My wrestling season has ended and I'm back on track with school stuff, so I've got a little more time on my hands and think I'm ready to play a little poker. Thanks for the replies and I definitely agree now with what a couple people have said. When my focus with poker is on how much money I'm making, I'm setting myself up for failure and misery. That's why I needed a break for a couple weeks and I need to take steps towards preventing that from happening again.

I feel like my biggest strength as a poker player is my ability to think a step ahead of my opponents and read hands well. My biggest weakness is my emotional control and occasional inability to predict what players will do with the range I put them on. So, as far as the emotional control front goes, my first plan of action is to take auto rebuys off. I need to take a second to evaluate my emotional state if I take a rough beat and decide whether I'm capable of playing my A-game and if I have an edge in the game. I feel like this time is critical so I don't fall into that zone of monkey tilt where I've maxed out the amount of pain I'm going to feel and don't care if I lose another 5 buy ins. I'm also going to stop checking the cashier during sessions, if I feel worried about how much I've lost, its time to quit. After my last little freak out, I withdrew a bunch of money, so I should have enough in my bank account to pay for rent, food, and all that jazz through summer and most of next school year, which means I won't have to dip into my poker account for quite a while. I think this will allow me to treat poker more like a video game that I'm just trying to beat the next level in. Hopefully this makes it more of a challenge of skill rather than a way to pay for stuff, and results in me just striving to play well and not punching something when I played perfectly and ran bad.

I guess with my inability to predict what my opponents will do, I just need to only make a play when I'm near positive it's a good one. I often find myself in situations where I say he's got QQ or JJ for sure, and if I were in his shoes I'd fold to a shove, so I shove and he looks me up with QQ and then I'm angry. I have to realize that just because I would think through my opponents likely range and realize I can't beat any part of it except for a bluff and fold doesn''t mean my opponents are thinking the same way. My edge comes because I am thinking through ranges and not just about how pretty my hand looks. I need to do a better job of identifying who is thinking like me, who is thinking more than me, and who is plain not thinking. I should probably just try to play straightforward until I know enough about an opponent to be able to run a big bluff on them.

I'm going to scratch my old goals and make some new ones.

1. Balance poker with school.
2. Have fun
3. View each game as more of an intellectual challenge where score happens to be kept with money, and not a gambling game where immediate results are important.
4. Get better and beat the 100nl and 200nl levels in a reasonable time frame. I think my original goal of setting a time limit is flawed because a time frame adds stress and factors in short term results very heavily.
5. Don't be scared to move up when I have the roll for the next level. I do a good job of moving down when my shot doesn't work out.
6. Play some good regs at 50nl and be able to tell where my edge is coming from against them before I move back to 100nl
7. Play at least 8k heads up hands per month during school and no more than 12k. Play at least 20k per month during the summer.