Why You Should Take 90 Days Off Gaming

Gaming Changes the Brain

This is a free chapter preview of Respawn: How to Quit Playing Video Games, Fill the Void and Take Control of Your Life. Purchase the full version here.

Chapter 6:

When you quit playing video games you’ll notice a shift in how you feel.

For the first few days (or even weeks depending on your situation) you tend to have no energy and your mood sucks. You may get irritated easily, experience headaches, or even have dreams about games.

It’s easy to feel like you are going a bit crazy.

This is all normal. When you quit gaming there are many changes that will happen in your life, and these can happen in both your physiology and your environment.

These changes happen because your brain responds to gaming in specific ways. It’s one of the reasons why you have gamed as much as you have, and this has to do with a chemical in your brain called dopamine.

In the brain, dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter — a chemical released by nerve cells to send signals to other nerve cells. The brain includes several distinct dopamine systems, one of which plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior.

Have you heard of dopamine before? Gaming provides rapid dopamine release. This explains why when you play games, the type of stimulation you receive is so much different than what you experience in other activities (and why you can find other activities to be boring in comparison.)

That doesn’t mean other activities are actually boring or that you don’t enjoy them, it just means that the type of stimulation in games is different than the type of stimulation in other activities.

I’m not going to make a villain out of game designers, but games are designed, intentionally, with the best practices of gamification and reward-motivated psychology. They are designed to get you (and keep you) hooked.

Rapid dopamine release can be dangerous, and even addictive:

Researchers analyzed the levels of dopamine release in the brains of about 20 ex-drug users and non-users as they played a motor-bike riding computer game. They found that video game playing affected dopamine release at levels similar to those exhibited by using drugs like ecstasy. These results imply that excessive computer game playing may resemble substance abuse or addiction in that it may be a strategy that children use to cope with negative emotions like frustration, fear, and stress. ¹ 1. Nature: Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game ×

When you game you experience dopamine surges that provide an environment of hyper-stimulation and continued consumption of this can override our natural mechanisms causing structural changes in our brain.

That was a bit wordy but what you need to know is that the type of stimulation you get from gaming is excessive and with continued consumption over time your brain will experience structural changes.

The science, as detailed in this video by Gary Wilson is the following:

Excess chronic consumption (dopamine surges) cause a binge mechanism (excess Delta-Fosb accumulates) which cause cravings for more which cause continued consumption which cause structural brain changes (detailed below).

The more you game, the more you want to game, the more your brain wants to game, so the more you game, and then structural brain changes.

3 structural changes to our brain:

1. Numbed pleasure response: Every day pleasures no longer satisfy us.
2. Hyper-reactivity to gaming: Every thing else is boring, but gaming is super exciting.
3. Willpower erosion: Due to changes in our frontal cortex.

These changes help explain why moving on from gaming can be so difficult.

I bet you relate to the following experience:

• Life just doesn’t satisfy you like gaming does.
• Everything else is boring anyways, especially compared to the fun you have gaming.
• And if you were going to quit, you just don’t really have the motivation to.

So what’s interesting about this is that for so long you’ve likely thought that either you just really enjoyed gaming (it was your passion) and thought other activities just weren’t really that much fun or at least, just not for you.

Plus, you were just one of those who struggled with motivation anyways. But what I want you to know is that this is likely not true. These experiences can be happening because of structural changes in your brain due to excessive gaming.

With greater power comes greater responsibility.

So now that we know this we have the ability to leverage our knowledge to respond differently. Remember, our response is our responsibility.

Research shows it will take up to 90 days for our brain chemistry to rewire back to normal dopamine sensitivity levels. And during this 90 days we may experience any of the following:

• Compulsions, cravings and/or urges to game
• Withdrawals, mood swings and/or irritability
• Feelings of apathy, anxiety and/or depression
• Headaches, lethargy and/or lack of willpower
• And really anything else. We each respond differently

I found the detox-type symptoms to be the worst during the first two weeks.

But at some point, you’ll begin to notice a shift happening, one where you have more energy than you normally do (even when you were playing games!), you’re more optimistic, your cravings are less frequent (they always come and go) and you may even experience a feeling of not being that interested in games at all.

This is your detox in action!

Ready to commit to 90 days without games?

Then I invite you to purchase the full version of Respawn. Respawn will walk you through the five steps you need to take to set your detox up for success:

1. You need to know how to breakthrough the psychology that keeps you gaming.
2. You need to know how to fill the void and avoid being bored.
3. You need to know how to stop wasting your time and be more productive.
4. You need to know how to deal with the urges and cravings that cause a relapse.
5. You need to know the key mindsets to ensure your detox is a success.

Respawn is the ultimate guide to quit playing video games

“The best decision I have made in my life, honestly.” – David

Frequently Asked Questions

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