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Rules Fatigue, When Your Rules Start to Feel Like Chains

At first, rules feel like protection. After months, they can feel heavy. You start thinking: "Why am I following this checklist? I know what I'm doing." That moment can be risky.

Rules fatigue happens when:

- Rules were set without understanding their purpose
- The system feels rigid and joyless
- You're tired, bored, or stuck in a plateau
- Short-term results make you doubt the plan

What to do instead of ignoring the rules:

1. Revisit the why. For each rule, write what problem it solves. For example: "Daily loss limit protects me from revenge trading."

2. Check your data. Does the rule improve results? Use your journal to find out.

3. Adjust formally. If a rule truly doesn't help, change it through a review process, not on a whim during a session.

4. Simplify. Keep only rules that have meaningful impact.

5. Add variety safely. Study new concepts on demo or in backtests without changing live rules.

6. Rest. Take a break if fatigue comes from burnout.

7. Talk it through. An accountability partner can help you decide whether the rule or the mood needs changing.

Rules are tools for your future self. When you want to break one, it's often a signal to pause and look closer.

Make rules you understand, and you'll find them easier to follow.

Point 3 is the one I'd underline. Changing rules through a review rather than mid-session matters because the moments when a rule feels like a chain are usually the worst moments to judge it: a slow afternoon, a missed move, an urge to trade something outside the plan. Writing the proposed change down and waiting for the weekend review takes most of the heat out of it.

Sometimes the fatigue comes from rules written for conditions that no longer apply, a session filter set for summer liquidity, for example. Those deserve a scheduled look every few months, not a quiet abandonment.

Rules fatigue is real, and "revisit the why" is a good fix. One more option that helps: schedule rule reviews, for example once a quarter, where rules can be changed based on journal data and not on how the last week felt.

Knowing a review is coming makes it easier to follow rules in between. A rule that feels wrong mid-session gets written into a "for review" note instead of being broken. At the review, the data decides. Some rules turn out to be outdated and get dropped, which also reduces the feeling of being chained.

One thing that helped me was counting the rules. When I first wrote mine out there were 23 lines on the checklist, and at least a third of them were the same idea worded twice after different bad weeks.

The fatigue was not really about discipline. Ticking 23 boxes before every entry on a fast London morning meant I skipped some each time, and once I was skipping some it felt fine to skip the important ones too.

So for the quarterly review FXS Prop Desk describes, I added a test for each rule. Every time a rule stops a trade I note the setup and later check what it would have done, which gives each rule a small record of its own.

After a few months the picture is usually clear. The daily loss limit and the news window earned their keep, while a couple of my entry filters mostly blocked trades that would have worked.

I ended up with nine rules, split into ones that stop a trade and ones that only change size. That split alone made the list feel lighter, because on most days only the first group ever comes up.

Fairman, how many rules are on your checklist right now? I suspect there is a number beyond which nobody follows all of them.