(2019-09-25) Can You Lessen Anxiety By Playing A Game On Your Phone

Can you lessen anxiety by playing a game on your phone? When Jane McGonigal started feeling anxious as hell 10 years ago, she unwittingly joined a club with 40 million members

McGonigal’s problems started when she suffered a concussion

The object was to recover faster by avoiding “bad guys” that triggered her symptoms (like bright lights) and engaging in “power-ups” that made her feel good (like a walk around the block). She recruited allies — her sister, her husband — to play along

And even though her physical pain persisted for months, she says she suffered less emotional pain within days.

Eager to share her game with others, she rebranded it SuperBetter and developed a smartphone app

SuperBetter may be the app that most explicitly turns battling anxiety into a game, but it’s by no means the only one. The past few years have seen an explosion in such apps — there’s Headspace, Happify, Calm, Mind Ease, MindShift, Personal Zen, and Stop, Breathe & Think, to name a few.

Do these apps actually work to relieve anxiety?

Anxiety sufferers face a lot of barriers when trying to access conventional mental health treatment. Therapy is expensive and time-consuming. Medication often comes with stigma and side effects, and gaining access to it requires going through medical gatekeepers. Gamified apps, by contrast, make treatment seem engaging, portable, destigmatized, prescriptionless, and cheap, if not totally free. Yet very few have been scientifically tested

The SuperBetter website points to the findings of the trial, conducted at the University of Pennsylvania and published in 2015.

Dennis-Tiwary, the Hunter College psychologist, has developed her own anxiety-reducing app, Personal Zen. It’s unlike most other apps in the space in that it makes a game of just one cognitive treatment: attention-bias modification training (ABMT).

In addition to attention training, another useful technique for reducing anxiety is cognitive absorption — just taking your mind off whatever you’re ruminating about. And you know what’s really good for that? Video games. They don’t necessarily need to be games specifically designed to reduce anxiety. Research shows that even good old Tetris or Fortnite can do the trick

Gamification keeps us coming back, but to a point that can actually start to feel addictive, cutting into our time with restorative forces such as friendship or sleep.

McGonigal said she designed SuperBetter in a way that indicates people should use it for about 10 minutes a day, not 10 hours. “We have a recommended dose of engagement: You do three power-ups, do one quest, and battle one bad guy a day.

conducting studies to find out just how brief a session of Personal Zen can be without losing its efficacy

Mind Ease is one of several apps that asks users to rate their anxiety level before and after they complete an exercise

The thing is, after the exercise, I always feel there’s a cognitive bias pushing me to say that I feel better

So, does users’ self-reported decrease in anxiety really reflect more objective progress? Are we actually seeing our anxiety reduced, or are we just winning the game? Perhaps it doesn’t matter if there’s a placebo effect at work, because even so, the effect is positive?