Feeling Overstimulated? Here's 3 Steps to Find your Calm with Games
Games can help balance your mood
Feeling overstimulated is very uncomfortable. It makes me feel jittery, confused, and angry. I just want to run away and hide. But I notice if I run to my room and sit, sometimes my mind replays the issue over and over, and it’s like i never left it at all.
This is where games come in.
Clear your space & Lower your lighting
Find a comfortable place where you can play a game alone. It can be at your desk or in bed with a handheld device.
Clear the area of any surrounding mess, this will help your mind by giving it a sense of openness. It’s like a breath of fresh air in an open meadow.
Lower your lighting by closing blinds, using one light, a night light, or warm color tones in your space. Don’t forget to lower the brightness of your screen to help your eyes in the darker environment.
By lowering the lights you create a calm atmosphere, making your space feel more soothing. It also helps lower stimulation by removing visual distractions.
Use headphones for comfort sounds or noise blocking
Noise cancelling headphones will be your best friend in these moments. Just make sure you let others know you won’t be able to hear them if they call for you. You deserve the time to get away even if it’s only for 5-10 minutes.
Grab your headphones, put on some nature sounds, white noise, or no noise at all and take a deep breath. This can help decrease feelings of stress and help improve focus.
Find your uncommon cozy game
Start up your go to comfort game. This is a game that lets your mind turn off in the most enjoyable way. It can be a game with repetitive motions. A game that doesn’t easily cause you stress or one that doesn’t necessarily have a story or one you care about. It could be as simple as a game whose menu music you enjoy. Staying in the menu with calming music coming through your headphones is a perfect way to decompress.
Find what works for you and breathe.
Take a deep breath every few moments and exhale the feelings.
I personally love melting away in Diablo 3 or fishing in Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft. These games are easy and mindless for me, which helps me calm down when I’m feeling overstimulated.
So next time you're feeling overstimulated, try lowering your lights, throwing on some headphones and drifting off into your uncommon cozy game.
Let me know some games that help you calm down in the comments.
💖
Good points!
I'd also add, from my experience: find a quiet time. Like... are you a night owl, like me? Then 1-3am work amazingly. Or are you a morning person? To get cozy with a very early morning hot coffee, before everyone else wakes.
Find and set a time! It really helps :)
One game that still brings me a great sense of calm has to be Minecraft! I used to always play it on PC with the older versions back from 2014 or so (I think it was ver. 1.7?), but lately I'll just launch it up on my PlayStation to chill for awhile!
I never got too invested in multiplayer or playing in hard survival modes, but I always love being able to jump in and create whatever I can think of! It was a calming experience to find materials to mine or collect, and being able to just get away from the real world for a bit to design something unique in a new world! Sometimes, it's not even about creating something — just spending time to mine ore, work on some farming, or fishing is all I need to decompress some! Oh, and I always made sure to leave the music on, as that greatly amplified the peace that game was able to provide!
Thanks for sharing your write-up Leefa!