The reward circuitry in your brain is one of the reasons video games are fun. Your brain releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which regulates the feeling of pleasure from video games. When dopamine activity happens in the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure center of your brains, you feel joy.
When you play video games, your brain releases a constant dopamine supply, with occasional random bursts. Over time, your brain gets used to this steady supply of dopamine, and the nucleus accumbens requires even more dopamine release for gaming to feel fun. That prevents you from enjoying anything that is not as stimulating as a video game. Even if you try to give up gaming, your mind will attract you to other forms of stimulation, such as browsing YouTube or scrolling through social media.
That is the height of dopamine addiction. If you let your gaming habit get out of control, this is a real possibility. Unlike the nucleus accumbens, we cannot map the triumph circuit onto the brain as easily. The triumph circuit makes us feel good when we overcome a challenge. That has shaped social psychology — we as human beings value people who overcome odds. Video games have hacked this circuit. They have found a way to deliver all the psychological rewards that we often seek to gain from the real world.
What we want from video games is often very similar to what we want from life. We want excitement, adventures, friendships, victories, and status. Games have found a way to serve that to us with little effort on our end. When we experience fear, worry, shame, or other negative emotions, the amygdala becomes active. The amygdala is the part of that brain that governs these negative emotions. It is also integral to our learning circuitry since it creates connections to the hippocampus, the center for learning in our brain.
However, fMRI studies have shown that if we start to play video games when our amygdala is active, it calms down. The effects of this are two-fold:. Playing video games is not an unhealthy activity on its own. Here are some health issues that can arise due to video game addiction. Gaming requires strenuous, repetitive motion on the hands and wrists sometimes for hours on end. These motions can cause inflammation and injury. Here are some RSIs that you can develop from gaming:.
Video games do not necessarily lead to mental health problems. However, you can be at high risk for video game addiction if you already suffer from depression, anxiety, or other mental illness. This is due to the way video games affect your brain. A study that looked at the effect of gaming on mental health found that problematic gaming habits correlated with maladaptive coping strategies, negative emotions, low self-esteem, a preference for solitude, and poor school performance.
While one of the benefits of gaming is an increase in the ability to concentrate, excessive gaming may lead to the opposite. A study done on children and adolescents from 12 different schools in Singapore found a bidirectional causality in play between video games and attention deficit disorders. While excessive gaming could contribute to a lack of long-term concentration ability, it is also likely that children who already show signs of attention deficit disorders would be more attracted to video games, due to the variety of experiences they can provide.
Browse our products and bookmark for quick access.. Gaming is a common source of entertainment and a hobby for people of all ages from all around the world. However, there have been some negative connotation attached to the idea of gaming and significant research has been carried out to better understand the impact of gaming on both children and adults.
Luckily for gamers, results have been divisive. There are many upsides to gaming, but an addiction to the habit could negatively impact your health. We take a look at the common effects of gaming:. When engaged in a game, a player will need to coordinate their visual, audial and physical movement at the same time.
For example: an action game may require you to be able to move your joystick or keys while looking at the various features on your screen such as energy levels, oncoming adversaries, remaining ammunitions, available time as well as other factors.
These are all vital to winning. For example: an action game may require you to be able to move your joystick or keys while looking at the various features. Playing video games help enhance visual and audial memory.
The player is required to read or listen to the instructions which might only be provided at the beginning of the game, thus the need to remember them throughout the entire game. Mastery of the keys on your keyboard is also proof of motion memory.
Individuals who play video games frequently can process these stimuli faster than others. In recent years, many modern education institutions incorporate video games as part of their teaching methodology.
Most of these games enhance cognitive and creative skills as well as learning through a fun and entertaining format. Co-player as well as multi-player online games enable players to work together to achieve a common goal.
With a shared objective, the game encourages players to forge a strong team through good communication skills. These often result in players developing meaningful relationships with each other beyond the screen.
On the less rosy side of gaming, addiction to the habit can be an issue. Due to the increasing social issues stemming from gaming addiction, World Health Organisation WHO has classified gaming disorders in its latest list of International Classification of Diseases. How can you tell when your gaming habit has become too much? You could ask yourself the CAGE Questions frequently used to detect alcohol addiction with a few modifications such as replacing the word "drinking" with "gaming" and altering the fourth or "E" question :.
Another important check is the duration of the gaming behaviours, in this case "over a period of at least 12 months. Ultimately, video gaming can be a good or a bad thing, depending on your gaming habits. Moderation is key. Don't let gaming replace human interactions or let you lose track of reality. Keep track of your mood, why you are gaming and how it may be affecting you, and reap the benefits of gaming by ensuring that you are the one holding the controller instead of letting the game control you.
The above articles are intended for informational purposes only. Just as the average age of gamers has changed, so has gaming itself. While some people have a more elaborate set up at home, many others turn to their smartphones or tablets for intermittent gaming throughout the day.
This evolution has made casual gaming an increasingly popular form of entertainment, causing video game addiction to become a growing concern.
This concern may seem substantiated, but research shows that very few people actually qualify as having an addiction. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that roughly million people in the U. Some research has actually shown positive connections between playing video games and the effects it can have on behavior and on various parts of the brain. Studies have shown that playing video games can have a positive effect on attention.
Both sustained attention and selective attention — being able to focus on a specific piece of information while tuning out unimportant distractors — can be improved by playing video games. Other research has shown that gaming can increase the size and efficiency of brain regions associated with visuospatial skills — the ability to identify visual and spatial relationships among objects.
Being active is a critical aspect of our overall health. Not only does it keep us physically healthy, it also affects mental health positively by helping improve brain function , increasing endorphins, and it can reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. Studies have shown that people with strong social ties to friends, family, and their community, are happier and live longer than people without those ties.
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