Last time, I covered Roaming, but this week, I will cover Ranked Anxiety. In this article, I will also discuss your attitude towards ranked games or gaming as a whole. This is going to address a more general concept. The format may seem a little different this time around.
Looking at this definition makes it completely justified and normal to feel anxiety. While researching this topic, I looked at people who have previously covered the subject. I noticed that those people admitted that they had never experienced Ranked Anxiety.
I experienced this in gaming for years. In my first two years of playing League of Legends, I couldn’t play ranked because of my fear of the outcome. In my case, the fear of playing ranked games came from pride. I always put so much pressure on myself when I was younger to perform well. This is because the people around me told me I had “so much potential,” and I didn’t want to disappoint them.
This extended into League of Legends because everyone was playing this game. It was also a game that I was passionate about from the start. The idea of playing a ranked game, not playing well, losing, and getting called “bad” was something that I had to avoid. Back then, I enjoyed playing Customs 1 vs 1 or something similar. That’s because the idea of having four other people on my team blaming me for losing the game was too overwhelming.
Some people find it difficult to understand and explain. But for me, the feeling of letting people down and having that pressure on you is natural. Even if it is difficult to overcome, if you have felt nervous queueing up for ranked, you may have experienced Ranked Anxiety.
Know that it is not a shame to experience that. Anxiety is a very natural thing, and it is your body reacting to a stressful situation. It’s like how your body reacts to being in danger, which is why people experience this in different ways. Adrenaline gets released to your body when it’s not meant to, making your body and mind tense. You’ll feel scared, uncertain, and disorganized—your breathing and heart rate increase. Oxygen gets transferred to your brain, and your extremities are reduced, thus giving you cold hands.
All this happens because YOU are too invested in this game. You’re too worried about how other people will perceive you and the outcome of the game. The first step to overcoming your anxiety is acceptance. You accept that you might be a bad player or would get bad players on your team. Most of all, you should take that you must go through those factors. It would be best if you pushed through to go on this journey to becoming a better player.
Soon enough, I overcame my Ranked Anxiety. It was because finding my actual skill level outweighed the fact that I could get called “bad.” I thought that if I was a bad player, I needed to know more to improve. I stepped back and realized I couldn’t control my team; no one could. One team is bound to lose, and someone else is bound to feel bad when they play. Most of all, that team or someone will be me, and I need to be okay with that.
My whole mindset changed when I played my first-ever ranked game and made a minor mistake. I got completely fixated on the outcome of the game, asking myself questions such as, “What if I lose this game?” and started to feel depressed. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, wasn’t playing well, and—worst of all —we lost that game. Even if I had entered the game with a great mindset and positive attitude, it all spiraled down soon enough.
At that moment, I realized that I could go into the game with such a fantastic mindset. But then, my brain would completely change the moment something went wrong. My mind would get focused on all the negative things again, asking myself, “What if I lose this game?”—and so the outcome of the game was still too important for me. I realized that I needed to work on how my brain works.
In Psychology, there’s this thing called the Feedback Loop. What you think and how you feel and behave are all linked. For example, you can force yourself to smile if you're feeling sad. Doing so will allow your body to begin feeling genuine happiness. This psychological concept can either be positive or negative. As for what I was experiencing, it was a negative feedback loop. When one thing went wrong, my mind started to think about all the negative things that could happen. This then, in turn, made me feel more depressed, which would lead me to behave in a negative way.
My brain changed, I started to feel depressed, I lost all my confidence, and my play would degrade. I solved it by acknowledging that an instance could happen. I knew that feeling bad about myself and worrying about the game's outcome wasn’t good. If anything, it would only feed into the negative feedback loop. I knew that if I made myself feel worse, I would play worse soon enough. My problem wasn’t losing the game but rather the fear of losing the game.
I decided to turn my League of Legends experiences into positive ones, like thinking about my ADC that could scale anyway despite him dying three times in 5 minutes. We could still return from the game despite giving up that one dragon. Training my brain to focus on those things made me start thinking positively, which made me feel much better. It allowed me to play better and enjoy League of Legends more. I got to the point where I was no longer nervous playing ranked games because I thought it was the “normal” way to play. That’s how I got to Bronze to Diamond from Season 3 to Season 5.
Even after years of playing ranked, I still get Ranked anxiety if I take a break from playing the game. I still get nervous trying to get back into the game. It’s something I’ve accepted that might never go away completely. At least I know that the problem is in my head, which is something that I can control.
RECAP
If you’re feeling Ranked Anxiety, remember the following things:
- Everybody loses games!
It’s a fact that even the best players in the world can go on a massive losing streak, and that’s okay.
- People will judge you!
They can rage at you and be mean to you, but you’re better than that, and you can always mute them.
- No one can control the outcome of every game!
Not you, not your team, and not anyone else. So don’t think of it that way.
- Your greatest opponent is yourself!
Think positive, be positive, and stay positive. You’re the only one who can put yourself down.
That’s all for now! I hope you learned something from this article. Good luck on the Rift!
