Playing video games can help you feel energized and engaged, but they can also be a huge drain on your well-being. Here’s an intro to gaming mindfully, using simple habits to help you keep playing (and feeling) your best.
Video games offer endless sense-rocking pleasure, welcoming you into an incredible multiverse of art and story, the dopamine rush of points, the pure escapism of an all-consuming on-screen experience. It can be hard to pull yourself away from the screen, even when you really need to. Here’s what’s important to know: Constant sensory super-charge is like constantly revving your engine, without giving it time to cool down. Mindful strategies can help you game the game by learning how to rev down, which will help you sleep, which will help you feel less exhausted, making you stronger and more savvy in the game of life.
In life, and in the game, when something comes your way that you don’t want and can’t avoid, you might feel powerless, cornered, or destabilized. The key to regaining strength and agility—health points, if you will—is seeing what is right in front of you, ready to be used to help you bounce back. This might include super-simple and highly effective rejuvenators like standing up once an hour, stretching and walking around the room, going to work or class, talking to people you love, petting your dog, cuddling with your goldfish, and generally maintaining your connection to the vividness of life, on and offscreen.
The key to regaining strength and agility—health points, if you will—is seeing what is right in front of you, ready to be used to help you bounce back.
This is mindfulness. Other mindfulness practices include the following ways to help you keep your eye on the prize when life is pwning you.
3 Mindful Gaming Techniques
1. A simple breath technique can help you be more present, stable, and energized, in and out of the game. Bonus points: Training yourself to focus on breathing can help when upsetting thoughts threaten to bring you down.
Try This: Once you take a seat at your monitor, take a moment to feel what happens when your body breathes in and out. Notice the belly rise, the back expand and any ways that you experience your body breathing. Focus your attention, as best you can, on feeling yourself breathing in and out three times.
Level up: To bring deeper calm, engage the body’s relaxation response by experimenting with making your out-breath longer than your in-breath. Extending your out-breath soothes the parasympathetic nervous system, which will also help you feel more relaxed and focused.
Try breathing in for a count of three and breathing out for a count of five. Do this for three or more breaths. Find your ideal ratio: Is it two breaths in and four breaths out? Or maybe five breaths in and seven breaths out?
Explore the ratio that brings you greatest calm.
2. Tuning in to your senses is another technique that’s great for gaming. Give yourself five seconds throughout your day to intentionally focus on one or more of your senses. Five seconds of acute listening. Five seconds of feeling your body being held by the chair.
Level Up: When you leave the familiar and welcoming world of the game, you might find it can take time to transition from that sensurround world to being able to joyfully and fully connect to life outside of the game. Paying close attention to your senses, rather than the burbling of your mind can give you somewhere to anchor other than terrified thoughts about an uncertain future or negative chatter about the past. Your senses can only be experienced in the here and now. If you start to feel overwhelmed in daily life, regain ground by diving into touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing to increase a feeling of okayness.
Try This: A 5-Second Sensory Mission
Explore Sound
- Bring your attention to your ears and deeply listen to the sounds in the room for five seconds.
- Then, bring your attention to fully listening to the music and immersive soundscape of the video game.
- Heighten awareness by noticing how the creators have used adaptive music and sound to create a fantastical world.
Seeing Is Believing
- Look around the room or at your screen and find something that’s been right in front of your eyes this whole time, but you never noticed it.
- For five seconds, take in the artwork, the colors, the impressive detail. Don’t just rush by. Appreciate what you are seeing. (This helps increase the flow of dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin—the feel-good chemicals.)
- Notice what happens to your busy mind when you take five seconds to tune in to what you can see, or any of your other senses.
3. Try a little IRL movement. Feeling fidgety? Been sitting playing all night? Just Died and waiting for the scene to load again? Don’t forget you have a body that also needs refreshing to support your AAA game.
Just Died and waiting for the scene to load again? Don’t forget you have a body that also needs refreshing to help support your AAA game.
Try This: Stand up and walk around your room. While you are walking, bring your attention to the ordinary sensations of movement that you normally wouldn’t take the time to notice. Feel yourself walking: picking up a foot, moving it through the air, feeling the foot touching the ground. Just keep bringing your attention back to the feeling of picking up your foot, moving it through space, and putting it down. Easter Egg: You’ve just unlocked the synergy between body and mind.
Level Up: Going outside to catch at least 5-15 minutes of morning sun every day will feed your bones, help you sleep, and keep you buff.
Try these short mindful gaming exercises, using your senses to connect you to the present, to help you to feel more alive and give you more game. Feel your feet touching the ground as you walk to your gaming chair. Be gently alert, because going gently allows you to be more precise and takes a lot less energy than wasting fire power that isn’t needed. You are cultivating mindfulness and focus by gathering your energy before you even sit down. Well Played.
