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Thank you all for your participation guys!
MadMojoMonkey thank you for sharing your experiences, albeit distressing ones.I think your story is a prime example of someone doing the "wrong thing" (quitting because of your anxiety) and yet ending up in a much better place. It's really good to hear that it worked out for you.
In a vacuum, what Savy mentioned is probably true most of the time. Especially when it comes to anxiety, it's usually not optimal to modify our behavior so as to avoid facing a situation that causes fear or discomfort (given that the situation is generally benign, and not actually threatening). It is actually quite common for people to use avoidance as a means of coping with anxiety provoking situations. What happens is that by getting away of the supposedly threatening situation, anxiety levels drop, making us feel better right away. This way we slowly learn that avoiding this specific is a good thing, and so we keep doing that over and over until it gets deeply engrained in our behavior. The problem is that especially during tough and stressfull timesduring one's life, like the ones MMM described, anxiety knows no limits, and there may always be new things that appear threatening in our mind. And since we have learnt to deal with them simply by avoiding them, what we end up doing is building a whole range of situations that we avoid, thus limiting our own lives due to fears that are, to a large extent, irrational.
 Originally Posted by oskar
How did you get over it?
I don't recall having a lot of poker related anxiety, but it got really bad when I was super tryhard in Starcraft. What worked for me was not focusing on winning as much and make goals for myself like working on a specific part of my game. That way I went in not expecting to win but simply to improve. That and having a pre-game routine that involved some non-ladder practice that required very little willpower to get into and that made it easier to transition into ladder games.
That's a great example of optimal goal setting. I find it quite common for poker players to set goals like "i wanna win X amount of money or bb/100 this month". A goal that's poorly stated mainly because winning involves variables that we can't really control, thus leaving open the possibility that we do our best, play our best, put in the hands, and yet fail to meet the goal and end up dissapointed. Whereas goals such as "i'm gonna play X amount of hands", "i'm going to quit when i'm not on my A game", "i'm gonna spend X amount of time reviewing hands" etc are more manageable to fulfil and are generally related to winning, without that being the focal point per se.
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