You sit down for a session after work. You slept six hours, maybe seven. You ate something at your desk. Your neck is tight from staring at a screen all day and you’re about to stare at another one for three hours.
You don’t think about any of that. You think about ranges. About that leak you spotted in your last review and whether the regular in seat four is going to three-bet you again.
Forty minutes in, someone sucks out on you and you feel that heat rise in your chest. You play the next hand too fast. Then the next one. Before you know it, you’re two buy-ins down and making decisions you’d never make if someone was watching over your shoulder.
You close the laptop and tell yourself it was bad luck. Or tilt. Or both.
Here’s what you probably didn’t consider – your body was already working against you before you even opened the first table.
The player who lived in his head
Joris Ruijs is a high-stakes MTT player who’s been in the game long enough to have cycled through the full range of what poker does to a person. Big scores, brutal downswings, ego traps, study breakthroughs, a staking operation… the full picture.
He was a guest on the Mechanics of Poker Podcast, where he described himself as someone who thought of his body as a vehicle for his brain. His identity was his thinking. All his skills were cognitive. He was in bad physical shape, and he didn’t care, because why would he? Poker is a mental game. The body is just the thing that keeps the brain alive long enough to play another session.
So when he was tired, he didn’t check in with himself.
So when he was tired, he didn’t check in with himself. Seven hours of sleep, no drinks the night before — should be fine. Instead of sitting down and asking, “How do I actually feel right now?” he ran the numbers and skipped the question.
That worked until it didn’t.
The burnout hit him as constant panic attacks, terrible sleep, and a complete loss of physical comfort. He described his first panic attack as a primordial feeling that something was deeply wrong – with no way to control it, suppress it, or push through it. Just there, bigger than him, the whole time.
His body had been sending signals for months, maybe years. He just never learned to read them
You’re probably doing the same thing. Not at the same stakes, maybe not to the same degree – but every time you sit down exhausted and tell yourself you’ll be fine, you’re making the same calculation Joris did. And it’s costing you money.
Stress affects you. And there’s a specific reason why.
How does stress actually affect your play?
Joris talked about what happened when he first started playing $1K buy-in events online. He kept busting 9th, 10th, 11th – and always told himself it was bad luck. But when he honestly compared his play in those tournaments to his $109 games, the difference was obvious. He was performing worse at the higher stakes. Not because the opponents were so much better. Because the stakes meant so much to him that the stress response kicked in – adrenaline, cortisol, the whole cocktail – and it literally blocked his ability to think clearly.
“They have a group of people and one group, they run a 400 meter and they say run it at maximum capacity, run it as fast as you can. The other group they say, okay, run it at 85. And the average finishing time for the 85 group would actually be higher. There’s a little bit of relaxation within the mind and within the body that actually allows you to access a much bigger part of your cognitive capacity.“
A little bit of relaxation within the system let them access more of their physical capacity.
The same thing happens with your brain at the poker table. When you’re locked in at 100% intensity – gripping the mouse, heart rate elevated, telling yourself this hand is critical – you’re not playing your best. You’re playing stressed.
This applies at the micros just as much as the highest of stakes. The stress might come from different places – maybe it’s not the buy-in but the fact that you’re stuck for the week, or that your bankroll is at a number that makes you uncomfortable, or that you’ve been running bad and you need this session to go well. The source doesn’t matter. The effect on your brain is the same.
When that stress overloads your system, it shows up in your decisions. Joris described moving up to high-stakes and playing paranoid, second-guessing everything and seeing threats everywhere. That change wasn’t coming from the opponents being better; it was rather cortisol distorting how he processed information. A paranoid decision-making process is not good.
His advice: when you move up, stick to the strategy that earned you the right to be there. Lower stakes are where you experiment. Higher stakes are where you execute what you already know. If you feel the paranoia creeping in, that’s your body telling you something – and sitting back down is discipline, not defeat.
The warning signs you’re brushing off
Joris laid out specific red flags for burnout that I think every player should know – because most of us have hit at least one of these and looked the other way.
- If you’re telling yourself you just need one big score to fix everything – that’s a gambler’s mindset dressed up as motivation.
- If the quality of your sleep is declining and you haven’t changed anything else – poker is bleeding into your rest.
- If you’re taking a shower or going for a walk and hand histories are flashing through your mind involuntarily – your brain can’t let go.
- And if you’ve been reaching for your phone, a cigarette, a drink, a game – anything, every time you feel uncomfortable after a session, pay attention to that.
The pattern is showing you which emotions you’re not dealing with. Pay attention.
The 85% Principle
This sounds counterintuitive for competitive people. You want to win. You want to play your best. So you grip harder, focus harder, push harder. But the research and Joris’s experience both point the same direction – peak performance doesn’t come from maximum effort. It comes from controlled, slightly relaxed effort.
At the table, this translates to things you can do right now. Take your time with decisions, especially in high-pressure spots. If you’re playing online and you almost never use your time bank, you’re probably rushing. Make your exhale longer than your inhale – it activates the parasympathetic nervous system and actually calms the stress response. If the information feels murky mid-hand, step away from the screen for five seconds. Get a breath. Come back.
None of that is complicated. But it requires you to acknowledge that your body is part of the equation – that you’re not just a brain running calculations.
What changed after the burnout
After recovery, Joris described his poker sessions differently. He has a strict pre-session routine now. He uses breaks to recharge physically – going outside, doing a quick yoga pose, something to reconnect with his body. While playing, he said he feels more at peace. Less aggression for the sake of aggression, more flow. The reduced intensity helps him play better.
That last point is worth sitting with. Less stress means your brain actually works better. Better thinking means sharper decisions. And sharper decisions are the only thing that compounds over thousands of hands.
What this means for You
I’m not saying this from the outside. Over 15+ years, I’ve burned out and stopped playing 4 or 5 times. My first big stop was two months. Then six months. The longest was a full year away from the game. Every single time I ignored the signals, pushed through, and lost more time recovering than I would have by adjusting early. Structure your energy like you structure your bankroll. If you don’t manage it deliberately, you will lose stretches of your career you can’t get back.
You probably don’t need to recover from a burnout to take this seriously. But you might need to stop calculating how you should feel and start actually checking.
Before your next session, sit down for thirty seconds and ask yourself one question: how does my body actually feel right now? Not how many hours you slept. Not what you ate.
How do you feel? Tired? Wired? Tight? Calm?
If the answer is anything other than reasonably good, adjust. Play fewer tables. Set a stop-loss. Or don’t play at all.
Your physical state is the operating system your poker brain runs on. If the operating system is compromised, it doesn’t matter how good the software is.
Start there. Everything else comes after.
If you enjoyed this and want to hear the full conversation with Joris, you can listen to the Mechanics of Poker episode:
