As human beings, we have good days and bad days. Why is that?
Every day that you spend playing a game, your experience increases — you get better at the game. You know more about the game today than you did yesterday. So unless something drastic is happening, you should be improving every single day. Then why do human beings have good and bad days?
It is about the state that we operate in. If we can get in the "zone" on a regular basis, then our performance will skyrocket. The game-changing fact is that it is possible to get in the zone voluntarily — it is not random.
Why do players go from a losing streak to a winning streak suddenly?? Did they suddenly get better at the game? No, the way that they showed up to play changed. The person that they are, remains the same.
Meditation is about structuring that flow state. The difference between good days and bad days can be reduced with practice. If we change our diet, sleep and learn how to meditate, it is possible.
When teams with millions of dollars per year of salary lose, they tear each other apart. They blame each other for the loss and point out the mistakes that each team member made.
However, the attitude in the winning team is completely different. They support each other and prevent each other from tilting. If you can train yourself to not tilt, imagine how good you would be.
A huge problem in esports is that it does not have a physical limitation. You cannot practice football for more than 6 hours a day but with esports athletes, that limitation does not exist.
Esports athletes tend to be young, and 18-20-year-olds are not cognitively prepared for this degree of stress. If you are in high school and you stream a game professionally, then you are probably the best of the best. But once you get a pro contract, you’re just average, or even below average among your peers. That is a huge psychological blow to get over.
When you take a bunch of people who think that they are exceptional and make them average, they become nasty. While it’s cool to be an e-sport athlete, it is very hard psychologically.
Job security is a huge issue in sports. Once you hit 22-23 years of age, and if you get kicked from your team, you don’t know what to do. There’s a lot of stress and uncertainty.
If a person becomes a pro player or a streamer, they find themselves under a lot of psychological weight. They start to become someone they are not. Before they went pro, they played the game because they loved playing it. But a year after going pro, they feel trapped and don’t find it easy to quit playing the game.
Similarly, streamers invest so much into becoming streamers that they feel they have to be the personality that they have built up. They think that if they start changing the content of their stream, their viewers will leave. They build an identity that they think they have to maintain. That identity becomes a cause for burnout since they cannot handle it.