I have you tagged as “19 year old day trader who needs therapy for his gambling addiction.” I’m sorry I missed your birthday. Tag updated.

https://gamblersanonymous.org/find-a-meeting/

You have a gambling addiction.

how do you separate your mood from your results? What actually worked for you?

By coming to the realization you're depressed and gambling is a coping mechanism. You don't need advice on how to gamble. You need advice on how to not gamble from a professional therapist.

You should not be day trading. If you are going to stick with it you need to switch to paper trading for at least a year. Odds are you are not suited to it, very few people are, it is generally an extremely difficult way to make money that the vast majority of people who try fail at. Especially at 20, your brain is not even fully developed yet. You absolutely should be enjoying life, right now you are wasting it on dumb bullshit. Open a Roth IRA and try out buy and hold investing, and make sure you learn modern portfolio theory before you go taking on extreme risks again.

As someone who knows gambling addicts, that's not a good pattern, and the bad moods get worse when luck turns against them, and get inflicted on people around them.

Do something with other people that's less transactional: A group activity where you're playing or working together. Volunteering, games, sports, hiking, whatever.

At 20, you should be out there finding your tribe to hang out with in person and support each other.

You'll need it then, and it'll be the base for even more mutual assistance in the decades to come.

I would suggest continuing to invest in your education to build a skillset and get a job, and also seek help for gambling addiction. Intraday trading is not a job.

Haven't day traded but I have speed ran games, you get a similar awesome feeling when you've accomplished the goal, and similar feelings when your runs that day are just worse than yesterdays.

You can't separate your mood and results. At least I couldn't. Most days this was fine, I could focus on "I got this trick down, just need to integrate it into the run better" or "wow, that was a perfect 2 minutes" (of an hour-long run). The days where there wasn't a silver lining, those days were a mess. Spend hours, all fucking day, accomplishing nothing? Killed me. I stopped speedrunning. Mostly stopped gaming, but I still like doing factory games or doing things like making a living dex in Pokémon, and still play games with others.

If you're shutting down on those bad days, you have it worse than me, which makes sense, since you're spending money to do this. My advice is to look at what money you've actually made. Is it more than what a normal job would make for the time you've put in? If not, then stop doing it, its not profitable. If it IS making you more money, then you need to put a value on your happiness, since its costing you that. Spoiler, most people want money to live well and get happiness. Even if you're making more, think of it like "was the extra hundred I made worth the crashes I've been having?".

Gambling isn't sustainable, anyway. Day trading is a short term thing, at best, and it sounds like you've tapped that out, at least as far as you can without sacrificing your health.

Keep at it. Did you know most gambling addicts day traders quit right before their big jackpot trade? If you quit, all that sunk cost will have been for nothing.

Real talk. How much money have you made in the past 2 months, and how many hours of the day has working been on your mind. One of the benefits of a normal job is that at 5pm, you can stop thinking about it. If you include all the time you spend worrying, are you ahead of someone working for tips as a bartender? Don't compare how someone presents themselves externally to how you feel inside, that's unfair, but do look at your actual hourly rate, and think if working at starbucks might be a less stressful way to make almost as much money.

trade with other people's money, like the pros.

Normal in the sense that most people experience it? Yeah.

Actually normal in the sense of how we should be spending our life on this earth? Nah.

20 is gonna be like 1 of several cycles through existential ennui, my dude. All for different reasons. You get like a decade between them though for life to happen

Like the other commenter said, if you're good at day trading that's cool to make money and all but you're basically living in a casino you've built for yourself. Judging by the other behaviors you've listed, that would fit the profile of dopamine trap-seeking tendencies that happens to a lot of young men.

I don't know how to engage with that profession healthfully, it kind of seems like you have to have your face glued to a screen in order to make the cut. But finding ways to sabotage that dopamine drip would probably help you get some more activity going in other areas of your life.

Things like set endpoints for your workday, phone apps that restrict color after a certain period. Gamify some dumb little quotas for yourself like "every six hours of work, call my Mom or someone and check in" or "for every transaction I did today have 1 minute of no screen time before bed" or mandatory walk and snack break twice per workday on a preset alarm

Just speaking from having worked a couple jobs where screens and quotas were at play with my personal time.

What's not normal is a 20 yo using 2 emdashes in their post.

Maybe in a trade school