europe, i.e. you are already stronger than 50% of the active go players. That's already satisfying. Whatever your level, you will always find stronger players, or players who improve faster. And there is no reason to be jealous of people who play 10h online in one day, this sounds more like a lign of addiction than anything else.

But if you really want to play more online without anxiety, one of the following may work:

• Play online against people you know personally, so that you can chat with them before and after the game.
• Search for games with long time settings, or even correspondence games, so that you make fewer blunders.
• Play unrated games
• Have accounts on many different servers. Sometimes, a server on which you haven't played for a long time may cause less anxiety.

In my experience that kind of anxiety comes from thinking you ought to be better than you can actually play (on average). Exactly because you spend so much time on tsumego, professional games, maybe theory books and most useless: watching videos of other people playing/explaining stuff. So you forgo the reality check and get a completely wrong picture of your abilities. Which then - when you do play online - disappoint you profoundly and even - in your mind - devalue you as a go-player in the eyes of everyone knowing your handle. (Which is utter nonsense of course: When was the last time you checked someone's rank and linked it to his value as a go-player/human being?)

As with a lot of other things (most prominent chess): Go is a skill honed by playing.

My solution: Just press that one button and use the automatch-feature

That's the only obstacle you have to pass and the more you do, the easier it gets because each game will give honest feedback on your actual playing strength.

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

That's good advice Kirby. There are many times when I start the computer with the intention of playing Go and instead go on Reddit or start watching Twitch. So, a stronger intention, this is what I will do, arranged regularly and beforehand, is a nice idea.



Bogiesan: I agree that those who try to improve should be careful that they retain the love for the game, so that it is still enjoyable, instead of painful. But, we have to have moments of pain if we want to improve, whether it is the pain of effort, the pain of sacrificing our time, the pain of spending money on lessons... No pain no gain, as they say. Should we view it as a "labour of love"?



Because I want to get better. I want to understand all I can about this game. The enlightenment of greater understanding. That has to involve a journey to improve, and on that journey, we are bound to have moments or aspects that we don't enjoy. But, we still want to reach the destination.



To jlt: that's a good one, a nice way to get over some aspects of anxiety is to not have your eggs in one basket. It also helps reinforce the idea that whatever your actual level, your rank will be different depending on how strong the servers are. We shouldn't be obsessed with rank.



Actually this makes a lot of sense. Why didn't I see that tactic? Why did I lose the thread of the game? Why did I not know where to play? Why did I not have a plan? Why did I miscount? Why did I attack the group when there wasn't a lot of profit? And so on.

So, if we are being honest with ourselves, there should be this mental disassociation between our online rank and the amount of "stuff" we think we know or should know. "My rank isn't correlated to the amount of books on my shelf nor to the number of Go-related YouTube channels I subscribe to. It may be correlated to the amount of games I've played". That's pretty good.

_________________
12k: 2015.08.11; 11k: 2015.09.13; 10k: 2015.09.27; 9k: 2015.10.10; 8k: 2015.11.08; 7k: 2016.07.10 6k: 2016.07.24 5k: 2018.05.14 4k: 2018.09.03 3k: who knows?

It's somewhat philosophical, and I don't think there's a single way to live life. My point is just that, in order to reap the cumulative benefits of a habit, it must be done consistently. A good example is physical exercise like running or lifting weights. The problem is, human feelings are fickle. Sometimes you are really in the mood to do something, and sometimes you're not. So if you have a goal, it's unlikely that you're gonna feel like practicing it every day - so it'll be hard to get the benefits of the habit.

But to your point, you might ask yourself why to do something that you're not enjoying. And that's a very good question to ask yourself. It's important to think deeply about whether it's worth it to pursue a particular habit, because it can have both costs and benefits to your life.

Things like physical exercise are somewhat universal - it's probably in most people's interest to get into some sort of exercise habit if only for the sake of feeling more healthy. But when it comes down to hobbies, work, and other pursuits, identifying what you want to spend your time on is something worth thinking about carefully.

To be honest, I have a hard time with this, myself.

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be immersed

The common pattern "substitute pleasure with discipline" comes from the belief that there is either pleasure which ruins you in the long run, or discipline which benefits you in the long run. I don't know if this is a Christian thing or universal. Often overlooked are those activities which are both pleasurable and beneficial. We should find and maximize those. Likewise, find painful activities which ruin your life too, and get rid of those if possible.

If you believe Go is good for you in the long run, because it stimulates the brain, is giving you a social life ... or for whatever reason, you may want to discipline yourself into it. But since we're not professionals, we have the luxury of doing those things that we enjoy about Go.

...

But SoDeSuNe hits it on the head. Anxiety mostly comes from an inflated image about one's own abilities, or from knowing deep down that you are not as good as you think/wish you were, and fearing to expose that, not so much to the rest of the world (they don't care) but to yourself. It's more comfortable to hold up the belief that you are essentially a (fill in rank) if you resist playing.

It's not easy to cure that. It's easy to say "set low expectations" but the mind doesn't let itself dictate too easily. The easier thing to fix is your performance. For that you need to stop thinking that you deserve a win because you're so smart and actually focus on those things that help you win: https://senseis.xmp.net/?DieterVerhofst ... mesmanship

It’s not necessarily “substitute pleasure for discipline”. It’s more like “have discipline to get more pleasure”.

There are different types of pleasure. Coming back to the example of physical exercise, it’s quite common for me to not be in the mood to get started. But having gotten started, I enjoy myself and feel better overall.

In go, too, sometimes I’m not in the mood to do go problems, for example. But when I get into the flow of doing it, it’s quite pleasurable. If I only follow the pleasures of my whims, I’d miss out on a lot of these positive experiences.

Having discipline to get started can often lead to a pleasurable experience.

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be immersed

Online go anxiety is a thing. We have had discussions about it in the past. Currently there are two active topics that are related:

Physical fitness for better Go? ( https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17203 )

How to improve? Useful ideas by Alexandr Dinershteyn ( https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17242 )

In the first one SoDesuNe links to an ESPN article by Aishwarya Kumar about the physiological effects of high level chess competition and the physical training of current top pros. ( https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27 ... =417198403 ) In reference to excessive weight loss by top chess players in tournaments, Kumar has this to say:

Kumar does not say much about destressing and handling anxiety. She does mention in passing Magnus Carlsen's yoga practice and Fabiano Caruana's jogging, without going into their destressing qualities. I was a bit surprised by that, because how to handle stress and anxiety has a long history, in general and in sports, as well. Some decades ago the Austrian Olympics ski team used to practice autogenics, for instance. Professional musicians have also embraced stress control and relaxation. I once attended a concert of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under Pinchas Zukerman, where it looked like some of the violinists were so relaxed they might slide out of their chairs onto the floor.

BTW, Kumar does mention the bad habit of chess players leaning forward oven the board, which puts strain on the muscles of the neck and shoulders that support the head. That happens with face to face go, as well.



It's definitely true that you need both study and play to optimize your advancement. In my own experience, my advancement in my first year of play, up to around current AGA 3 kyu, I think, came almost entirely through play, with some review. This was before online go. I played between 5 and 10 games per week, at about one hour per game. Depending on your circumstances, you might need to play online to get that much play, but I don't see much value in online play, per se. I agree pretty much with Dinershteyn in his article:



Really? To those who say, no pain, no gain, my reply is this: No pain, no pain. Sprains and pains come from pushing and exceeding your limits, from increasing the level of stress, not decreasing it. Feel the burn? Physiologically, it is true that to build muscle you have to damage it slightly, so that the body is later mobilized to repair it during later sleep or rest. The brain does not work that way. And what is the point of stressing the body to improve the mind? IMHO, it is good to get into the zone of competence, which combines a certain level of physiological arousal with relaxation. Effortless effort is an art that can be acquired.



To address the last first: 10 hours of online go in one day? That's fine for those who enjoy it, but if your goal is improvement, I would recommend not more than 3 hours of play, with equal time for review. 1,000 online game? At what time limits? Unless the player is already quite strong, that is thousands of plays and read aheads that reinforce bad habits. Repetition of thoughts and actions reinforce them. That's how the brain works.

Your self diagnosis is good, but what you say is not very concrete. You mention bad feelings and avoidance, doing something else instead of playing go online. One well established method of reducing anxiety is called systematic desensitization. You can look that up, if you wish. Not to go into any details, the basic idea is that as you approach what causes anxiety, your anxiety arises and begins to grow. At some point your anxiety is still manageable, and you are able to reduce it and relax. You can imagine yourself in that circumstance, vividly enough to evoke some anxiety, which you then reduce. As you practice this anxiety reduction, you will find yourself getting less and less anxious when you first imagine it. When you no longer get anxious at that point, you can move closer to what causes anxiety, and repeat the process. In a related method you can also go through the actual steps, rather than relying upon your imagination. For instance, if you find bad feelings arise when you are at a go server's web site, but have not logged in, you can practice going to the web site and reducing anxiety at that point. When you feel comfortable at that point, you can try logging in. These methods are tried and true. You can find one of them, or some variant, that works for you. IMX, I have also found relaxation practice helpful, such as the savasana of hatha yoga. autogenics. and self-hypnosis. Good luck!

Edit: I have said that these methods are tried and true. That does not necessarily mean that you can do it yourself. There are therapists who help other people with this for a living. It may take some skill to come up with an effective desensitization schedule, for instance. IMX, I once had to start stress reduction before any anxious feelings arose, at the very first sign of aversion. OTOH, a lot of people can treat themselves effectively, just as they take care of minor physical ailments at home.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Thanks Bill, very interesting!



Haha, that mental image is pretty funny.

Actually, I used to play trumpet, piano and classical guitar. I was in some concerts at school, nearly 20 years ago, and I had to do some solo pieces in front of 100 or so parents. Then there was a concert at a big manor house where I played some classical guitar studies. And music exams, grade 5 piano, 6 and 7 for the others. Never did decide to sit the grade 8 exams though. It's been years since I've played.

While we're on the subject of desensitisation and anxiety management, I wonder what you thought of this recent article to do with so-called "anxiety reappraisal":

https://pha.berkeley.edu/2018/12/01/get ... r-anxiety/

The basic premise is: instead of saying to ourselves "I'm relaxed" or "I'm not anxious", which is effectively telling ourselves a lie and trying to "reverse" a cognitive process, we leverage the idea that anxiety activates many of the same chemicals and physical and mental responses as excitement. So we tell ourselves "I'm excited", changing a bad-feeling, high-energy state into a good-feeling, high-energy state.

I wonder if techniques to cope with this can be applied to different situations. If I go back to music, I would be very happy to be relaxed as if I were falling off my chair when about to start a concerto. But playing Go? I think I read better and more accurately and have better instincts when my heart rate is 130bpm, my forehead is shiny and I'm biting my lip over the board.

_________________
12k: 2015.08.11; 11k: 2015.09.13; 10k: 2015.09.27; 9k: 2015.10.10; 8k: 2015.11.08; 7k: 2016.07.10 6k: 2016.07.24 5k: 2018.05.14 4k: 2018.09.03 3k: who knows?

Yes. Fortunately, I had been reading a few weeks before about musicians adopting relaxation techniques. So I was not too surprised by the sight. It still seemed like a bit much, however.



One of my high school English teachers had at one point in her life been an assistant director on Broadway. She told her students, in drama, speech, and English, two things about stage fright and performance anxiety. One, that you need a certain level of anxiety to perform well, and two, to reframe it as excitement. (This was before people were talking about reframing, so she described it differently. She did talk about roller coasters, as I recall. People seek out a certain level of fear and call it thrilling. )

Edit: When I was in Santa Fe I played clarinet with a pure improv trio, cello, clarinet, and keyboard. Our first concert was before a fairly small audience. Our cellist, Suellen, started one piece with a beautiful solo, the keyboardist, Kirk, and I joined in, I with a two note monotone. Then both of them dropped out, and there I was with my two notes. Uh-oh! Forget pre-performance anxiety. How about in performance terror! Fortunately I remembered Leonard Bernstein talking about how Brahms made music out of nothing, and I decided to play the fear. After the concert a friend in the audience came up and said that my solo had blown him away.

Sometime later Kirk and I were in a local music store looking for a new tape recorder. They kept a lot of recorders in a separate room, which was empty of people at the time. The salesman told us that we could try the recorders out with our tape. We played that piece, and when it came to my primal scream, he came running into the room. What was that? he exclaimed. Music, I replied.



Well, everybody is different. Maybe you don't get excited enough about online go.

As we know, hypnotic induction is normally done with suggestions of relaxation or sleepiness. But that is not necessary. You can hypnotize someone in an excited state quite rapidly if you have their attention. And yes, in an adrenaline rush you can concentrate quite well. But, as I said, why damage your body to improve your mind? Find your zone of competence, I say. IMX, in that state time seems to slow down a bit, and things flow.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Interesting. In my other life as a musician, I've also been doing this for decades, and teaching it to others. I had no idea it was backed up by any research, it just seemed like common sense. You can't stop the physiological reactions, but you can use them to your advantage instead of fearing them.

Same here: whether playing a table tennis match, or performing music on stage, or professionally speaking for a large audience, whenever I felt the anxiety, I learnt to think "Good! I feel this because I want to do well". To be fair, those times I didn't feel it, because I was super comfortable, I probably did even better.