Phone Games that Reduce Stress and Anxiety
With quarantine lingering on, many turn to physical gadgets to relieve stress, from fidget spinners to home gym equipment. In this post, we’ll introduce a handful of innovative ways to manage your stress through technology and apps. If you’ve ever played Candy Crush, you might have seen a “Swipe the stress away” slogan. We often hear that being on our phones often increases the stress and anxiety that’s already existent in our day to day lives. However, there are now many games on the market to reduce our daily lives’ stress and anxiety. Some of these games include puzzles and strategy games that help us shift our focus. Other games utilize clinically-proven techniques for improving mental health in mind during the gameplay. We hope to give you a few pocket-friendly resources for tackling anxiety and stress.
First, we’re going to cover some phone games that allow you to focus on puzzles and use critical thinking skills to solve problems as a distraction and opportunity to step away from intrusive thoughts. Classic games like Candy Crush provide various puzzles and objectives that increase in difficulty as you move forward. If you are looking for a distraction from real-life, solving puzzles in a game is an excellent alternative.
Other puzzle and strategy games like Sudoku, initially filled out on paper with a pencil years ago via workbooks, inflight magazines, and newspapers, are now available on your phone. Sudoku provides a logical, number-placement puzzle for those who love to engage in critical thinking. There are now many apps that host hundreds and thousands of sudoku puzzles for you to play.
Other classic games like minesweeper and jigsaw puzzles now have phone app-driven versions to help you delve into a technology puzzle. Before choosing to play a strategy game to reduce stress and anxiety, it’s essential to recognize whether this will help you or create additional stress for you at the moment. If a strategy game will make things worse for you, read on for some more phone apps that utilize less critical thinking to manage stress and anxiety.
Next, we’re going to dig into some games designed with mental healthcare techniques in mind. These games may require less skill or focus than other games, but the goal isn’t to win; the goal is to reduce stress and anxiety. Games like Prune for iOS and Android have you shape a bonsai tree by removing unnecessary limbs. Alternatively, craft it with your creativity, provide no real goal other than an outlet for creativity and a task. Prune can inspire you to knock things off your to-do list or prune your life and remove harmful and unnecessary relationships, tasks, or problems that haunt your day-to-day. Ken Zoi allows you to collect a pond of koi fish, there’s no big goal, but this relaxing activity can help you destress from your day. Who doesn’t love watching beautiful ponds of koi fish?
Apps like SuperBetter turn managing your anxiety into a game. SuperBetter came to life after game designer Jane McGonigal was bedridden and brought down by a major concussion. She used her skills to design Jane the Concussion Slayer to help her manage the depression and anxiety brought on by her concussion. Eager to help others, she turned her game into SuperBetter to help others. SuperBetter comes complete with a cheery, bright color scheme and real-life tasks to help you conquer bad guys like intrusive thoughts, catastrophizing, and black and white thinking. You enlist real-life friends as your “allies” for “quests” that include positive activities like deep breathing or exercising. These in-app challenges provide real-life positive outlets to help you manage anxiety and conquer negative thoughts.
We hope at least one of these games and options can help you reduce stress and anxiety using a tool you already usually have with you all the time, your phone. We know that day to day life is stressful, and healthy outlets and coping mechanisms are crucial to a positive mindset balanced life. Don’t forget to breathe and take some moments for yourself today.
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