I know it's good to only play in +EV situations but...

[parappa]

...over the course of my poker career I've developed this compulsion where I hate to play unless I have a huge edge. If my tournament is tight and tough, I'll drop back down to the lower level where I can beat the hell out of the other players. In limit, I'll drop down from a tough-but-beatable $2/$4 game all the way to a .5/1 game that I can 4-table while watching television.

My bankroll is gargantuan for the levels I play. I know I'm a better player than the levels I'm playing, but every time I move up, I find it so uncomfortable that I only play a few tournaments/sessions before I move back down into my comfort zone.

And it's not that I'm having the "running bad at the higher level" problem, either. I'm a winner at all the levels I've tried (up to $2/4 limit and $22 sngs), though the results at the top levels are far from significant--all I can really know is that I'm not getting radically outplayed, and I do subjectively know that. It's just that the bigger amounts of money, or the tougher competition, I don't know, freak me out and I retreat.

So, I've got the limit skills to be at least a break-even player at $2/$4 and I am a solid winner at $1/2 over 20k+ hands, but you'll catch me clearing bonuses at .5/1 on Party simply because I'm much more comfortable with a massive edge. In sngs, I'm legitimately at least a $22s player, but I've played in excess of 1000 $11s with a 25+% ROI, and it's not all that unusual to find me in the $5.50s some days.

Why does it matter? It's costing me money. I'm not god's gift to poker, but my competence is legitimately higher than the levels at which I play. I make a substantial portion of my income from poker and others with comparable skill levels make more simply by playing higher.

A lot of this is variance-phobia. Losing sessions really upset me and I haven't learned to deal with it. While I can easily deal with losing sessions in casino bonuses, every time I have a losing session at limit poker I walk away feeling like there's something wrong with my game.

My bankroll is static at $10k, and I've begun simply paying bills out of the excess because the limits I'm playing at in no way implicate the bankroll size I have but I need to keep it around should I ever start playing higher.

Why's it bothering me? Because there is a significant opportunity out there for me to be making more money than I am, and I feel like I'm wasting it.

Anyway, any thoughts appreciated.