Don't grip life so tightly.
Being too serious creates a kind of brittle fragility which a playful attitude insulates you against.
Your goal is dynamic persistence over the long term. Taking things seriously gives you a huge advantage in bursts, but chronic seriousness makes you rigid and at risk of blow-up. What would this be like if it was 10% more enjoyable?
"Make a sense of humour your default." ~ Matthew McConaughey
Don't be so worried about winning that you forget what winning is supposed to feel like. Is your presiding feeling when things go well one of happiness and satisfaction or one of relief? Is it joy or simply the abatement of fear?
After a while of winning, you realise that HOW you win is more important than IF you win. How you feel during the event is more important than the outcome of the event. How the people who read your work are impacted is more important than how many are impacted.
Do not be so terrified of failing that even the act of winning is made miserable. Ultimately you are doing things not to say you have done them, but for the experience of having done them. When you look back, it's the experience itself, not just the outcome that matters.
One of the big determining factors in how you feel will be the outcome, but it's not everything. Oddly enough, optimising for how you feel detaches you from caring about outcomes, but is the very thing that drives outcomes the most. And if it doesn't, what do you care, you're enjoying it.
Emotional pain is a hell of a teacher. But it won't kill you. Would life be easier if you didn't feel everything so very deeply? Perhaps. But the only reason you're getting the outcomes that you want is because of your depth of thought.
As bad as it feels, this is the breadth of human existence. You are ALIVE. Your inner landscape is a fascinating world to explore. Act with curiosity: What you are doing right now is a hypothesis to be tested, not an ideology to be proved. Is your goal to survive, or thrive, or flourish?
You are doing this for you. After a certain level of material comfort, the only person you need to do this for is you. Your conscience knows when you're being honest and not. Optimise to make him happy. Be the person your mum thinks you are. Be the person your younger self wanted as a role model. Brave, courageous, earnest, honest, virtuous, flaming.
"And that's how we measure out our real respect for people ~ by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate ~ and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you." ~ Ted Hughes via Visakan Veerasamy