Mental illness affects how one thinks

Trading is a mentally challenging activity, and traders must take care of their mental health just like athletes take care of their bodies. Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression can be compared to sports injuries, and ignoring them can lead to long-term damage.

You can play through some injuries, and some you simply can’t. Albeit there’s no shortage of players that’ve played through some serious injuries, even against the advice of a professional. Though possible, it isn’t a good idea to play through some injuries because often doing so worsens the injury.

A couple of years ago I suffered my first experience with a panic attack/mental breakdown. I was scanning markets on a Sunday preparing for the week when this happened. Thankfully markets were closed.

This was like tearing a hamstring, for a while, I couldn’t trade or make sense of charts. It was quite terrifying for many reasons, but also because I feared being unable to trade from that point on. A big problem for me because I love trading.

Here’s how I dealt with it

Looking back, the process started long before the panic attack, and the subsequent depressed mental state. Though I didn’t know it at the time. I was very aware of how my mind functioned when I was trading at my very best. This made it easier to recognize that something wasn’t quite right, as the attack was building up.

To give a bit of context, a panic attack or a mental breakdown builds up over a period, typically a few minutes, till it just attacks you uncontrollably. Then you really can’t do anything (at least I couldn’t), except to go through the experience.

After calming down. I sat at my desk and tried to do some technical analysis in preparation for the week. It was as if I was blind. I knew then that the injury was worse than I thought. I made a decision that I would stop trading for a while till I’m better again

Recovery.

Firstly I accepted that I couldn’t trade. Doing so with that kind of injury risked worsening it and my trading account. I sought professional help, in the form of talk therapy and medication as well.

Meditation, physical exercise, sleep, and writing things out. I can’t tell you exactly what and how exactly each helped, but they did.

After a couple of weeks, slowly but surely, I began to see charts as I did at my best self. It took about three weeks before I could place another trade. But the injury hadn’t fully healed.

Trading through it

The main danger of mental illness is that it affects how one thinks. It isn’t only about being sad and unhappy. How I saw the world and how I spoke to myself had fundamentally changed. Again being aware of this alone was of paramount importance. I had to learn another level of dissociation with my trading. So my trading would not be affected.

To learn the dissociation, I rewrote my trading plan (strategy, system and risk and money management). For the first few weeks after resuming to trade, I traded off of it. Checked each trading decision I made against my trading plan. Till it was intuitive again.

After a few months, I felt better and was back trading at my best again. But things were never quite the same.

It’s still something I battle with on a daily basis. But being aware that my view of the world and myself can sometimes be negatively distorted, has helped me separate my trading & its difficulty from myself.

It’s important as a trader to remember that you work with your mind – any mental problems you have may affect your trading. When things get bad it’s like having an injury. If you ignore or don’t rehabilitate the injury it does worsen. Seek professional help if you have to, but don’t ignore it or force yourself to trade through it if its really bad.

Your mind is your main asset, take good care it.

Traders share a peculiar characteristic: they’re fiercely competitive, but only with themselves. In practice this means that they see every outcome as an opportunity to learn, and they’re brutally honest about both their failures and successes. This also means that they’re hungry for knowledge. They don’t sleep easy with unanswered questions. And they’re seldom satisfied with just one answer.

Njabulo Nsibande is a founder of Village Trader, and Sakha Ingcebo investment club. His interest in trading began in 2016, alongside a rash of Instagram ‘fx traders’…

Find him on Twitter: @njabulo_goje.