How to Deal With Stress Without Gaming

One of the main reasons we game is to escape from the stress in our life. So how do you deal with stress without using gaming as your outlet? Press play:

Using gaming as a way to deal with stress is definitely something I relate to, especially during all of the bullying I experienced growing up. Anytime I needed a break, gaming was there for me.

Now there are two really important things to understand about stress:

• There’s a difference between feeling stress and feeling different emotions.

After we quit gaming we tend to become a lot more aware of our emotions, and this is a good thing. When we’re gaming we’re numb to the emotions we’re experiencing, but when it comes to dealing with our emotions it’s important to identify what the specific emotion is, which will allow us to deal with it in a specific way.

• Stress is a perspective.

Most of us are a lot more stressed out than we really need to be, and that’s just because we have a narrow mindset. Stress tends to come when we have a perceived lack of control and when we don’t know what to do about whatever situation we’re in.

One of the reasons why I love to travel so much is because there’s no way to avoid situations where you have no control. Now this can be frustrating sometimes but the benefit is that it forces you to learn to take the things you need to take seriously, seriously, and to let go of the things you can’t control.

With the things we can’t control it’s easy to get stressed out about them… but we have no control so what’s the point of being stressed out or frustrated? It’s not like having those emotions is going to change the situation, so being stressed is really just going to drain your energy and hurt your ability to focus. Many times when we feel stressed there are easy solutions to start dealing with the situation.

Stress can happen and it is what it is, and you can’t always control things but you can control how you respond.

One of the reasons why people feel stressed is because it makes you feel alive, and this comes from your human need of significance – to feel powerful, in control and to feel like we matter. In our life we will fulfill this need in healthy or unhealthy ways, in conscious or unconscious ways, and stress is an easy way to fulfill it… even though this doesn’t really serve us.

So instead of just living life on autopilot like this, we want to conscious choose how we want to feel. I want to feel amazing every day because feeling good feels good. So now that I’ve made this decision, it’s up to me to take responsibility to create an experience in the world to feel this way.

So when things do happen, these are the three steps you want to take:

1. Take a breath.
2. Shift back into gratitude.
3. Create an action plan.

Next, you want to complete the following two exercises:

1. Set a timer for five minutes and journal on how would you feel in an ideal day.
2. Take out two pieces of paper. One one piece, write down everything you’ve done in the last two weeks. On the next piece, separate it into two columns, Positive and Negative. Now take the things you’ve done and filter them based on what’s contributed (+) to you feeling the way you want to feel and what hasn’t (-). Now in the negative column, start eliminating them or shifting them into the positive.

Life is too short to not feel amazing all the time. It’s up to each of us to design our life in a way that serves us feeling that way and to cut out the shit in our life that doesn’t.