I’m going to be doing a series of videos about Mindfulness in Gaming. The topics we’ll cover will be burnout, GM burnout which is a separate thing, self-actualization and reflection through games, emotional bleed and a couple of others. If there are any topics you want to see covered, leave them in the comments for me, or send me an email or twitter DM if you want to keep it private.

Anyway - today’s video is about how playing tabletops - or anything really - can reduce burnout.

 

I want to preface this video by saying - I am not a therapist. I have been to therapy and I am an advocate for accessibility, which to me includes both physical capabilities and mental health. I will not be providing any kind of diagnoses and will be staying away, as much as possible, from clinical terms like depression, anxiety, ADHD etc and I urge you to do the same. This is really just about treating yourself and the people around you a little better. This is not a substitute for any work you should be doing with a professional, and in some cases, this shouldn’t even be something you look to in an ancillary capacity. You know what’s best for you obviously, but I wanted to start by stating my own intention so you can make the right decision for yourself.

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So here’s the thing about burnout - a lot of people assume that it is primarily the quantity of work and responsibilities you have. And yes, that’s a significant part of it but not the only part - and the other elements are just as important to address. The two biggest additional - and again, not ONLY, just additionally big and what we’re talking about here: The pressure you put on yourself for there the be no disasters on your watch - which everyone around you gets used to and that becomes the baseline of what’s expected from you - and feeling like you don’t have a lot of agency. You’re just constantly reacting to things, you don’t have as much decision-power as would be meaningful for you in deciding what you get to react to, or make changes to make your life easier down the road.

So there are three things that go into feeling burned out (There are more but we’ve focussing on these 3 for today’s purposes):

1. Quantity of responsibilities

2. Quality expected from you - pressure coming from yourself and/or others - to deliver on aforementioned responsibilities

3. Lack of agency or feeling like you are enabling meaningful change

Which is why, when you’re feeling majorly burned out, just stepping away from work for a few days may not always do the trick. You’ve addressed the first thing - you’ve reduced the quantity of work. But you haven’t done anything about the second two. You’re still putting a lot of pressure on yourself to perform at a no-failure level and you still feel like you just have to react to shit endlessly without ever being able to do anything about it.

And the thing is, you fucking push through. You find a way to cope. And then you feel real good that you did that for yourself. And then a cycle starts to form, and that plummet and rise again becomes addictive almost - or predictive and familiar at the very least.

And I know some of you might be thinking - yeah I’m under a lot of pressure but so what? I’m handling it. And honestly - that’s me. I’m handling it now, but it’s going to catch up to me if I don’t do something about it. You don’t give yourself permission to feel any kind of way because you’re like - well what do I have to complain about? Honestly, getting to feel like you are in a state to fix your burnout is a tremendous privilege and before we move forward, I want to acknowledge that. There are a lot of people that are just stuck in their circumstances and after you work multiple brutal shifts and you have to come home to family responsibilities and you are constantly broke and scraping by on food stamps - those people can only ever try and stay afloat. But for the rest of us who can do better, let’s do better so that collectively, we can make the community better and maybe even eventually provide more infrastructure and support systems for those people who need it most. 

 

Anyway - I came across this incredible list of questions in doing research for this video. If you say yes to even just a couple of these, you might consider it an early warning sign of burn-out. It’s not a judgment, it is just an observation. And as you’ve heard me say before here - a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved. So let’s start by identifying the problem.

— Do I feel guilty or anxious when I’m not working?

— Have I stopped playing or doing leisure activities with my friends?

— Do most of my daily activities revolve around building a more successful career?

— Am I consistently sleeping fewer than eight hours per night?

— Am I consuming stimulants multiple times per day to hide my exhaustion?

— Am I sitting still and staring at screens for most of my waking hours?

— Am I indoors all day long, receiving minimal fresh air and sunlight?

— Do I depend on alcohol or drugs to cope with social situations outside of work?

 

Thing is, if you don’t listen to the soft signs, your body is totally Type A and will not hesitate to give you hard emergency signals. Like blacking out, which is what happened to me. It’s fucking scary and embarassing to go to work like any other day and then randomly be waking up in a hospital emergency room with some random person from HR hovering over you. Believe me, you do not want that. I had 4 more blackouts over the next 5 years but - thankfully - they happened at home. So I really only scared the shit out of my partner and my parents. So… awesome.

 

I’m still very driven. I still set tremendous bars for myself and work really hard. You better fucking believe though that I am super intentional about work-life separation, and taking the ‘life’ part and using it to recharge and try to get as close to 8 hours of sleep every night now. And somewhat paradoxically, the better I do at the life stuff, the more energy and verve I have for the work stuff.

The idea is not to ignore your responsibilities and your goals. The idea is to be recharged and rejuvenated so you can honour yourself and do the things that are needed from you more effectively. You can’t pour from an empty pitcher. I’m not telling you not to show up - that’s not the answer to burnout. I’m saying you can do it better by allowing yourself to take things a little less seriously and allow yourself to be joyful.

 

And for many of us, we get that joy in games, in tabletops. Don’t you feel so great when you’ve just come out of a good session?  And that good feeling probably permeates other areas of your life without you even realizing. You’re a little lighter. You laugh a little easier. You don’t feel like the world is out to get you as much. Everything’s just a little brighter. 

 

So one of the reasons that this is happening is of course, the general good feelings abound when something you did goes well, but another reason is that ‘play’ as an idea is an incredibly effective tool to combat burnout. There’s a lot of great research out there, and I’m going to link Charlie Hoen’s blog article on the subject in the description box. He was Tim Ferris’ second basically for the 4 hour workweek, 4 hour chef - and if you know Tim Ferris’ work, it’s very research-intensive so that kind of methodological step by step approach is what you should expect from Charlie too. I got a lot out of reading this blog and watching the related Ted talk.

Anyway - play is what you need. You probably don’t do a lot of it because time taken to do that is time you are spending on yourself in a non-serious, non-productive capacity. But like.. That’s what you need. You need to find areas to engage with that’ll allow you to stop taking life so seriously - specifically in the area of ‘play’. Whether it’s a boardgame night with friends, or a game of catch outside with one other person, or playing a tabletop. And I’m not saying you need to only engage in tabletops in a loosey goosey improv way for this to work - no, engage with it however it is the most fun for you. If that’s hours of prep so that you can tell the most epic and seamless story with your players, do that - If it’s showing up with a general outline of what you can accomplish, do that - If it’s trying a new system, do that. Whatever it is, the only rules are to be intentional and not take yourself too seriously.

There is a liberation and a rejuvenation that comes from doing things that you enjoy intentionally, and you can take that energy to doing the things you have to do: your responsibilities and goals. 

There’s a great section from Charlie’s blog that I want to reference directly:

“Kids don’t run to get in shape; they run to feel the grass beneath their feet and the wind on their face.

Kids don’t have a chat over coffee; they pretend and make jokes and explore the outdoors.

Kids don’t network; they bond with other fun kids while playing.

There is no ego. There is no guilt. There is no past to regret, and no future to worry about.

They just play.

And that’s what I’d forgotten, what I’d been missing, all along… Giving myself permission to PLAY was the cure for my anxiety. It was a subtle but powerful shift in how I viewed the world.”

 

No one tells you to stop or take a break, or that you’re burning yourself out. You only ever know that you are getting more tired and more irritable and things that used to be easy now seem to really take a toll on you. You’ll be oblivious that your nerves are frayed to shit, only that you’re snapping and getting mad at the dumbest shit. But you can’t seem to stop.

The paradoxical problem here is that when you get like this, it’s super easy to convince yourself that if you just go through your to-do list, if you were just more productive, maybe you wouldn’t be feeling like you’re constantly behind. 

But do you see how feeling stretched thin can’t really be solved by stretching yourself thinner? And at this point, if you don’t give your body a break, it will take one itself. 

 

This is where play comes in. You need to do something fairly low stakes that engages different parts of your brain. That just gives you joy. Finding that spot where you are truely yourself, being made happy by something ostensibly fairly simple. You need a space where you can let go of your ego, let go of worrying about looking stupid, and immerse yourself into the flow of the moment. You need a space where you can not just imagine and create but revel in that imagination and creation. You need a space where you can be a social creature to your comfort levels and bond with other people and get to know yourself. 

And all of that stuff I just mentioned - Tell me that for many of us that’s not what a great tabletop session does for you. Or if it’s not tabletops, it’s something else. Maybe it’s videogames. Maybe its basketball. I’m talking about tabletops because thats the space for me and I think for at least a few people watching this. 

 

And that’s the central point of this whole video. Make time for play. It’s like that old saying - if you don’t feel like you have 20 minutes for meditation, you probably need at least a 40 minute session. So yeah, maybe your jerk brain will convince you there are more important things to do - need to be productive - but like I said before, you can’t pour from an empty jug. You need to do this to show up in the best way possible for the commitments you’ve made.

 

And none of this has to be like ‘good’ to some arbitrary standard which, lets be honest, when you say ‘good enough’ what you mean is ‘worth monetization’ because that’s what capitalism has done to us - like oh i’ll only sing if i’m a ‘good’ singer - no man, sing because you fucking love how you feel when you sing. It’s not like you’re pitching for a record label. 

 

Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. Play to reduce burnout. That’s all I have - come see me again soon.

 

http://charliehoehn.com/2013/05/19/how-i-cured-my-anxiety/