If you’ve just come off an exhausting day at work, are you really doing yourself any favors with a few hours of “Valorant”?
Playing video games is my favorite pastime. I always look forward to the few hours of me-time I get after an eventful day at work, whether it’s a competitive round of “League of Legends” or a journey through an immersive single-player campaign like “Final Fantasy” or “Kingdom Come: Deliverance.”
Currently, with the upcoming release of “Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” I’ve found myself revisiting past entries such as” Unity” and “Syndicate.”
However, I’ve observed that the few hours of gaming I get don’t always produce the relaxing sensation I’m searching for. It’s not like I’ve been playing stressful titles and have gotten annoyed at my teammates or its sheer difficulty—in fact, I’ve been enjoying my limited video game sessions. And yet, after a weekend filled with ‘relaxing’ gameplay to recover from a busy work week, I’ve come out of it more exhausted and drained than before.
Why is that? Aren’t video games supposed to produce beneficial results?
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Research suggests that a healthy amount of gaming helps improve the brain’s cognitive functions, from enhanced hand-eye coordination to reinforced memory retainment. A journal article by Isabela Granic, Adam Lobel, and Rutger C. M. E. Engels indicates that these can also positively affect your mood and ward off anxiety. These effects were also identified to manifest across a variety of genres from rhythm games and RPGs to horror and racing titles.
However, video games’ heavy utilization of the brain may also be the reason why it is not always the best option for rest.
The rest we need vs the one we want
In a research titled “Differential effects of wakeful rest, music and video game playing on working memory performance in the n-back task,” the authors found that using video games for rest impaired one’s work performance level. In a sense, video games were too effective in engaging and stimulating the brain—so much so that their participants had difficulty focusing on their tasks afterward.
“We have incorrectly combined the concepts of sleep and rest and in doing so, we have dumbed down rest to the point it appears ineffective,” said internal medicine physician Saundra Dalton-Smith during her TEDxAtlanta talk.
Dalton-Smith outlined seven types of rest: mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and physical—and explained how many of us assume we have ‘rested’ because we slept long or in several cases (including mine), played their favorite game.
She further discussed how we inadvertently create our own rest deficits by incorrectly assigning a specific kind of downtime to address a totally different point of exhaustion. “If your definition of rest is comprised of sleeping or lying on the couch binge-watching an entire season of a TV series, you leave yourself open to chronic exhaustion.”
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To put it plainly, if you’ve just come off an exhausting day at work where you used plenty of mental energy—are you really doing yourself good by further stressing your brain for a few hours of “Valorant”?
Anna Lannstrom, head of the Philosophy Department at Stonehill College, puts it best: “We’re not paying attention to what we’re doing or how it makes us feel. And so, we keep going onto social media even when the posts stress us out; we dive into the Ben and Jerry despite not being hungry; and we skip the walk that would clear our heads.”
Video games are in no way the enemy and I can’t guarantee that I won’t boot up the console the moment I finish this story. But the point stands, our bodies call for a specific type of rest for a specific need. And though video games are a form of relaxation, they are not the be all, end all for the exhaustion we’re looking to alleviate.
