Episode 75 - The Stories that create Anxiety
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[00:00:00] And welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I want to talk about the stories in our minds that create anxiety.

So I'm constantly fascinated by the power of our minds, and it can create a lot of good, but also quite some pain because, well, spoiler alert: our brain is working in a way that we make emotional decision and not everything is going on rationally. And so recently I wrote an article on how ratings are a good invention.

It's just our interpretation and interpretations usually are stories with ratings that are toxic. Today I wanna go a little bit [00:01:00] deeper and share my personal anecdotes of how I used to create stories in my head when playing chess, when having results that created anxiety and made me enjoy the whole chess journey less.

If you ever feel like rating anxiety or just general stress when playing chess or you have this feeling of sometimes feeling on top of the world when your chess is good and then feeling absolutely destroyed when you play a few bad games in a row, then this is definitely a podcast episode you shouldn't miss.

And as mentioned, there were these moments in my career where I felt invincible. Like I can remember this tournament I made eight out of nine points, so it was an open tournament. There were other grandmasters and I would start with seven out of seven. Now, these games weren't super clean, but it was seven out of seven.

That was very impressive, right through the last two rounds. And I made [00:02:00] eight out of nine scored like a performance of 2,750 rating points. And I would catch myself in this moment of like, oh, if I continue playing like this, how many rating points am I winning? Oh my God. Imagine just a full year of just

quote, unquote, just playing like this, right? It was an insanely good tournament, but in my mind, I already created that story of like, if this continues, then I'll be 2,700 in a year. Maybe not even in a year. And this is really, really tricky. Really, really dangerous. And sometimes my expectations would be so high that even if I went to a tournament and I would perform like 50 points higher or a hundred points higher than my current rating,

I would still be unhappy with my performance. And this wasn't about process, mindset or whatever. No. This was about feeling that I had, an expectation that was so high that even [00:03:00] scoring 50 points higher than my current rating, a hundred points higher than my current rating wasn't reaching that expectation.

That meant I was unhappy. Because there's an easy equation that you can remember, which is: happiness equals your results minus your expectations. And the problem is, when we have these sky high expectations because of these stories that we create. It's like, oh, we have a few games that are going well. Now we think that everything will always continue like that.

Good example is also a lot of people get into chess. They win a hundred points in a month. And then create the story. Oh, every month I'm going to win a hundred points now. So I'm setting a goal in 10 months, I wanna be a thousand points higher rated than now. Now, you probably know this is not going to work, but this is how these stories work.

This is how oh, one or two events, we create a straight line up and we think, oh, everything is going positively. We create these expectations and that means that [00:04:00] even if we win 50 points a month, which is a positive result, we think, ah, this is shit because I expected a hundred point. And that's very, very bad.

And then there is an opposite story, and I'm going to share a personal anecdote from my life right now from my content creation, especially on YouTube. I feel this lot because YouTube is very good at giving you the numbers and trying to make you addicted to getting this, you know, you get this score one out of 10.

Like out of the last 10 videos, how did your latest video compare? And if it's a one out of 10, it was the best video of these 10. If it's a 10 outta 10, it's quote unquote the worst in terms of views.

I really still have these moments when I upload two or three videos and they rank low on this out of 10 kind of scale, maybe eight after 10 or 10 out of 10. And immediately, instead of this continuously positive story that I'm creating, I'm creating a continuously [00:05:00] negative story. Again, you can just think drawing a line and because it's going down

from the last, or from the previous month or whatever, it will go down in eternity and it will go down to zero. And everything goes to shit. So, in my mind, when I'm telling myself, oh my God, you suck. Nobody wants to watch your videos. You need to turn, change something right now, or everything goes downhill.

We, we will be at zero soon. And this again, is just this kind of interpretation of events happening. It's not reality, but somehow it's so logical for us humans to create these stories. If we have a few good results, everything goes up. If we have a few bad results, everything goes down and on both ends, these are not positive stories and they create anxiety because they create either this kind of,

Insane expectations that we can get anxious because we're thinking, oh, how am I even going to win another a hundred points next month and another a hundred points next month? Or, it creates anxiety [00:06:00] because we feel like, oh yeah, I will never play a good game of chess again. I'm now going to lose every single game, every single hour I study was a waste of time, and so on and so forth.

This phenomena is not something I came up with or whatever, but it's actually backed by neuroscience. And the point is here that our minds are trying to help us navigate an extremely complex world. And so we try to connect dots. And to fill the gap between these dots, we create stories or to continue giving us a stability in a very, very complex world, we have this narrative that builds, and the fallacy is called the narrative fallacy.

And I've read about it the first time in the book, Thinking Fast and Slow by the late researcher Daniel Kahneman. If you haven't read that book yet, I highly, highly recommend it. It's super fascinating just to understand how our minds work, because that also helps you [00:07:00] for chess. So here's a quote from that book.

Narrative Fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple, are concrete rather than abstract. Assign a larger role to talent. Stupidity and intentions stand to luck and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.

Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. Talib suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true. That's Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow. So basically how I understand this is, as I mentioned already, is like.

Even if we just have two consecutive things, so two losses in a row, we put the dots together and we think, oh, ship is going down, [00:08:00] chess is going down. We will always just lose. Or if we win a few games in a row, we kind of don't think, oh, this was maybe a little bit strange that we won four games in a row, but we think, oh, that's the new normal.

And so a story creates, we will win all our games. How will our rating be if we continue winning like this and so on. And even if we consciously remind ourselves that this is not true, obviously, we will lose at some point. I see this time and time again, for example, in my community, the Simplified Chess Improvement System, if somebody has a very good streak, often they will write.

Obviously it will get to an end at some point, but still there's something, some expectation that is forming. Maybe it's like, okay, I'll lose a game, but then I'll continue winning. So there is still this new story in your head that is not really the reality.

And what turns out with these stories in both directions is that we just over adjust in both directions and very, very often, it sadly leads to emotional, [00:09:00] short-term focused decisions because we wanna stop the trend or we want to keep the trend going, but we are not thinking straight anymore. And this is a real problem in chess as well.

And this gets me back to one of my favorite hated topics, which is openings. I see way too many people change openings too quickly. Why does this happen? Hmm. Well, what could happen? You lose a few games in a row, or you have a few bad positions out of your opening and you're creating a narrative. This opening sucks.

This opening is not for me. Instead of, oh, maybe I just blundered twice in a row in the same opening, or, oh, I just have to learn this one thing about this opening. I might have to readjust this one line in this opening. We create a bigger narrative to help us navigate the world. And then boom, everything is bad.

You buy a new opening course, you study 50 hours of the Najdorf, and then you lose two games there again, and it's like, oh, the Najdorf is also not good. And then over and over, the same thing again. [00:10:00] And that's why if I get asked like, I wanna change openings, which one should I pick? My first response to that is always, are you really sure your current openings aren't working?

Is it based on actual facts? Like is it based on the last 20, 30, 40 games? Is it based on proper like data or is it just based on a story that you created because of two events that happened?

And as you might guess, in most of the cases, there is nothing wrong with the opening. Maybe there is a line that is not ideal. Recently, I just talked to a student and they would have problems in the French and specifically the French Advanced. And it is just like, okay, just study this French Advanced a little bit deeper.

You need to know two, three plans more, then you'll play it better. The French wasn't your problem. So it can just be that there is a smaller problem lying, but usually it's not this, oh, I need to change all my openings. Everything is going to be better because that's again, a story. If I get a better opening, [00:11:00] then I will only win games.

No, that's not true.

And just as a cautionary tale as well, if you are in a good moment of your chess improvement, if you win quite a few games in a row, or if you just started recently and you won a few hundred points, which is normal early on, that it's easier to progress. Don't just think that it will always be like that because you create these insane expectations that you cannot live up to, and this will be a lot of frustration.

And because there is no way to stop our minds or brains from creating these stories because I'm no magician, I wanna present three steps that you can take, that once these stories are created, you can counteract them and not buy a new opening course just because you lost two games. And step number one is awareness.

Just realize and remind yourself this is just a story. 'cause the problem is, our mind doesn't tell us like, oh, I just created this [00:12:00] story. No, this story feels as true as one plus one equals two. So if in this moment you feel like I have to change my openings, you feel this is a pure fact. So you need to be get better at getting the awareness of like, what is a story I created just because of two events?

And what is one plus one is two, right? What is a proper fact? So distinguish this, get the awareness. The second step is don't take decisions in the heat of the moment. What happens a lot is bad tournament or bad games, maybe even bad day. Creation of a story and overreacting doing something that's not good.

All happen immediately. Right. I've been a few times guests to the Chess Journeys podcast from Kevin. And with Kevin, we usually talk about his games and one running joke we have is, it's the Rook endgames because one time he would play a tournament and he was convinced that [00:13:00] Rook endgames were his big weakness because he just lost the Rook end game.

And I think he went on to buy two books at this tournament physically. And then started reading them. That's super overreacting. That was just one game. But then you have two books that you feel like having to read. So you just created 60, 70 hours of chess work for you just because of one bad game.

You don't wanna have that immediate decision. So usually it's good to cool down, maybe widen the scope a little bit. Look at the last 30 games and say, okay, is the rook endgames? Is the openings? Is this really a problem if it's going in the negative direction? And also just remind yourself like, this is not going to last forever.

That's very, very important. And for the good part, again, if you, everything is going great, we have the dangers of like, oh, it will anyway go great. So why should I do the tactics properly? Why should I really write down my solutions? Why should I focus fully on playing game? And we [00:14:00] can get a little bit cocky and we can not put in the right effort anymore, and we will pay for that at some point.

So just because it's going up doesn't mean that no matter what you're doing, it's always going up. We get careless. So remind yourself of this as well. And then put in the work properly. So step number two, don't decide in the moment. And then step number three is: have a proper plan. It really nearly always comes back to this.

Get a proper plan that you can trust. Focus on simplicity, and then always get back to that plan. No matter if it's going well, no matter if it's going badly, just say, I trust my plan. I'm going to execute the plan. I'm going to focus on the process. I'm going to focus on my input. And then it's likely that another phenomena that you might know, which is called a regression to the mean, is going to happen.

And the regression to the mean simply means that after a few exceptional events, [00:15:00] you are getting back to what is more normal. Or I can read you out a definition that I read and liked. Just quote regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon where unusually extreme results very high or very low, tend to be followed by results closer to the average because chance or luck plays a role in extreme outcomes, end of quote.

So after two amazing wins, or even five or 10 amazing wins, some losses will follow. That's okay. And after two losses, some wins will follow. And after a few bad days of training chess, some better days will follow. Don't overreact. Don't change everything just because something went badly. Stick the course.

Follow your plan. It's going to get back to more normal.

I hope this helps you understand when your mind creates these stories and just freak out a little bit less if you have a losing streak, or get a little bit less cocky when you have a winning streak. As always, keep improving [00:16:00] and see you next week.

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