Gaming and Mental Health

Maintaining Mental Wellness While Navigating the Largest Entertainment Industry in the World

The highest grossing entertainment industry globally is gaming which includes PC (personal computer), consoles (Switch, Playstation, Xbox, etc.), and mobile (phones). The outlet of videogames presents a robust and complex offering to individuals for not just passing time but adding value to their lives. This value can positively and negatively influence the psychology of the player which presents a necessary task: to engage with intentionally so that wellness is maintained. 

Potential Impacts of Gaming

Positive 

• Personal Expression/Exploration - Identity development through endlessly creative outlets offers safe ways to develop self-confidence and awareness. 

• Community - Many games include community connection as a mechanism of engagement leading to new experiences with new people who build out our social support network. 

• Dynamic Problem Solving - Games that rely on physics or social simulations, are time limited, or require complex hand-eye coordination make for novel situations that challenge problem-solving skills and can support resource management skills in real time.

• Education - Gaming is increasingly becoming a modality to offer “hands-on” or interactive learning to support better educational outcomes. VR is even being utilized in medical schools for teaching surgical skills (Jiang et. al., 2022).

• Cognitive Decline Prevention - Growing evidence shows that games can help reduce decline of certain cognitive faculties as we age such as memory [Clemenson et. al. 2020].

• Eudamonia - On top of the relaxation or pleasure based effects of gaming there are also games which seem to offer truly meaningful experiences and forms of self-actualization (Ballou et. al., 2025)

Negative

• Escapism - Hiding from problems, people, or responsibilities and in doing so causing a reduction in quality of life. 

• Addiction - Whether from nature or nurture individuals can overspend on their gaming libraries, peripherals, or microtransactions in an attempt to solve unrelated internal dissonance.

• Emotional Dysregulation - Detachment from immediate consequence or belief in anonymity can lead to extreme behaviors and reactions such as the evolution from social toxicity (aggressive behaviors) to emotional toxicity (internal dysregulation) and eventually to physical toxicity (high blood pressure, physical outbursts, etc.).

• Safety - Being tricked, scammed, or worse resulting in unsafe situations or anxious avoidance of them. 

• Manipulation - Certain gaming content can influence an individual's morals, values, and ethics towards more extreme sides and encourage actions not aligned with safe or appropriate behaviors. 

A Web of Psychological Influence

Across all of these theorized, researched, or observed effects on people who game we know the relationship is not a simple input/output where if you play a game one of those effects will occur. These effects interact with the psychology of the player before, during, and after engagement based on the situational variables in place and their relational balance with other simultaneous effects. For example, a teen who was raised with poor financial management skills (nurture) and an addictive personality (nature) may over-spend on a racing simulator (lack of regulation or executive functioning) which negatively affects their financial wellness (increased anxiety). They start playing an online game and come across a variety of other players who can be either encouraging or discouraging leading to either simply increasing anger in the immediate moment and/or the development of emotional management skills and over time filtering themselves into a more positive community. They develop an understanding of racing (cognitive skills development such as persistence, patience, adaptation, problem solving, etc.) such that they begin to attend real life events (identity development and socialization) and assimilate into a local community (protective factor against isolation). Their addictive personality leads to overspending on real world vehicle parts while an economic crisis puts them back into financial trouble (anxiety, depression, fatigue) so they return to primarily online car culture games (temperance). The saga of this example illustrates, though highly simplified, how the complexity of gaming choice can add opportunities for both healthy and unhealthy changes and exacerbates both positive and negative psychological capacities within an individual. 

Choose Your Own Adventure

There is no one direction or path that guarantees mental health when it comes to gaming. Not only are there near infinite forms of engagement with this entertainment, there are infinite possibilities of how those forms interact with each other while the gamer and gaming industry are themselves always changing. As with most things it is a matter of viewing gaming as a tool with a responsibility to use it wisely. Being regularly self-reflective of how gaming has impacted your mental health is critical. Have you become more confident and adaptable? Have you found new friends or community to help you through hard times? Did you carry a bad mood into the rest of your day because of a bad experience in a game that morning? Are you getting less quality sleep because of your gaming session’s proximity to bedtime? Have you learned new skills? Have you been able to relax more? All of these questions are such ways that engaging in a reflective practice can guide healthier choices whether they validate positive impacts or illuminate the negative ones. Then it is your choice of what to do or what changes to make based on that insight. 

Seeking Help and Supporting Others 

If you find yourself or a loved one appearing as though there is an unhealthy relationship with gaming it may be worthwhile to seek out support. This can look practically like leaning on a trusted other to discuss your concerns, find ways to spend more time with your social support network, creatively adjust your schedule to reduce game time, learn new skills, find new hobbies, etc. If it seems like the source of the concern requires more than just redirecting attention then talking with a professional to explore those deeper reasons of how your mind is affected by or why it is dependent on gaming might be best. There is no shame to be had about wanting to improve our wellness in relation to gaming. In fact, it can be an exciting medium with which to understand ourselves better. 

Healthy Gaming

Gaming will continue to be a heavily used outlet for entertainment across the globe. It is a hammer; it can be a tool for destruction or a tool for creation in terms of our mental health. There are so many ways in which it can enrich our lives but just as many ways it can degrade it. Community, adaptability, regulation, and education are just some of those positive offerings but isolation, dysfunction, dysregulation, and manipulation can turn us toward a very difficult lifestyle to maintain. To navigate this web of influence we simply cannot rely on knowing everything about every game; we have to build personal resilience through regular self-reflection to confidently and appropriately respond to the changing landscape. In doing so we can more healthily evaluate our needs and optimal ways to avoid mental maladaptation while enjoying the beauty of this outlet for entertainment and meaning making.

At RAFT Counseling, we want to support your efforts towards your mental health goals with compassion and resilience as we all learn to healthily engage with the world and this medium of entertainment. If you or a loved one needs that support simply visit our website or contact us to get connected with our team to help you on your mental health journey.

Sources for Further Reading

• Ballou, N., Hakman, T., Vuorre, M., Magnusson, K., & Przybylski, A. K. (2025). How do video games affect mental health? A narrative review of 13 proposed mechanisms.Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 6(2), 123–143. https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000152
• Clemenson G, et al. Enriching hippocampal memory function in older adults through video games. Behavioural Brain Research. 2020;390:112667. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2020.112667.
• Jiang H, Vimalesvaran S, Wang JK, Lim KB, Mogali SR, Car LT. Virtual Reality in Medical Students' Education: Scoping Review. JMIR Med Educ. 2022 Feb 2;8(1):e34860. doi: 10.2196/34860. PMID: 35107421; PMCID: PMC8851326.