Stress, money and the affect on poker

So here's the deal. I've been stressing pretty hard about money lately. We have slowly accumulated debt over the last couple of years due to starting the business and not making as much as I used to. In addition, we owe one some loan payments and we are probably going to pay taxes this year (which was unexpected). We will have a big payment coming up on a humidification system and we just found out our insurance is going up $100 a month.

Why am I venting this on a blog no one reads? Because it's been affecting my poker game lately. Is it affecting how I play? Maybe a little. But worse, it is making me feel extremely tense and stressed every time I play. If a pot goes bad, I get pissed. If I get card dead, I stop looking for situations when I don't need cards or I start feeling either impatient or I start getting on myself for being a nit and not opening the pot with any two cards. Either way, it's putting me in a funk. I love to play poker, but the pressure of needing the money has been starting to get to me.

I have the money in my bankroll to at least take a large chunk out of our debt, but then I'll have to go back to grinding micro-stakes. I'm trying to play more MTTs in hope that I'll hit a big cash and can take care of some things. Some days I'm playing fine and I'm not forcing results because of the need for money and some days I'm just completely stressing while I play.

So...what's the solution? As much as I hate to say it, it falls back on the principles of achieving success in any endeavor...especially poker. I have to stay patient. I can't change the cards, I can't force things. I have to completely separate the need for money from the goal of playing poker. I have to play poker for the fun of it and any good result that may occur in the short run will be gravy. But poker IS a game of the long run and it has variance. For me to stress about results would be the equivalent of me flipping a coin and getting pissed that it didn't land the way I picked. I have to find other means of earning money and if it comes to it in the next few months, then I may need to withdraw some of my bankroll. If I'm able to make it bigger by that time, then that's great. But I need to focus on playing poker and not on winning money.