candy crush is my safety behaviour
(contains discussion of anxiety disorders & compulsions)
About three weeks ago, I attended my first weekly CBT workshop. It was supposed to teach me about how best I can manage my anxiety. CBT stands for Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, which is a type of therapy that teaches you how to manage or control anxiety disorders through various thought techniques. It’s used for other stuff too — it’s kind of treated as this cure-all, a panacea. But for me, it’s anxiety.
I did not find the sessions that useful. This is, I think, largely my own fault, because I probably didn’t put enough in, but I also think that most of the exercises and techniques we were talked through weren’t relevant to my own particular combination of anxieties and symptoms. But there were a handful of concepts and ideas that I’ve come away with that have changed how I think, and how I think about myself (I was going to say “and my anxiety” but the anxiety really is just me). The largest one is the idea of Safety Behaviours.
Safety Behaviours are, basically, any behaviours that people who deal with severe anxiety rely on to reduce their anxiety quickly, or to stop them from feeling anxious in the first place. It could be always carrying a bottle of water with you, it could be only ever riding public transport with a friend, or it could be leaving a party as soon as you start to feel anxious. The problem with safety behaviours is that CBT is about allowing yourself to feel the anxiety, because then you realise that it’s not as bad as you thought it’d be, and then you disrupt the cycle of anxiety surrounding that particular activity or thought. Whereas if you rely on something to take you out of the anxiety for a small period of time, you can end up just making the situation and the anxiety worse for yourself in the future.
When they explained the concept to us, I thought, “ah, yes. Like Candy Crush.”
There is no particular situation that I use Candy Crush as a safety behaviour to help me cope with. But I always have my phone on me. When I’m having an anxiety spike, I like to close my computer (because I am usually using my computer), breathe in and out, and play Candy Crush. It’s good if I have all five lives because I will play for all of those lives, then hopefully use the extra lives that friends have sent me that I save up. I will do this without thinking. That’s the appeal of it.
I also play it when I’m watching TV shows, or when I’m reading a book. I love Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but if you told me that I had to watch it without doing anything else I would be much more reluctant to watch it. I’m jumpy, and have no attention span, and a lot of the time I need to do something with my hands as well as just watch the programme, because otherwise I feel uncomfortable and headachey and, yes, anxious. This isn’t always the case, but it is the case a lot of the time. I would wait until I was in the right mood, until my head was right. And that can take a long time.
I have a 3DS and various games for it that I can carry about with me and play as and when I need to. I also have a laptop that’s capable of playing tetris, and all of the games I have on Steam (and not through Steam), and I have other games on my phone. It’s not that I don’t play other games, but Candy Crush is the one I turn to when I need to do something with my hands and shut down my brain. It’s a crutch. This is why I instantly thought of it when I learned what a Safety Behaviour was. I didn’t think of my phone, and I didn’t think of gaming. I thought of Candy Crush.
One thing that I have to deal with along with the anxiety is compulsions. I don’t believe they present with the full severity or frequency of compulsions associated with OCD or similar disorders, but they are a thing that I have. I bite my nails until they bleed, but more notably I pull hairs out of my chin and I pick at spots. I do this until they bleed, too, And after. I don’t care. I will be in the bathroom and I will notice a single dark hair on my chin, and sometimes I don’t care and sometimes it makes my brain flip over and I can’t do anything until it’s gone. I can’t think of anything. My brain buzzes and my tongue goes dry and I will use my fingers if I don’t have tweezers (and because of biting my nails so much my fingers can’t do this kind of thing, they are blunt instruments) and I need the hair out, I need to get it out, I need to stare at it in full and see the little bendy bit at the root and feel satisfied that it is gone, there is nothing left.
If it won’t come loose then my head hurts and my breathing gets fucked up and I just, I don’t know what to do, I need it, I need to pull it out.
If the hair breaks off and doesn’t come out at the root I am infuriated and will run my hand over my face, looking for other hairs to pull out. If the hair does come out at the root I feel briefly relieved and then will often start looking for another hair to repeat the process with anyway.
I will do the same kind of process with spots. I will pick at my skin, I will squeeze my skin, I won’t care if I hurt myself (it’s not the aim, but it’s not a reason to stop), I won’t care if I bleed. I need to get the root of the thing out. I need to get rid of the hair. I need to get rid of the spot.
This process shuts my brain down. I don’t think about anything except the hair. I will look up and have no idea how long I’ve been picking at myself. I will suddenly have a big bloody piece of skin on my chin and have no idea why I didn’t stop myself from doing that, except that I kept thinking, I almost have it. But you never almost have it, because there’s always more, and it’s not about the hair or the spot anyway. It’s about stress, and it’s about needing gratification and rhythm and to feel something.
Sometimes, I play Candy Crush compulsively. My brain shuts down. I play it through until I lose all my lives because it’s there and until something stops me I will just stay there. I swipe across the screen over and over again. I see the game when I close my eyes. My brain goes hot and fuzzy and shuts down. I don’t have to think. I am gratified, or I am dissatisfied, in which case I will repeat the motion over and over again, for hours or days or weeks.
I am unbearably grateful for the five life limit and the long refresh time because after five games I need that kick to stop and do something else or, when I’m feeling particularly stressed or tense, I could just play on, and on, and on. Sometimes it’s not enough and I have to play something else, and I get frustrated waiting for it to reload because what ever the other game I chose to play is, it’s not good enough.
What is it about Candy Crush? Why do I get bored of Pokemon so easily, when it’s a much more fun game in a lot of ways? Why don’t I play Puzzlejuice, or A Dark Room with this frequency? Why not Tetris?
Candy Crush is almost entirely non-verbal. When I’m at my most instinctive and compulsive I can’t even take in the single line of instructions at the start of a new level and I have to work out what I’m meant to do as I play. I don’t have to think, I just have to move. Each level is also just different enough to the last that I don’t believe that it’s pointless. I’m moving forward. It’s not like Tetris, where you always eventually lose. With Candy Crush, you always eventually win. When I get stuck on one level for weeks, I’m infuriated, irritated. It’s like the hair. If I just keep picking at it, I can beat it. Eventually, I can beat it.
And like the hairs, after I’ve dealt with one level there’s always another one.
I’ve played it so much that I know its grammar. I know its rhythm. I can live inside it. I am completely taken out of myself. My head tingles as I write this and I don’t want to play it until I’m done because I will lose my thoughts, I will lose what I want to say.
It’s a joke between me and the people I live with, how much I play Candy Crush. “Don’t get it,” I said to one housemate. “It will take over your life.”
But the other day I was upset by something to a degree that made no rational sense. I went up to my room and hunched in a corner and cried for about half an hour, maybe longer. I had no real reason for this, and didn’t understand why I was so upset. But I had my phone with me, and I played Candy Crush through, and tried to breathe, and even though it didn’t work as well as it usually does — I was more upset than tense or stressed — it helped. It calmed me down.
In the CBT classes, they talk about how safety behaviours are not always bad. When you’re trying to work out how to confront something that seems at first to be totally insurmountable, it can be good to have one to start off with. If you’re too terrified to even think about taking a train, it’s a good idea if you take a friend with you on your first train journey. At some point you will hopefully be able to see that it’s not so scary without the crutch. At some point you need to just get on the train by yourself.
I need to work out, in the long run, how better to cope with my problems, because I can’t use Candy Crush to get through everything. I should probably delete it off my phone and try and make a week without it. I’ve done it before, I can probably do it again. But it’s better than making myself bleed because my brain has fucked off and I’m just made up of some useless instinct to destroy small parts of my body. And it’s better than leaving parties early, or saying to my boyfriend that I can’t watch our favourite tv show because I don’t think I can bear to make myself sit through it. I’m sorry if we’re friends and I sometimes start to play Candy Crush at the wrong time, I might not even know I’m doing it. I’m not trying to be rude. It’s just, it shuts the bad parts of me down.
