Do Games Really Affect Your Mental Health

You can always guarantee fun times and engaging moments whenever you play your favorite games, but have you ever asked yourself if these games have any effect on your mental health? It's a proven fact that a lot of the games we play influence how we think and how we manage our lives. This is because we can learn a lot from playing them, whether it's a board game or video game.

So, here are some interesting and important facts about the effect of games on our mental health.

The Mental Benefits

You can rest assured knowing that gaming can positively boost your mental health significantly. The nature of how games are played makes you engaged and immersed heavily in what you're playing. This boosts your mental activity because it stimulates your brain cells, keeping it healthy and sharp. You naturally lose neurons as you age, but playing games helps you retain more brain cells as you grow older because you've trained and strengthened them over the years because of playing. 

Also, studies from various researches on Alzheimer’s have seen excellent results on senior citizens who played games. Their chances of dementia are a lot lower than the people who didn't play any games. So, not only will it make you happy, but it can also help your brain function better and helps you stay more lucid as you grow up.

It Improves Our Skills

Some games can improve our skills in numerous ways. Fun games like Scrabble can provide a lot of benefits to our cognitive skills because it promotes complete concentration and analytical thinking. Even when you find yourself stuck, you can use this tool to form the words you're missing. Not only will you keep the game going, but you will learn new words and further improve your vocabulary. Games like Scrabble have proven to help us concentrate on our daily activities and it can teach us how to strategize and look at different options from various perspectives.

Skills like this can help us significantly at work and in the business world. It can improve our business capabilities and mentally prepare us for tasks that we perform at our jobs, negotiating with other people at the workplace, and coming up with better plans. Our decision-making skills would be quite improved, and we won't second guess ourselves too often. With the right mentality like this and the ability to adapt quickly, then you can achieve a lot of success at work.

Better Tolerance 

You can find yourself having increased tolerance with the people around you, especially if you dislike some of them, this can be possible thanks to gaming. You are bound to find someone you dislike at  work or just can't stand a certain person, however, because you have to be professional and it's the right thing to do, you learn to tolerate this person and work together for the good of your group in-game. This is relatable in real life and at work too because some people might cause you to feel upset and that can hinder you mentally.

It can make you lose focus and you might find it difficult to control your emotions and not listen to logic and your brain. But thanks to gaming, you can train yourself and your mind to be a bigger person and work together for the betterment of your guild/group in the game. You can do the same thing at work to make sure that you stay professional and it wouldn't bother you so much that it makes you lose focus.

It Can Be Therapeutic

Playing a game is considered therapeutic for most people, this means that it could increase the chances of positive structural changes in our brains. When you look closely at mental disorders, you can see that some areas of the brain are affected negatively and that leads to a decrease in size in those affected areas. But when you play games, the deficit that some mental disorders have on our brains would be less because it would lead to a volumetric brain increase. This means fewer mental disorder symptoms and better health.

Gaming can be much more beneficial to us than you think. It can make you solve problems and issues in real life much easier because you’ve trained your mind to handle these types of situations through the games you play. Your cognitive thinking and problem-solving skills would be strong and effective to help you at work or in any situation you might face. So, gaming can be fun, but it's also mentally beneficial to you.