Mental Health | Psychology
3 Secret Mental Health Benefits of Playing Video Games
Boost Your Brainpower and Beat Stress with Video Games
You may have heard many myths about video games like they make you lethargic, kill your productivity and it is a complete waste of time. But in my case, I have met who are great at playing video games, anyhow they have turned out to be the smartest people that I have ever met in my life. When I was a kid I used to play video games a lot.
We were not able to afford the PlayStation and other expensive games but we were able to afford the cheapest video games under $10. I was kind of addicted to video games. But I can give credit to my video gaming habit for increasing my focus and making me smart.
I did waste my many hours playing video games but as a kid, I think it has overall helped me more than harmed me. I was very good at playing video games and I have not found anyone a better player than me in any video game.
I have found a few mental health benefits of playing video games that we can avail at a young age too. Yet I have not had the opportunity to play any video games in almost the past 20 years, but I wish to play them once I make myself financially stable.
In this blog, I will explain some mental health benefits of playing video games. We can only avail of their benefits if we play them under limits and do not get lost in the world of video games.
1. Enhanced Mental Stimulation and Stress Relief
Most video games require a very strategic mindset, solving mysteries, problems, and puzzles, and sharp decision-making. That keeps us engaged in the game. It enhances our focus, and mental stimulation and releases our mental stress.
Video games are a kind of mental exercise. It relaxes our brain. They play like a kind of mental escape from real-world problems. They do not let us think about daily real-life problems. They save us from overthinking.
2. Sense Of Feeling Accomplished and Building Emotional Resilience
It’s a simple psychology whenever we make certain goals and achieve those goal under the desired time frame, our brain releases happy hormones like dopamine. Each game has multiple difficulty levels, that act like a mental challenge to compete in them.
Such difficulty levels evoke the feeling of contentment and accomplishment. Video games act as ego-boosting tools in our lives. It keeps us engaged by boosting our motivation and gameplay skills. After completing any task there is a virtual reward for this.
While playing video games we experience lots of setbacks, obstacles, and failures that are important in building resilience us. With time we learn how to manage our stress levels, and how to control our negative emotions and frustration.
We learn how to bounce back from difficulties. We learn that the problems that look difficult are not that much difficult.
In this way, we learn so many coping strategies from failure. With time we become smart and that smartness can be easily seen in our daily lives.
3. Supporting Mental Health Recovery
Video games offer us a wide variety of different games and environments that act as an easy escape from our daily mental issues such as stress and anxiety. Here we can transform our negative emotions into positive emotions. Video games are always interesting, therefore they increase our focus and attention span.
Overall, video games are very therapeutic in nature. In my point of view, Video games are better than spending time scrolling Instagram reels, because here we are actively engaging but on Instagram, we are passively active.
We feel bad after using social media but we end our video games on a positive note.
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