[Blarg]

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Most people don't like most things once the novelty wears off.

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Excellent and true and appropriate to the discussion.

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Most people will invest a lot of energy to get started in something(poker, mountain biking, flyfishing,... whatever) until they reach a certain proficiency level. They get to a point where they are "pretty good." The basics become somewhat easy, the challenge goes away, and the novelty wears off. Also, moving to the next level requires more work - often times it takes more work than originally invested to move to only a little higher level....but this is what separates the great from the mediocre..in any thing.

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Also good.

Burn-out or boredom is what virtually everything in life offers eventually. The human mind is too energetic, vast and varied to be able to feel good about being nailed into one place forever. It craves stimulation and difference. Once something becomes a habit, the stimulation and difference die down even when the subject at hand is actually pretty intensely interesting.

So if you're playing poker for a living, you have to learn to just work through the staleness or, if you can afford it, treat your mind and spirit so that they work optimally, by taking time off and doing something else. The mind and spirit, like the body, are something that can be trained to be more disciplined and focused, but it's slow going and it's best not to try to force it too hard and abuse the natural limits of your level of development.

Think of your spirit and mind as allies, instead. Give them what they need and don't expect from them what it's not their nature to give -- unbridled enthusiasm for and concentration on repetitive tasks, for one. That's just not the way the mind and spirit work. And what you're feeling is very natural.

Don't expect to be happy with everything forever. Learn to manage things so you can put in the time you need to meet your goals without burning out or hating poker. That may be more time off than you'd really like to spend, consciously, but you'll be meeting other needs that you also need to meet in order to keep yourself healthy and feeling right.

Eventually you may become more disciplined and need less time off, but maybe not. At any rate, you'll have to adapt and not try to force the issue unless you want to burn out much harder and be more miserable still. You may find that instead of a steady-state person who feels fine playing on a regular schedule, you prefer much more to work in cycles, putting in long hours quite happily and then doing absolutely nothing for a while too. You may prefer a scattershot approach of playing for an hour or two, quite a few times a day. You may even use all of these approaches at times.

Find out the mysteries of how you work best and adapt to it. It may not be the way you think flatters you most, but we all have our own rhythms and sometimes they take a long time to find. And then sometimes they change. Just keep a respectful eye on your capabilities and learn to harness them and make an ally of them.