Why can a tiny unrealized loss keep people awake all night? Actually, put plainly, it’s not about how much you’re down—it’s that your brain keeps feeding you the plot: Was I missing a confirmation that I should’ve waited for back then? Did the “trap” end up locking onto me? Should I have closed the order earlier instead? Unrealized gains, on the other hand, feel like “it’s not in hand yet”—enjoy it for a moment and then it’s gone.

The longer I watch the mempool, the more obvious it becomes. When I see gas suddenly start acting up, or someone on-chain makes a loop to arbitrage, my mind starts running in circles with paranoia: Will my position just so happen to be treated as liquidity? Recently, the whole noisy back-and-forth about L2 TPS, fees, and subsidies has been going on too, but to me none of it compares to whether the “exit button” is still timely. My current approach is very timid: keep the position size small, draw a stop-loss line for both entry and exit, sleep if I can—and don’t let an unrealized loss lead you around by the nose.