How Your Need For Accomplishment Keeps You Gaming
One of the main reasons you play video games is because it fulfills your need for accomplishment. Watch the video below to learn more:
In my article on How to Quit Playing Video Games FOREVER I shared how gaming fulfilled four different needs I had:
- Temporary Escape
- Social
- Constant Measurable Growth
- Challenge
Now if you look closely, both constant measurable growth and challenge represent a need for accomplishment.
But does gaming actually make you feel a sense of accomplishment?
I don’t think so. I think it makes you feel a false sense of accomplishment.
Although you’re genuinely accomplishing things in the game itself – and I’ll never be someone who will take those accomplishments away from you – gaming makes you feel like you’re accomplishing more than that – it makes you feel like you’re accomplishing things in “real life.”
But what happens is you sit down at your computer, you’re gaming away, you’re beating levels, beating bosses, destroying n00bs, feeling really good about yourself, you’re accomplishing a lot.
But as soon as you turn the game off, you stand up, you look around and your life is in the exact same place – which for most of you reading this it probably isn’t a very good place.
I know mine wasn’t.
I was depressed, I had few friends, I was constantly put in the friend zone, I dropped out of high school twice and I was pretending to have jobs.
My life was a disaster.
In the game I felt really good, I felt that sense of accomplishment, and then I would look around and my life would be in the exact same place.
That was a hard reality to face and it didn’t make me feel very good. So instead of dealing with that, I would just sit back down, put my headset back on, turn the game back on and keep playing.
Why deal with your situation when you can just escape into video games instead?
The reason I share this story is because for many of you, this is your reality right now. You’re gaming and in the game you feel really great about who you are and how you’re showing up, but then as soon as you turn it off your life is in the exact same place.
If you’re reading this and you want to quit gaming or you’ve quit gaming and you’re kind of procrastinating, maybe you’re relapsing, I want to share with you that to quit gaming is a lot less about a decision to not play games, and it’s a lot more about a decision to start fixing the different areas of your life that you need to fix.
Part of why I recommend a 90 day detox is because 90 days is actually enough time for you to really start making some progress in other areas of your life, so you could improve the way you deal with stress, you could improve your social skills, you could even go on a date or two.
These are things that are very possible for you if you remove your crutch, which is gaming, to put yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to look at your life for what it is and where it’s at, and to start improving it.
In the journey, in the process of facing your life for what it is right now, you will learn a lot about yourself.
Guess what, stress is going to happen in your life and you can’t always avoid it. You actually have to learn how to engage with it, how to process it.
Sure… you can numb yourself from it, whether that’s with video games or porn or sex or drugs or watching TV for six hours or browsing reddit or binging on YouTube.
But these are just activities and if you want to live a meaningful life you have to be willing to do the harder work – facing reality – and learning to improve your life in the ways that you need to improve it.
And in that process you can find a lot more meaning, you can grow a lot and eventually by doing the work, day by day by day, you end up coming a far way and that’s what I’ve seen in my life.
Right now I’m really happy with my life and you can make that same progress because my life hasn’t always been this way but by facing it and using that as an opportunity to learn and grow I’ve been able to make a lot of progress and you’ll be able to do that too.
To begin your journey, start with the 90 day detox.
You can also join our community on the forum. The community is a great way to have more encouragement and support and the community’s growing a lot.
Finally, just remember: you can pretend that you’re accomplishing a lot by continuing to play video games but when you turn off the Xbox and you look around and your life is still a complete mess, you get to choose whether you face reality or not.
And there’s a lot of power in stepping up to make the right choice for your own life. When you take that kind of responsibility, magic happens. That’s why I always say that to quit gaming and go through the detox can be a turning point for you.
So I hope that resonates and if it does, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.
If you’re still gaming and you are ready to quit, commit to your 90 day detox today and grab a copy of Respawn to help you with it.