Does anyone else suffer from chess cycles?

Hi, I’m wondering if any other chess enthusiasts experience what I’ll call “cycles” regarding their chess life. You see, for about the last four years now, I’ve noticed that I always build up my interest in chess during November or December. I will play lots of online games, usually participate in a tournament, and just generally fall back in love with the game. But, somewhere in the vicinity of late winter or early spring, I’ll out of the blue lose my interest. It takes like two days (maybe even less time than that) for me to lose my interest. I start wanting to do other things—cook something, go someplace, read books (I have to have something to take the place of my chess hobby when it’s in the “dormant” stage of life). During this dormant stage I play few if any chess games. On occasion, I’ll regain my interest in late summer, when I’m beginning to get a bit of summer boredom.

The thing I’m describing here went way too far last time around. It was March of 2016. I was participating in a tournament, and was doing decently well when, with short notice, I felt “chessovirus” coming on. (The symptoms are as follows: severe drop in interest of the game; chess boards being viewed as pointless, dull, and (in extreme cases) dorky; playing chess is seen as a MAJOR time waster; etc. (I know it probably hurt your feelings to read all that, but trust me, it hurt mine even worse)). This was really an inconvenient time to catch the chessovirus, since I was right in the middle of a tournament. But the chessovirus didn’t care – that thing wiped me out in short order! (Well, technically I wiped myself: I resigned about ten games right in a row and got as far away from chess as I could for a good, long while.) I went from a rating of like 1700 down to a 1402. And now I begin the slow ascent back up to (hopefully) a 1700.

Does anyone else experience what I’m describing here? How do you “cope” with it? Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can break this awful cycle and enjoy chess PERMANENTLY? Oh, and I’ve got another question: what kind of damage does taking a long break from chess do to your chess abilities? Can you come right back from, say, an eight month break from chess and play just as well as you could before the break?

I get what you get. My 2 hobbies are chess and bike riding. In the winter since it's cold my bike riding decreases and chess picks up. Come spring I'm drooling of the idea of a bike ride and post ride barbecues. Last thing on my mind is chess. But I don't let either disappear. Sure my interests see saws but both are too important to not do either for a point of time. When you lose interest just don't play as much. Just do a few puzzles a week to stay fresh so when you do start to play again it's not bad. When you lose interest don't try to get better just do minimal chess to maintain what you have. You worked too hard for it to lose it buddy. 

thanks for the feedback.

I play chess for a while then I take a break for a while. It's not seasonal or regular though, and I don't have thoughts about how pointless or "dorky" what I'm doing is. Nothing so extreme and I don't worry about it, I just play when I want to.

Yeah, similar for me. I have a couple of hobbies, and I tend to obsess over one at a time, leaving the others behind. This often results in breaks of a year or two at a time in my chess play. But then I return gung ho and ready to dive in. The big down side is that after that long a break, I sometimes need a couple of months just to get back to my old playing strength and remember things that I used to know.

I've heavily cut down on my correspondence style play (daily as it's called here), because it takes too long, and I can lose interest. Even within an individual game, I'll lose interest in some positions. But especially if I'm losing interest in chess while I have games going, I'll just want to quit playing them.

So I stick to "live" chess all the time instead, more on other internet sites and OTB than here.

Im exactly the same, maybe an addictive personality.  Give up, miss it, start playing a few daily tournaments, escalates to having 100 on go, overdose on it then move on to other hobby, od on that, rinse and repeat.  

I have this.

I view it as the privilege of being a patzer/amateur.  look at it this way- if you were a professional GM you could NOT afford to fall out of chess.  that would be economic suicide!

so it is a privilege, although  it can suck to feel like perhaps if you just stayed engaged and interested, you would be so MUCH better at this game...