In dealing with tilt, in poker or in life, an option is: Do nothing. So much of success is just failing slower than other people. There’s no better way to fail quickly than to tilt, and so, when you’re tilting, you should try your best to quit all activity. If you’re playing in a poker game, quit. If it’s a tournament, fold. If you manage a hedge fund, go have a long lunch, drink some wine, and take a nap. When you’re on tilt, just quit making consequential decisions. You cannot make good decisions in a fast-moving present when you’re stuck in the past; when you’re on tilt, minimize the number and complexity of any decisions you need to make…
…During extreme tilt, the irritation is so severe that you are willing to gamble in the simple hope of changing your negative mental state. This, of course, hardly ever works out. It’s why I advise you to err in the direction of doing nothing, in poker and in life, when you’re in the tilt state.
Revert to a core of stable, value-enhancing activities. The deeper the tilt, the more certain you should be that any new activity is value-enhancing. Life tilt is often accompanied by a genuine uncertainty about whether you are making, in an overall sense, good decisions.
In the short term, you are in a negative emotional state. Things are going against you, causing you to make bad decisions. In addition to things going poorly in the short term, you are confused about the way your environment has changed, and this makes you uncertain about whether you are making good long-term decisions. Part of recovering from tilt is sitting back and untangling which of your bad results are caused by short-term factors and which are caused by long-term factors…
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