Easing Stress From Screen Time: Gaming Recovery Guide

If you’ve been playing games for a long time, and you’ve been feeling like it hasn’t been the same, you might be experiencing burnout. More severe cases of gaming burnout can be detrimental to your mental and even physical health.

We’re here to help you get through gaming burnout with a few solutions you might want to try out.

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What Is Gaming Burnout?

Gaming burnout, just like any burnout, is caused by mental, emotional, and even physical exhaustion.

Gaming for too long can be taxing on your body, especially if you don’t move around and have bad posture as well. Addiction and dependency can also cause you to feel exhausted mentally and emotionally, especially if you often feel frustrated or angry.

The worst thing you can do when you’re feeling burnt out is not change anything. You’ll get immensely stressed and potentially even depressed. If you’re going through gaming burnout, here are some tips to cope with it:

1. Try Out New Platforms and Game Genres

If you’ve played only a few, or maybe just one type of game for a very long time, there might be a point where nothing surprises you anymore. Nothing feels novel, and the newest release feels predictable to you.

In this case, you might want to try out other games. Maybe try out a genre you never thought you’d ever try before, like going from shooters to MOBAs, or vice versa. Ask a friend to recommend you some games, and try them without assuming that you won’t enjoy them beforehand.

You might even want to try out a different platform. You don’t have to commit and shell out money if it’s out of your reach—you could always try out emulation first if you’ve got a PC, or try out your friend’s PC if you’re coming from a console.

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Of course, there’s also the myriad of retro consoles and handhelds that you can get for cheap. A Sony PSP would be a great deal as you can evenemulate a Game Boy on a PSP , giving you a lot more for your purchase. If you don’t want to buy anything at all, you could alwaysemulate games on your phone .

Who knows, you might discover another genre to sink your hours into.

2. Try Indie Games

Indie games set themselves apart from big mainstream titles as in many cases, they’re incredibly varied and unique. Indie games aren’t a genre, they’re a whole industry filled with passionate gamers trying to create a game they want to play themselves.

You’ll discover fresh new mechanics, visuals, storytelling, and so much more that can’t be found in most games. What’s great is that there’s usually a tightly-knit community behind them with the creator just a message away for any suggestions and improvements.

Indie games can send you down a rabbit hole of hidden treasures with strong storylines, interesting mechanics, or incredible replayability. Check out theseindie games on Nintendo Switch if you want to start somewhere, some of them are also available on PC and other platforms.

3. Set Unique Challenges

Challenges are a great way to get more out of any game besides what the game already gives you. Think of challenges as your own game within the game you’re playing.

These challenges could be things like speedruns, kill challenges, achievement-hunting, and so much more. It might even be as quirky as playing through the whole game capped at 15 FPS. The only limitation to challenges is your imagination.

There are videos out there with people playing shooters on a wheel, Resident Evil on a dance pad, and other silly things. You don’t have to go as far as they do, but if you gather some friends and try it, you’re sure to have an ab-workout from laughing.

If you can’t think of any yet, don’t worry, we have a fewfun gameplay challenges for you to try out.

4. Avoid Games With Addictive Tactics

There are so many games nowadays with the sole purpose of making money. They hook you in and keep you locked in with a constant feeling of FOMO (fear of missing out).

They’re engineered to give you controlled dopamine releases, enough to keep you playing the game and dependent on it to chase that feeling. They use that emotion to either make you shell out money or keep grinding and increasing your playtime. This emotional push and pull can be extremely exhausting, both emotionally and physically—eventually leading to burnout.

This is incredibly prevalent in mobile games—and while mobile games aren’t necessarily all bad, you might want to find out theaddicting features of mobile games to look out for . Gacha games that are practically gambling simulators and games that urge you to pay attention to an “emergency” can take control over your life.

If you have a bad relationship with addicting games, the next tip might be important for you as well.

5. Take a Break

Taking a break is definitely a solution if you’re feeling burnt out, especially if it’s caused by a dependence or addiction.

While you’re stepping away, try to avoid anything gaming-related. Avoid talking about it, thinking about it, or looking at it. Separating yourself is a way for your body and subconscious to know that it’s really taking a break from gaming. It could be as simple as reading books to something like going off-grid like going to the beach or on a camping trip with no reception.

The duration of your break will depend entirely on you. For some people, a day off is enough, but some might want to take longer breaks. If you’re taking a break because of addiction or dependence

6. Take Things Less Seriously

As someone who has hit their table out of frustration in Counter-Strike, taking things less seriously has improved my gaming experience.

Competitive games can get quite toxic, and you could probably relate if you’ve been heavily invested in trying to rank up on a MOBA or a shooter. We can get so focused on improving our skills that losing feels frustrating, possibly even anger-inducing.

Some gamers thrive on that competitive feeling, but it could also be unhealthy. Even professional gamers have to manage their emotions to get the most performance out of themselves. Anger will only cloud your judgment, make you play worse, and ruin the experience.

You can still take games seriously of course, but too much of anything can be detrimental.

Reignite Your Gaming Passion

If you know you want to keep playing but it just doesn’t feel the same anymore, you’re most likely burnt out. No matter how passionate we are about something, too much of it can cause many to feel this way.

You don’t have to feel like your gaming days are over though, you just need to try different things, so you can get back to playing passionately and enjoying what you love again.

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