I deal with a fairly moderate level of anxiety on a daily basis, which increases in severity much more often than I would like. It can be quite difficult for me to get my thoughts to quiet down and stop racing through my mind at all hours of the day and night. It really doesn’t take much for me to fly into a full-blown panic attack for reasons that wouldn’t be readily apparent or easy to explain to anyone who doesn’t know me.

As if that weren’t enough, it’s not just anxiety that interferes with my ability to live a “normal” life. I also struggle with a handful of other mental illnesses and physical limitations, in addition to the general anxiety and panic I’ll be discussing today. However, in the interest of staying on topic, I’ll save those for other articles in this “Tackling Challenges Through Gaming” series.

Because of everything I deal with daily in terms of my own mental health, I often find myself in need of ways to quickly calm myself down and resume thinking rationally before things get too out of hand. I’m always on the hunt for new, effective ways to bring about even a temporary ceasefire to the incessant “war inside my head,” as I’ve taken to almost affectionately calling it.

I know it isn’t the healthiest strategy to rely on prescription psychotropic medications or worse, non-prescription drugs, to cope. Because of that, I try not to lean on my medications too heavily in favor of instead using the alternative methods I’ve worked on with my therapist, such as meditation and what I call “thought restructuring.”

However, when I’m stricken with a sudden panic attack or when I am having a particularly unpleasant day, meditating and telling myself I’m worrying too much just won’t cut it. That leaves me forced to count on my prescribed mood stabilizers and anxiety regulators in certain situations, as displeased as I am about sometimes having little choice but to do so.

Since I’d rather not rely on psychotropic prescription drugs just to enable myself to get through my rough days, I seek solace and comfort in video games. Some people may find that equally as unhealthy as relying on anti-anxiety medications. However, I firmly believe that anyone who’s familiar with any manifestation of anxiety, depression, or any of several other mental illnesses knows that coping mechanisms are unique and can vary wildly from person to person in terms of effectiveness.

Certain video games tend to consistently work quite well in helping me cope with whatever I might be dealing with on any of my especially difficult days. I acknowledge that these same games, or video games in general, may not work for the next person the same way they do for me. I’m pleased to declare, however, that my anxiety has lessened significantly in the ten months or so that have passed since Phenixx Gaming was created and I was given the honor of becoming one of this site’s founding members.

If you’ll indulge me for awhile, dear reader, I’d like to regale you with the tale of how gaming has helped to bring about such consistent, notable improvements in my mental and emotional condition. It is my hope that by sharing my story, by detailing how gaming has helped me bring about a more lasting armistice to that aforementioned internal civil war, I might be able to help those among our readers who find themselves fighting similar battles to my own. After all, it sometimes helps to know you’re not alone when it comes to this sort of thing.

In order to best accomplish my goal of describing how gaming has helped me conquer many of the most severe aspects of my three diagnosed anxiety-related disorders, I shall provide you with a fairly detailed list of a select few titles which I feel have been the most instrumental in bringing about the aforementioned improvements as time has passed. Unlike most lists like this I’ve published here on Phenixx Gaming, the games on this list are presented in order of how effective I consider them to be at reducing my levels of anxiety.

I think I’ll begin by discussing my most effective coping strategy. Namely, I’ve always found that listening to music helps my anxiety significantly. The methods by which I’ve found that process takes place might be surprising to some among our readers, as I don’t particularly care for the vast majority of classical music or any other genres that might be traditionally labeled as “calming.” Instead, the type of music I find myself listening to on a given day largely depends on which of my emotions I feel are currently out of control.

For example, suppose I’ve noticed that my anxiety has made me more irritable than usual. In that case, I’ll usually put on some classic heavy metal, a genre traditionally labeled as “angry music,” in order to get the frustration, irritability, and anger out of my system more quickly. Alternatively, if I just want to listen to something calming to lessen my normal or slightly elevated levels of anxiety, I’ll put on a playlist of songs that I’ve always used as a sleep aid since I was a child. In case you’re curious, the most prominent song on that playlist has always been Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”

Audiosurf 2 capitalizes on the healing properties of music for me by providing an engaging, yet easy-to-play game to occupy my mind in a way that doesn’t require me to just close my eyes, focus on the music, and hope the unpleasantness of my uncontrolled emotions passes quickly. The game’s concept is quite simple: select a song from either a music file on your computer or a link to said song on YouTube, and collect appropriate amounts of colorful blocks in order to score points in time with the tempo of your selected song.

As I said, this concept is most assuredly uncomplicated, but its easier difficulties require very little skill or mechanical prowess. Skill and mechanical prowess are two things I find myself sorely lacking even on my best days, but that’s especially true while I’m struggling through a more difficult period of time in a mental and/or emotional sense.

On the occasion that my anxiety is heightened and I don’t necessarily want to play a music-based game like Audiosurf 2, I find that it often helps if I play an immersive game, usually a simulator of some description, that allows me to temporarily pretend I’m somewhere else rather than in my normal environment. I know that probably isn’t the clearest explanation of my point, so allow me to provide the most notable example of a game that falls under that banner in my case: ConcernedApe’s beloved farm-life simulator known as Stardew Valley.

I’ve never truly been “addicted” to Stardew Valley in the traditional sense of the word, but I have come quite close to reaching such a point on a few occasions in the past before my anxiety began to improve. Whether I’m experiencing high levels of anxiety, I’m exceptionally depressed, or even if I’m having what I would consider to be a good day, there’s just something about running my own peaceful little farm that I find incredibly calming and cathartic.

After all, there’s nothing close to what I would call a “failure state” in Stardew Valley; that is to say, there’s no real way to get a “game over.” About the worst thing you can do in the entire game is accidentally destroy a plot of crops that were almost ready to be harvested. While that does tend to be annoying and disheartening at certain points, it’s a minor inconvenience at worst. That’s just one of the hundreds of things I absolutely adore about this venerable indie farm life simulator.

There’s no pressure to do anything outside of your normal routine of watering and harvesting crops if you don’t want to. You can, for example, explore the mines near your farm provided you’ve played far enough into the game to open them. Alternatively, you can while away the time by going fishing or simply taking a walk around town. If you have the necessary materials, you can also spend some time crafting new items for your farm to increase your future income and productivity.

To my great delight, I can also share the experience with up to three friends thanks to the addition of a full co-op mode. The fact that I can spread the joy and catharsis I’ve gotten from a simple indie farm simulator game to my friends simply serves to cause me to recommend this title even more wholeheartedly than I would without its multiplayer capabilities. If you find yourself wanting to read more of my in-depth thoughts on this particular game, I humbly suggest checking out my review of it.

Speaking of highly immersive games that allow me to pretend I’m somewhere else when my anxiety is approaching its worst; I’m compelled to discuss a much larger and arguably more enthralling game than the aforementioned Stardew Valley. I’m referring, of course, to none other than The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a title with which I’m sure the majority of our readers are at least somewhat familiar considering the game’s age, ubiquity, and lasting popularity.

Skyrim is an extremely versatile game, to say the least, and it’s for that exact reason that I enjoy it as much as I do. There’s just so much you can do in Skyrim to suit whatever play style you may have. If you want to focus entirely on the main story and finish its quests as soon as possible, you’re absolutely free to do that; admittedly, though, I think you’d be sorely missing out on a ton of content and, therefore, doing yourself a disservice if you went about things that way.

Alternatively, if you want to hop on a stolen horse, ride nine miles in the exact opposite direction of the nearest main story quest, and repeatedly get launched into orbit by a giant you’re not quite powerful enough to kill, have at it. There’s really not much stopping you from playing Skyrim exactly and exclusively how you feel you want to. That in itself is a factor that I strongly feel played a significant role in skyrocketing the game’s popularity.

I’ve found that in addition to the sheer amount of interesting stuff there is to do in Skyrim which serves to help distract me from my troubles, it’s also a wonderfully tranquil experience to not do much of anything at all. That might sound a bit paradoxical, but I’ve been calmed down on a fair few occasions by simply wandering through an in-game forest and taking in the sights.

Sure, the game might be almost nine years old by this point, which makes me feel rather old myself, but thanks to such things as official high-resolution texture packs and a computer powerful enough to handle everything the game has to offer, it still definitely has the potential to feel like an entirely new experience to me each time I fire up Skyrim.

Of course, I can’t help but feel I’d be doing our readers a considerable disservice if I didn’t mention the fact that I also greatly enjoy tricking most of my enemies into walking near a particularly high cliff and taking advantage of the readily-available “Unrelenting Force” Shout to teach them the error of their ways. I’m not sure why, but for me, that truly never gets old.

As I said earlier, some people find relief in knowing that they aren’t the only ones dealing with the struggles brought about by anxiety; I happen to be one of those people. That brings me to the next game I want to discuss in this context. According to its Steam store page, Red Hook Studios’ Darkest Dungeon is a “gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring.” That description is indeed quite accurate, but Darkest Dungeon has so much more to offer than you might expect from that description alone.

For example, the part of the game’s description which mentions “psychological stresses” references the fact that the game has a unique central mechanic which requires you to manage the stress levels and overall mental health of a party of mercenaries you hire to eradicate the ancient, unspeakable evils surrounding your ancestral home. Making sure your mercenaries remain both alive and sane while going about their grim task is quite a challenge in and of itself, both for you and the mercenaries themselves.

In total honesty, dear reader, I don’t quite know why playing Darkest Dungeon helps lessen my anxiety as much as it does. Maybe it’s because I find a small degree of solace in knowing that the warriors I’ve hired to do my dirty work are also highly susceptible to many of the same mental health conditions with which I struggle on a daily basis. Granted, the knowledge that my actions are either directly or indirectly responsible for someone else struggling with stress is particularly unsettling. At least the game offers your mercenaries access to certain highly-effective, though unhealthy and often downright unscrupulous, stress-relief mechanisms, albeit for a price.

Alternatively, I have a different theory as to why my stress is often reduced as I play Darkest Dungeon. You see, although the game absolutely can and will strive to convince you that all is lost and everything is hopeless if it so desires, just as it seems living with any mental illness can do, Darkest Dungeon’s gameplay can also demonstrate the opposites of these ideas just as thoroughly. I would say this concept is best explained by the in-game mechanic wherein your hired mercenaries undergo what the game calls a “test of their resolve” whenever their stress meter fills halfway.

When this happens, the affected mercenary will receive either a positive or negative status effect until either their stress meter fills completely, which will result in their immediate death via a stress-induced heart attack, or the current quest is completed and they successfully return to the game’s hub town. In my experience, these status effects are negative the vast majority of the time; however, when any of my mercenaries happens to be granted a positive effect instead, the associated buffs usually quickly turn the tide of my current quest in my favor.

It seems to me that in scenarios like what I’ve just described, Darkest Dungeon might be trying to tell its players who deal with anxiety or other mental illnesses that although things may seem quite bleak, the situation can drastically improve when we least expect it. Even if you might think you’re at your worst, even if you think you’ve hit rock bottom, the game has ways to encourage you to keep going. I’m well aware that I might be looking much too far into a game mechanic like this, but I elect to remain optimistic and believe otherwise.

There you have it, folks! As I acknowledged earlier, I realize that coping mechanisms vary wildly between people dealing with any kind of mental illness. Even so, it is my sincere hope that in writing this list, I may have inspired you to try to find at least one game which grants you the same levels of comfort and solace that I find in many video games. If gaming isn’t an effective coping mechanism for you, that’s okay. I hope this list serves to inspire you to find your own effective methods for dealing with anxiety, whatever they may be.

Before I officially sign off, though, there are two more minor things I’d like to mention. Firstly, as I alluded to at the beginning of this article, this is the first in a series of articles I’m debuting wherein I’ll discuss how gaming has helped me cope with and overcome other challenges, both physical and mental in nature. Keep an eye out for the rest of this series if you’re interested. Secondly, this series was directly inspired by an outstanding piece written by one of my esteemed colleagues who developed a passion for gaming despite his own challenges with dyslexia.

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