[ebaudry]

Anything you do during the day will be processed in your sleep. The best ways to minimize that is to have many different activities and brain uses during the day so that no particular topic sticks out in your attention while you are sleeping. Not playing right before sleep is helpful, something like a 1-2 hour break before bed is ideal, kind of like how you shouldn't eat anything around that time too in order that you body can fully relax and not "digest" anything, food or otherwise.

Taking up meditation would help a lot. Daily exercise would also be a good idea. Something to think about also, anything you do for more than a couple hours a day changes your emotional, physical, physiological, and energetic states. i.e. you are sending signals to your body and brain that say "I want to be a poker/chess/MTG/ signal processing system", and the body slowly adapts to that. The obvious effects would be on your posture, becoming shortsighted, developing wrist problems, thinking about poker "too often", wanting to talk about poker more than you do, and so on.

Just FYI, I have poker dreams almost every night when I play more than 5-6 hours/day, especially when its right before bed, which it often is. It can be very frustrating, although I can say hands down that it is preferable to the "Lemmings" dreams I had for a few weeks back in High School. The "Tetris" dreams were pretty annoying too...