Coolgav wrote:

What i try to do is clear my mind and act like i'm only play osu for no reason.

^this

I kind of get nervous on high bpm.. can't keep my hand still, end up surprised by my ability to hit notes with a shakey pen which makes it worse because I just realized how freaking shakey it is which causes me to miss notes.

I also subconsciously hold my breath while playing and then when I realize what I'm doing, I start breathing manually and end up paying less attention to the notes.

Stop caring

Not sure if this suggestion was posted because I'm short on time, a decent trick you can try is every time you feel "pressure" of a FC or any finish, just pretend you just began playing the map from t he beginning regardless of where you are in the timeline. Preferably during a break time but you can do it any time.

Mind over matter goes both ways, good and bad. However you can take advantage of it in time.

I'm starting to shake, to breath faster and my heart is pounding a lot. I even start to sweat which is so horrible when you are a full mouse player since it become so hard to streams properly, which add more to the stress.
I've found a way to calm down a bit before playing a song I know I'm going to tryhard on it: Drink water, take a deep breath, show the ranking on the left of the screen and smiles. Also, during break in a song, I just breath deeply, pass my hand over my shirt to wipe off the tiny sweats and let's go again.

yea, that sound dumb but it works for me at least, i hope it will help a bit.

thelewa wrote:

So basically this thread is all about how people get nervous and how they deal with getting nervous if they get nervous. If you don't get nervous, do tell how we common lowlives could achieve something as glorious as a state of mind where we don't get nervous. Keep in mind it's all about osu!, not real-life stuff like going to the store to buy groceries and getting a panic attack.

Basically I get nervous every time I'm about to FC a map, no matter what map it is. My heart starts beating at a billion beats per minute and my vision grows dark, while my hands shake furiously enough to be considered viable replacements for jackhammers in road construction. How I try to deal with this is by focusing on my breathing and using the force of a thousands suns to try to control my right hand. It doesn't work that well, though.

There was not enough space in the subject name to include a question mark

The only thing to do is when this thing happened is to just try and get done with this song. Then take a deep breath and calm down and think you did it once you can do it another time. But usually if i get this nervous it was just a lucky thing for me and i need to try a couple more times before i get it right again and then at this point i allready memorized anything and im not even getting nervous anymore just trying to make no more mistakes

Yeah stop carring about the game is the best way I found to get rid of my nervousness, even when I'm about to FC a long map that I've been retrying a lot.

That's also the reason I suck, but at least I don't care and I'm having fun ^^.

same here, when I was about to FC a map, I started to nervous and......BAMMM......combo break *rage*

It's hard to act like one isn't caring when trying to pass an insane map.

I keep thinking "Don't get excited - you're going to miss a note anyway, no FC this time". Doing so actually helps me relax.

i do when i'm about to fc a map, and also when i'm about to pass a point i always mess up on. silent hitsounds make me nervous too. i usually overcome it by thinking "you can do it, just concentrate, you won't mess up!"

Drink cold water maybe??

Anzo-nii wrote:

Kokozord wrote:

I keep thinking "Don't get excited - you're going to miss a note anyway, no FC this time". Doing so actually helps me relax.

This doesn't work on mine. ._.

I only FC when I least expect it.

Mira-san wrote:

Kokozord wrote:

I keep thinking "Don't get excited - you're going to miss a note anyway, no FC this time". Doing so actually helps me relax.

This doesn't work on mine. ._.

I only FC when I least expect it.

The reason it doesn't work is likely because you read on how to avoid focusing on fc. You will instead tell yourself not to worry, or degrade yourself, but you will be focusing on doing so for the reason that you can get a FC/ or not get nervous, which is ultimately focusing on just that.

In fact, everything in this thread, i realized, is almost useless. Because the main issue why you get nervous/mess up is because you're focusing too hard on doing well. By finding out different methods on helping combat, and trying them, you know you are doing this because you want to FC/stop being nervous. Just knowing this fact will make it so that nothing helps.

You've got to develop your own mindset, figure out your own methods in order to truly help this issue.

The only way to truly combat this honestly is to take drugs that calm you down, or just play with invisible numbers or something so that you can't see your combo.

I figure Osu would be pretty boring if i didn't get nervous. One of the main reasons i play is to get scores I'm proud of and to improve as a player, getting nervous just seems like it's a sign I'm getting better.

TSC wrote:

I figure Osu would be pretty boring if i didn't get nervous. One of the main reasons i play is to get scores I'm proud of and to improve as a player, getting nervous just seems like it's a sign I'm getting better.

Wait.. what? Nervousness as a sign of getting better? Do you mean that the stuff you are playing gets easy enough so you won't need to concentrate super hard thus getting nervous or what? oO


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).

As to how to improve said ability... well, just do stuff that requires your full concentration.

jesus1412 wrote:

Basically, practice.

inb4 this thread gets added to the "How to improve on osu!"-thread along with some advice on how to live healthier.

I'm disregarding all the advice and instead saying that the answer is beer

As it is for me, I think my advantage is that I'm still to fresh to osu!, because of that I kinda enjoy the music and are nearly 99% focusing on the song and the beats. I can't tell if I got nervous or not because I kinda don't have time to keep an eye on it. I just play, try my best I can and if I mess up, I just laugh about my mistake and go again.

Maybe that's the deal, just to try not to focus on me and way more on the game so there is no time to tell "Shit, I start to get nervous".

thelewa wrote:

I'm disregarding all the advice and instead saying that the answer is beer

lol good to see that I'm not the only person who keeps thinking "Not enough Bier" after slip ups...

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).

kfshradio wrote:

What I do is I force myself to think that I combo broke like 30 notes ago or so. It's a lot easier to FC when you believe you've already failed, and I find I have a lot more fun.

This is pretty much the case, the other day i thought i missed a slider at the beginning of a map and kept playing anyways, fc'ed it like it was nothing (it used to be pretty hard for me) and didn't get even a little bit nervous.


It happens a lot that whenever i miss i lose all tension and fc the rest of the map regardless of how hard it is, i can miss a simple part and fc things i wouldn't be able to do being nervous .. so yeah that's a major thing.


I still don't know how to convince myself that i missed other than it being accidental.

I just try and think of nothing, I usually get nervous and then I start to think about other things other than the beatmap at hand (usually really random stuff like a conversation I had with someone the day before or what food would be nice right about now) and when that happens 90% of the time I drop my combo. So basically, think of nothing. Nothing at all and just play the map.

Swap combobreak.wav with comboburst.wav

Problem solved

Most important to forget what you did. I dunno how you go about doing that. Try as I may, I can't fool myself on purpose. But accidental "I thought I missed" stuff does work. Once your goal has been shattered, or at least believe so, the nervousness goes away because you don't care about mistakes anymore.