Written by You are neck deep in a video gaming session. It’s been hours since you moved anything other than your hands. You are sitting comfortably with a handy bag of chips near you, and a double sized energy drink to wash it down.
You have things to do in the real world, but what is happening in-game is more pressing at the moment. You just need to play for a little bit longer; you just need a little more time to get to a good end point.
Yet, you never actually get there do you? That end point never really exists, a good time to stop the game is illusive. There is always a new point to get to, a new ranking to achieve, a new game to play.
And therefore we sit and play countless games, over and over and over again, until all we’ve really achieved is poor health, all in the name of entertainment, in the name of gaming.
Survival of the Sittest
Before we walked, we crawled. Before we crawled, we sat. Before we sat, we were healthy.
From the earliest moments in our childhood, we learn to sit. Before we move on to more advanced body movements, sitting is our first balance mastery.
From there we learn to crawl, then walk, and ultimately run, all through that first step of learning to sit.
The thing is, that once we are up, we cannot sit still. A baby moves at all times when it’s awake.
So, why is it that at the peak of our physical growth and excellence, we are put into classrooms, unable to move much, throughout our adolescence?
As adults, we have a great deal of careers revolving around the use of the sacred chair, almost obsessively keeping us from using our bodies to their full potential for our entire lives.
Let’s not forget that the majority of our entertainment requires us to sit, as well. This, of course, includes playing video games.
We did not evolve to sit for long periods of time, let alone day in and day out. We are not like our ape cousins regarding exercise. All evolutionary indicators reject the notion that we should sit for long periods of time as a lifestyle if we are to maintain good health. Good health means being free of disease.
This sedentary lifestyle can cause a list of endless health issues starting with weight gain, poor posture, muscle atrophy, and for men, lower sperm count. Even worse, sitting for long periods of time daily can also drastically increase your risk of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, cancer, anxiety, and depression.
In other words, the comfort you live, and often times are addicted to, is not helping your quality of life in any way. And for what? To live in a fake adventure world or to be an above average esports competitor? To control a healthy character in-game yet be unhealthy out of game?
I’ve been there and one day I finally had to ask myself if my entertainment was more important than my own health.
What Is More Important To You?
What is more important to you, your entertainment or your health? This is the starting point of your journey.
If entertainment is more important, then you will be very happy that you didn’t pay for this guide as it will serve you no purpose.
If health is more important, great! Read on as I go deeper into the health problems caused by sitting and gaming too much, how they might affect you, and solutions to remedy these problems and create a healthy gamer lifestyle.
The Body Inflation Equation
This section is about the basic weight gain process. “What goes in, must come out” does not always apply here.
It is simple: every moment you are sitting and gaming you are not using much energy. In a survival scenario, this is great. But since you are playing video games, not somewhere starving, this greatly increases your ability to gain weight. You gain weight when your caloric intake is more than your caloric usage.
Calories in – Calories used = x
If x > 0, you gain weight. If x < 0, you lose weight.
Generally, any calories that you do not use go into your fat cells. Everything you eat has a certain amount of calories and everything you do uses a certain amount of calories. It is as simple and complicated as that.
What gets complicated is trying to figure out how many calories your body burns naturally when at rest and how much you burn with physical activity. This would be near impossible to measure.
What is important to understand is if you are not using your body, you are not burning any extra calories. So, depending on how many calories you are eating, you may be adding weight.
When you play video games, and sitting, you are not burning many calories. So, depending on how much food you are eating, these calories may be adding up.
Keep this up for a few weeks to years, and your fat cells will get bigger and bigger. Before you know it, you will be overweight, the true start of health dysfunction. If you don’t change things soon, and go a little further, you will become obese.
Nothing good comes from being obese if you are looking to feel good and be healthy. I mean, did King Hippo ever win in Punch-Out? Most of the health issues listed here can be a consequence of being overweight or obese alone, without ever gaming.
So, the solution to weight gain is the simplest yet most difficult thing to achieve: eat less than you use or use more than you eat. Consume less calories and you will lose weight, though it will not generally be fast. I’m not telling you to starve yourself, just to think in terms of numbers.
Like if you normally eat around 3000 calories a day and hover around the same weight, dropping it down to 2000 will help you lose weight. This is a first step after all.
The second step is doing more physical activity since that will burn your stored calories as well as what you are eating. I go into this more later in this guide.
WEIGHT LOSS RESOURCES
Weight Loss Calculator – A great weight loss calculator that not only calculates all of your information, but also allows you to enter a goal date on a calendar to see how many calories you need to lose weight by that time.
Calories to Gain Weight – A solid calculator on weight gain. Yes, this link is here so you can reflect on your current choices based on different parameters.
There are other big variables to weight loss and weight gain, from different types of diets and foods you eat, sodium intake, added chemicals, body size, physical activity, gender, and even your age.
But this is a beginner’s guide and simplicity is important here. Just keep this formula in mind and later we will deal with diet and nutrition.
The Domino Effect of Sitting Too Long
Once you have one health problem, it influences or creates another, then that new one creates another, and so on and so forth and so on and so forth…
Health In-Game and In-You
Weight gain is just the beginning of what the video game lifestyle has to offer to our health if we are sitting too much. See, sitting for long periods of time increases our risk of heart disease. These include coronary heart disease, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and congenital heart disease.
Heart disease is the leading killer of people in the world. According to a study by Loughborough University and the University of Leicester in 2011, sedentary behavior increases the risk of heart disease by nearly 150%. Playing video games for long periods of time is sedentary behavior!
Remember, if you are sitting all day at school or work and then come home and sit all night, be it gaming, reading, watching TV, eating, or chatting, you are sitting a lot.
In doing this, you are increasing your risk for many metabolic syndromes which in turn also raise your chances of having heart disease!
See a pattern here?
Don’t forget that you are also slowing down your blood flow, potentially increasing your blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood clotting chances, which directly increase your risk for having a stroke.
On top of that, you are burning less fat with your muscles and allowing that to increase your heart clogging chances, too.
As mentioned before, you burn less calories naturally while sedentary, slowing down your metabolism, which means that you are speeding up your weight gain potential.
This also hurts your blood sugar regulation, adding to the fact that all of the above are already the main prerequisites to creating insulin resistance, better known as type 2 diabetes. Actually, a 112% increase in this risk, according to that same study above, just by living sedentary.
So, now you know what the sitting effects of gaming excessively are on the heart and blood system. But the dominos don’t stop there. Lung, uterine, and colon cancers are also linked to sitting too long, too often.
Speaking of organs, and as an important side note for men, this lifestyle will decrease your fertility. Trust me, if you’ve heard the stories of this happening with truck drivers, well, I mean, they are driving on a seat, and you are gaming or watching or working from a chair. You both are sitting for a long time. And the heat builds up down there.
All of the above health problems are the great killers of our time, and all can be heavily influenced by gaming too much. But for the other, less murderous ones, though still debilitating, these include muscle and bone atrophy, spinal scoliosis, eye strain, as well as psychological effects like stress and anxiety.
Not using your body can also cause weaker muscles and bones. Ever heard the saying that if you don’t use it you lose it? Keep it up and your muscles will atrophy, especially as you age.
In the sit down lifestyle, you are helping increase bone loss in your body. It sounds epic, and it is. It is an osteoporosis risk raiser. Sure, it can generally happen as you get much older anyways, but why would you want to speed that up?
Regarding some specific bones, let me introduce you to my spine in its first yoga class. There I was, sitting around a bunch of strangers, when the instructor asked us to sit up straight cross legged. Then she asked me to sit up straight.
She walked over to me and asked if I was able to straighten out any more. I didn’t understand why she asked because I was already sitting straight up, or so I thought.
When I looked and I saw my body in the reflection of the mirror, I was hunched over, with my shoulders down, and neck up. I was horrified.
When I got home, I tried to see how my posture was when I gamed. Starting on the computer, I sat in my chair, straight up.
Within minutes, I had unknowingly hunched over and stayed that way, in comfort. Sometimes, when I was focusing more on the game, I hunched even more!
My next test in posture was while couch gaming.
What I learned immediately was that I basically was sitting on my lower back, with my neck and head down, chin tucked, facing the TV. If I sat up, I was hunched over forward worse than when I was on the computer.
And not just during gaming sessions, but anytime I was on a comfortable couch.
I called it “video game hunch” and from that day forward, I vowed to fix it before it got worse and before the painful effects and problems kick in. These problems include strain on the back, hips, shoulders, and neck. Ever had a stiff neck after gaming?
Each contribute to increased headache potential and muscle soreness, too. With extended back posture abuse, creating muscle imbalances caused by too much sitting, you are increasing your risk in getting scoliosis, spinal nerve issues, blood vessel constriction, and even poor digestion.
Yes, due to smashing in your organs for long periods of time, they may not function as properly, leading to results like constipation. Which clearly is the biggest concern of all health.
Also, depending on some additional factors like consistency and age, improper posture can increase the strain that can cause osteoarthritis.
Posture from sitting position is also important in regards to where your hands and arms are located and how strained they are when gaming. Add long play sessions and too much strain and you may be continuously compressing your median nerve. This can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), a painful condition causing numbness and tingling in the hand and arm.
Another repetitive strain injury is called computer vision syndrome (CVS), or digital eye strain. CVS also can cause blurred vision, and dry eyes, as well as more headaches, neck, and shoulder pain.
There is also something called blue light that comes from cell phones and computer screens. It can result in blurred vision or blindness with continual phone and computer use, including gaming, especially in older people. Something to be mindful of if you use these devices for long periods.
So, as you can see, sitting too long and gaming too much with poor posture can be seriously detrimental in all sorts of ways to your body. But there’s more.
Mother Brain
One big thing I haven’t touched on yet is on how the effects of sitting and gaming too much have on the mind. Specifically with stress, anxiety, and depression.
Now, while many studies indicate that gaming can be a stress reliever, sitting for prolonged periods of time is a stress and anxiety inducer, including social anxiety. Add in game stress, out of game stress, weight gain, and the domino effect of other sedimentary illnesses listed above, and we have a recipe for depression.
But before going there, understand that living a sedentary lifestyle not only harms your body physically, but also your brain. Sitting around stationary like Mother Brain will not give you the ability to control the space pirates.
Remember before when I talked about how sitting a lot reduces your blood flow and affects your blood pressure?
Well, according to a published study from Liverpool John Moores University in England, decreased cerebrovascular blood flow and function are associated with lower cognitive functioning and increased risk of neurodegenerative disease.
These include Alzheimer’s and other dementia, Parkinson’s, and motor neuron diseases. This reduced blood flow also influences your brain’s oxygenation, cellular communication, and glucose metabolism.
Another major and easily attainable health issue caused more directly by gaming is sleep deprivation. According to a Military Medicine reported study, sleep deprivation caused by excessive video gaming appears associated with daytime drowsiness, fatigue, poor concentration, irritability, poor work performance, expressed anger, and blunted affect. This includes insomnia, too.
The point is, if you are sleep depriving yourself due to playing video games you are really hurting yourself and are ultimately influencing depression, just like the many other factors listed above.
But before I get into depression, there is another major disorder related to gaming too often that also contributes to depression, sleep deprivation, and both anxiety and stress. It is called gaming disorder.
Gaming disorder, as defined by the World Health Organization, is a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.
In other words, gaming addiction. I cover it briefly in the article Gamer Well-being 101.
Gaming disorder is not so different than any substance abuse addiction. Fortunately, it should be easier to break once recognized.
Just don’t confuse it with a gaming habit. While habits and addictions are very similar, addictions are much harder to overcome. They affect both adults and children, though recognizing it in children is much easier than recognizing it in yourself.
I would suggest that if you play a lot of video games, take some time off and see if you may suffer from gaming disorder.
Don’t fret if you do. Many people have or had it, including myself, and while treatments are not in the scope of this guide, I will suggest a starting method.
Start limiting your gaming time by slowly increasing your time away from gaming more and more. There is no rush but there needs to be intention.
You will know you have reached a breakthrough once you can stop a gaming session without any internal resistance. Or better yet, if you don’t play games for a few days and don’t suffer any withdrawals or other negative feelings.
Influencing Depression or Depression Influencing
Depression is defined by the Mayo Clinic as a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. Also called major depressive disorder or clinical depression, it affects how you feel, think and behave and can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems.
You may have trouble doing normal day-to-day activities, and sometimes you may feel as if life isn’t worth living. In other words, you are extremely unhappy.
Many things can cause depression and many things can affect it. Sometimes it is continual, and sometimes it is temporary. Just understand that this is a guide geared towards video gamers and their gaming caused health problems.
This is not to say that whatever reason one may be depressed isn’t important, it is very important. Influences outside of gaming are just past the scope of this guide. Please seek help nonetheless.
With that said, how can the gamer lifestyle create, influence, or add to someone’s depression?
As you have been reading, gaming a lot creates or raises the risk of countless health issues. Some substantially severe and potentially life threatening. Many influence depression, but at the same time, depression influences them, as well.
For example, if you are depressed, you may want to sit more and game more. But if you game too much, you may get depressed due to just that.
If you sit too much and gain a lot of weight due to that, it may make you depressed. Or you may get depressed due to gaining weight without sitting too much, but then chose to sit a lot after, because you were depressed because of the weight gain, increasing the problem!
This greatly increases once obese, too. It never ends!
Another influence of depression is the fact that while gaming, you are indoors sitting and not interacting with the world. This includes everything outside of video games and devices and the comforts of your own living place.
Remember the Requirements of Gaming (an earlier section in the eBook)? The vital variety of life does not reside sitting indoors.
Having no fresh air, sunlight, outdoor activities, or social life can substantially influence your well-being and depression. Plus, the less you are around people in real life, the more you have the possibility of developing social anxiety. This too can cause depression.
All of the health problems listed earlier can be both additional causes of depression, as well as caused or heavily influenced by depression.
For example, if you have a lot of back pain and can’t be very active, you get depressed due to that. So, you end up gaining weight because you are sitting, and maybe stress eating, making your depression worse.
Unfortunately, a lot of the aforementioned health issues that influence depression are difficult and time consuming to reverse, creating a cycle of health problems that both cause depression and are caused by depression.
For a direct example, in the past when I was stressed with life, I would hide in video games to ignore the problem. I would also stress eat, especially junk food. Every time I would do this, I would temporarily feel good, but quickly feel bad after.
After some time, I had gained a lot of weight. This made me unhappy and I would then eat because I was feeling unhappy.
I would continually hide in video game land for long periods of time to ignore this feeling of depression, further increasing those issues, my waist size, and raising my risk for all those other health problems listed here by the day.
I was not dealing with the original problem or the supporting problems. Forget eating less, forget exercising, I had no motivation for any of that.
I was in a very bad cycle. All I cared about was sitting, eating, sitting, gaming, and repeating that as much as possible. I even ignored family and friends due to how I was feeling. I was disconnected and depressed.
That cycle of living a sedentary life, hiding in video games, had to be broken or else there would be severe consequences.
As you can see, depression is a tricky and complicated subject and too loaded to say is exclusively caused by gaming too much. Playing video games can actually help in some circumstances of depression, believe it or not.
The importance of all of this, though, is to be aware of what gaming can influence health wise. This is kind of how health is altogether: all things influence everything else.
What is key is to not go down this path to begin with but if you do, it is ok. Most health issues have remedies where you can still play a lot of games so hopefully the next section will help you with that.
MEDICAL HEALTH RESOURCES
If you are experiencing anything similar to any mentioned above medical conditions, please contact a health professional immediately.
Crisis Text Line – For depression or other mental health crises.
National Suicide Prevention Hotline – 1-800-723-8255 – If you or somebody you know is showing signs of potential suicide, or needs emotional support, please call this number or contact this or many similar websites.
International Association for Suicide Prevention – Same as the above but international.
A Beginner’s Guide to a Healthy Gamer Lifestyle
This is where the guide begins. The solution section, the place where you go to turn your health around. Here I give you the info on how to be successfully healthy on the physical side and on the mental side. I also show you how to reverse excessive sitting.
So, back to the question I asked myself in the beginning of this journey: what is more important, my entertainment or my health?
In time, and after a lot of research and many experiments, what I have learned is that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It can in fact be both.
You can be fit and healthy yet play games, even play them a lot. But a certain balance is needed and it all depends on a combination of factors in your lifestyle, specifically in fitness and diet.
The following section contains information and simple attainable solutions for not just a healthy gamer lifestyle, but of a healthy lifestyle for anyone. Most are preventions to many gamer health ailments mentioned above, as well. To begin, stand up.
This is an excerpt from my eBook PAUSE THE GAME: A Beginner’s Guide to a Healthy Gamer Lifestyle. To read the rest and get it FREE, subscribe to the blog below or HERE.