On Speedrunner's Mindset

I haven't started doing runs yet but I think about this sometimes. the goal is to have a memoryless mindset, where at every point in time, you're copying what you learnt in practice into that part of a real run, unaffected by past and future. obvs nobody can actually do that, which is where the entire mental game and challenge of execution comes in.

some things that could help are:
– ways of clearing your mind. from meditation to hiding distractions like splits
– making the task smaller and aiming for consistency – e.g. IW runs
– mindfulness. which the rest of this ramble turned out to be about...

every1's susceptible to having things go wrong and getting tunnel vision, trying to brute-force turn your fortunes around (= tilt). taking your mind out of the tunnel, you always find it more optimal to stop and do sth else, as soon as you feel you're no longer improving in a replicable, consistent way, and are instead doing attempts losing focus hoping for an instant payoff.

I sometimes get to points in life where nothing is going well and I get an existential depression, so the only way out is sleep. accepting the discomfort that you can't make yourself do better right now, so have to put it on hold feeling like you might never do better. but inevitably after a few more attempt days, you start to make breakthroughs or just better understand the plateau you've hit (which I'm sure you haven't at 1:30!).

having broken expectations of progress is the detrimental thing here, and it happens to everyone. at which point, pull yourself out of the tunnel by stopping, remember how you're enjoying the journey, and note that you can reset your strategy anytime.

just my take. I'm kinda bummed about the wall I hit in smash ultimate (on a week hiatus) and how I only just clocked how bad I am at binary trees even tho I was gonna start job interviews next week. gonna sleep it off rn :P

p.s. my writing about tunnel-vision is largely inspired about how I blew 6h straight playing 2048 the other week (aiming for 8192) bc I had early success, but then lost my focus completely and kept spamming bad attempts. what a waste of time!