Beer is a much simpler solution than trying to rewrite nervous habits.
Lycanth wrote:
From my own experience with nervousness (not only in osu!, but in general) improving your ability to concentrate/focus helps a lot with that. When you are "using the entirety of your brain capacity" for doing one task there is no room for nervousness. And the moments where you start getting nervous are usually the moments during which you lose focus(e.g. thinking about your combo etc. even though you should only be thinking about the next nodes you are about to hit).
You know... If I didn't know better, I would agree with you, but there is a delicate balance you need to maintain to achieve this, and pushing your limits will most definitely cause you to be nervous, on a possibly even greater scale. I used to play most of my games in this "single-minded" state and it really isn't all it's cracked up to be. The nervousness is still there, it just doesn't manifest itself as strongly, and I can most certainly feel it because of my gastric condition.
The problem is as simple as the emotion "fear" - It's the strongest emotion known to humankind, comes in many forms, and cannot be controlled as long as it is present. It's impossible to control, you can only "get rid of it." The problem with this is it can only be achieved if you:
- don't care about the game
- have great confidence in your abilities
- or just aim to have fun
But then the ambition of improving faster is gone, because there is no reason to try so hard. You just don't get to be at your maximum performance unless you have placed a priority on something. And a priority is just that, something at the top of your list of ambitions that makes or breaks your sense of self-worth.
"Using the entirety of your brain capacity" is merely just a state you have achieved where you no longer have lapses in attention span, so messing up is less likely and also the nervousness, but it still taxes your system in other ways. You are constantly driven by a steady flow of adrenaline keeping your senses awake, but there are other chemicals released along with adrenaline which are harmful after prolonged exposure (cortisol), which is partly where my health problem originated from. Since discovering this, I've made every effort to NOT be in this state all the time. Sometimes it's good to just takes things at a steady (healthy) pace, especially if you're going to be doing it for a long time.
TL;DR
You cannot get rid of nervousness and still hope to improve at the exact same rate (fastest), because they are mutually exclusive. You have to settle somewhere in between... Or just drink beer (since that helps you find that spot unwillingly).
But I can't drink alcohol anymore (high stomach acidity and other problems, all of which are affected by anxiety/nervousness - so I know what puts me in pain, and what doesn't, and I've since been free of pain for the better part of 6 months - as seen in my play history... The 2 breaks - Aug, Feb - are when I was in hospital. Although they look like 1 month breaks, the graph always tapers to 0 before flatlining, these were both in fact 3 month long breaks).