Hello.
I currently have a problem with my aim. That is... it's become shaky very lately.
There is a sort of feeling that builds up in my fingers whenever I play. Once it reaches some critical point, my fingers can't help but tense, messing up my aim alot. Normally, this doesn't happen.

What do you think I should be doing to prevent that from happening? Play more? Play easier maps (~4*)?

P.S. I should really stop taking week-long breaks in hopes of getting better afterwards

Don't try too hard, it will only make your arm/fingers hurt. If they start REALLY hurting don't go any further because your injury will have a good chance of becoming permanent or just take longer to heal but I guess you don't want that
Take breaks, they don't need to be too long. Sometimes even a 2 day break can help a lot. It also improves stuff like bad habits that you create after playing maps that are too hard or you simply don't understand. But ofc that's if you play a lot, if you play just every once in a while your hands won't be used to it and what you described happens.

If you can't do a score relaxed chances are you can't even do it at all (implying if you can do it tensed you can also do it relaxed). Playing while tensed isn't sustainable. Keep your grip loose and repeatedly tell yourself to relax as you play. If you need to, take a break from maps that give pp (ie. unranked or simply play offline) to build composure. The idea is to separate the mentality of "i should be able to do this but I can't" or "that would have been worth so much pp without the miss why do I suck at this game" from the game.

If you do play a ranked map offline in this process, don't expect to be able to just breeze your way to an fc online. For this reason I recommend unranked maps over offline play because you literally can't get pp from them so there isn't this looming regret from good scores. There probably aren't nearly as many quality unranked maps under 5* though as 5-7* is the "meta" so to speak and many maps in that range don't get ranked solely because of the difficulty spread requirement.

The goal is to foster thoughts like "damn, did I seriously just do that?" when you achieve a decent non-pp score and "w/e wasn't worth pp, time to move onto next map, this one isn't worth playing right now" when you don't. The key here being to have a massive enough map pool that you always have new maps to play. If your map pool is too small you frequent the case of "damn, I did much better on this map last week." By having both 0 expectation on your performance going into a map and 0 expectations you'll be able to play with a lot less stress and in turn relax more.

Over time you will just start to become numb to misses and good scores alike and relaxing will be a lot easier. From there it's just a matter of focusing on that same feeling of calm confidence when you go to play actual ranked maps. The nervous feeling when getting doing better than you think you should be will always be there, it's just good to know what calm composure feels like so when the nerves kick in strong you know what you need to do to fight back.

TL;DR: download and play lots of different maps, relax, enjoy game, you're here to stay a while

Try some finger stretches. They might help relax your fingers

play more, that is all

gitgud and you'll be better.

just hold ur mouse or tablet pen tighter but not that rough or u cant jump further

[-Haqua-] wrote:

There is a sort of feeling that builds up in my fingers whenever I play. Once it reaches some critical point, my fingers can't help but tense, messing up my aim alot. Normally, this doesn't happen.

I think I know the feeling you're talking about. After you take your hand off of the mouse, when you go to bend your fingers, they're so stiff you can't bend them, right?

If so, you're trying too hard to aim for far too long, causing your hands to stiffen up to the point they're hard to move. If it happens, PUT THE MOUSE DOWN, go do something else for an hour, then when you come back, play maps that you can aim without tensing up. You should take a break long before it gets to that point though, if your hands start tensing during a map, stop, flex them a bit to make sure they haven't seized up and take a few minutes break, after which again, play something that doesn't cause you to tense up.

If you're going to play a lot of osu! you should try to play at a level where your hands feel relaxed to prevent any uneccessary stress on your hands. Tensing your hands just destroys your performance and can damage your hands if you keep doing it. You can't play more if you wreck your hands.

[-Haqua-] wrote:

What do you think I should be doing to prevent that from happening? Play more? Play easier maps (~4*)?

If that's a level you find comfortable to play at, then that's the level you should spend most of your time at. You can always come back to harder maps once you can play them while relaxed.