Текст бизнес-книги "SuperBetter: How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient"

Автор книги: Jane McGonigal

Раздел: Жанр неизвестен

You don’t have to be an avid game player to activate your gameful strengths in everyday life, but if you love or play any game regularly—golf, bridge, Scrabble, soccer, poker, Candy Crush Saga, solitaire, sudoku—you’re probably a bit more in touch with your gameful strengths already.

To lead a more gameful life, you simply have to be open to learning about the psychology of games—and be willing to experiment with new ways of thinking and acting that can help you increase your natural resilience.

The fastest way I know to get you to see games—and your own capabilities—differently is to play a game with you.

So let’s play a game together—right now.

I challenge you to complete four life-changing quests in the next five minutes.

Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds. I’ve watched some amazing people complete the same four quests you’re about to undertake—including Oprah Winfrey, legendary skateboarder and entrepreneur Tony Hawk, and Colonel Bat Masterson, the surgeon general for the U.S. Armed Forces. If they can do it, you can do it, too.

These are the first four quests that every SuperBetter player completes. I guarantee that if you successfully complete them all, roughly five minutes from now you will already be a stronger person—mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. (You’ll also have a much better idea of how this book can help you unleash your gameful qualities.)

Ready to play? Let’s go!

THE GAME STARTS NOW

Here’s your first life-changing quest. I want you to complete it, right now, before you read any further.

Do not skip this first quest. I repeat: DO NOT SKIP THIS QUEST. If you skip it, you’ll be tempted to skip others—and then the game will be over before you’ve even started playing. So here we go. Your first quest—I know you can do it!

QUEST 1: Physical Resilience

Pick one:

Stand up and take three steps.

or

Make your hands into fists and hold them over your head as high as you can for five seconds.

Go!

Did you do it? Well done!

By completing this quest, you’ve just boosted your physical resilience.

Physical resilience is your body’s ability to withstand stress and heal itself. And research shows that the number-one thing people can do to boost their physical resilience is to not sit still. Whenever you sit still for more than a few minutes, your body starts to shut down at the metabolic level. This shutdown negatively impacts every aspect of your health, from your immune system to your ability to handle stress.⁷

Every single second you’re not sitting still, however, you’re actively improving the health of your heart, your lungs, and your brain.⁸ You’ll have more energy and sleep better, too—which is crucial when you’re facing a hard challenge, even if it isn’t primarily physical in nature.

So stand up for just one second. Take three steps. Throw your arms in the air. That’s all it takes. You are now physically stronger than you were thirty seconds ago.

Ready for your next quest?

QUEST 2: Mental Resilience

Pick one:

Snap your fingers exactly fifty times

or

Count backward from 100 by 7, like this: 100, 93 . . . all the way to at least 0.

Go!

All done? Good work.

By completing this quest, you’ve just increased your mental resilience.

Mental resilience is motivation, focus, and willpower—strengths that are essential to achieving any goal.

Researchers have figured out that willpower is like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it—as long as you don’t exhaust it.⁹ Accomplishing tiny challenges—even ones as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly fifty times or counting backward by seven—helps you exercise this muscle without wearing it out. That means you’re more likely to have the motivation and determination you need when it’s time to tackle tougher obstacles. So congratulations: you are now mentally stronger than you were a minute ago.

Let’s keep playing!

QUEST 3: Emotional Resilience

Pick one:

If you’re inside, find a window and look outside for thirty seconds. If you’re outside, find a window and look in.

or

Do a Google Image or YouTube video search for “baby [your favorite animal].”

Go!

Mission accomplished? Great!

By completing this quest, you’ve just strengthened your emotional resilience.

Emotional resilience is the ability to access positive emotions at will. It doesn’t matter if you’re stressed, or bored, or angry, or in pain—when you have emotional resilience, you can choose to feel something good instead.

Emotional resilience is a particularly important strength. Research has shown that if, on average, people experience more positive emotions than negative ones, they gain a huge range of benefits. They’re more creative at solving problems. They’re more ambitious and successful at school and at work. They’re less likely to give up when things are hard. People around them are more likely to offer help and support them in their goals.¹⁰

To achieve emotional resilience, you don’t need to eliminate negative emotions—that’s obviously impossible. You just need enough positive emotions, over the course of a day, to beat out the negative ones.

Both options in this quest are scientifically validated methods for provoking a specific positive emotion. Looking through a window provokes curiosity—the positive emotion that psychologists define as “a desire to gratify the mind with new information or objects of interest.”¹¹ (Hopefully you saw something interesting through the window!) Meanwhile, researchers have demonstrated that looking at photos or videos of baby animals is all it takes to make virtually anyone feel the emotion of love. (Baby animal cuteness brings out our nurturing instinct!) Better yet, this quick burst of love from looking at baby animals doesn’t just feel good, it also improves attention and productivity.¹²

Even if you felt the curiosity or the love for only a few seconds, you just got emotionally stronger. Enjoy it.

Let’s try one more quest.

QUEST 4: Social Resilience

Pick one:

Shake or hold someone’s hand for at least six seconds.

or

Send someone you know a quick thank-you by text, email, or Facebook message.

Go!

All done? Awesome.

By completing this quest, you’ve boosted your social resilience.

Social resilience is the ability to get support from friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers. You’re able to ask for the help you need—and you’re more likely to receive it. Social support is crucial to tackling challenges successfully. You can try to go it alone, but your odds of success are vastly improved when someone else has your back.

There are lots of ways to increase your social resilience. Touch and gratitude are two of the most effective.

Studies show that shaking or holding someone’s hand for at least six seconds increases the level of the “trust hormone,” oxytocin, in both of your bloodstreams.¹³ Boosted oxytocin levels make you want to help and protect each other. The more oxytocin you release together, the deeper your bond.¹⁴

Meanwhile, expressing thanks is one of the most reliable ways to cultivate good feelings and a closer connection. Gratitude is the single most important relationship-strengthening emotion because, as researchers explain, “it requires us to see how we’ve been supported and affirmed by other people.”¹⁵

So whether you just touched or thanked someone, you are now socially stronger than you were a page ago. Success!

I knew you could do it: you’ve completed four simple quests, and you’re already building up life-changing skills and abilities. You’re discovering that you are, in fact, stronger than you know; you are indeed surrounded by potential allies; and you really can become a hero to others just by tapping into your natural resilience.

Are you having fun yet? I hope so. Because my goal is to make this the most fun book you’ve ever read. You’ll complete nearly one hundred more quests before this book is through. Each one is based on a different scientific breakthrough about what makes you more resilient. And at the start of each quest, you’ll see one of these four icons to let you know if you’re building primarily physical, mental, emotional, or social resilience:

I promise you these quests will make you feel more confident, more in control, and more optimistic about all your real-life challenges. (As with any good game, these quests will get a little bit trickier the further you go!)

Seeking out and completing quests is just one of the seven gameful skills that will help you become stronger, happier, and braver in everyday life. Now that you’ve gotten a taste of what it feels like to adopt a gameful mindset, let me tell you a little bit more about what you can expect from this book.

I won’t ask you to start leading a more gameful life until you’re absolutely convinced of the ability of games to solve real problems and change real lives. So in Part 1, “Why Games Make Us Superbetter,” we’ll start with an overview of the evidence on games. What strengths do they tap into, and what psychological benefits do they bring? We’ll look at games that increase motivation and willpower, that block the feeling of physical pain more powerfully than morphine, that help you overcome anxiety and depression, that can change your eating habits, develop your compassion for others, and help you forge stronger, happier relationships with friends and family. Most of the games we discuss in Part 1 are readily available for you to play on your phone or your computer as a way to practice and understand your gameful strengths better. However, even if you decide never to play any of these games, Part 1 will give you a solid foundation to understand what it means to be gameful. You will know exactly what it takes to tap into your three most important challenge-facing, problem-solving powers: your abilities to control your attention, to make allies and get support, and to motivate yourself to do what’s important, even when it’s difficult for you. We’ll finish by exploring the research on why some game players are better able than others to bring these powers from their favorite games into their real lives.

Part 1 is full of gameful quests for you to complete, just like the ones in this introduction—so you’ll have plenty of opportunity to play and get stronger with every page.

In Part 2, “How to Be Gameful,” we’ll talk about your life. Now that you understand your strengths, what is the best way to harness them in everyday life? We’ll go in depth with each of the seven gameful skills that can help you tackle real-life challenges with more courage, creativity, and determination. I’ll give you seven simple rules to follow to practice each of these skills in daily life. This is the SuperBetter method, and it’s designed to make it easy for you to lead a more gameful life—whether or not you have the time to play games.

In Part 2, you’ll meet people who have used the SuperBetter method to grow stronger, healthier, and happier in the face of challenges like anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and PTSD. You will hear stories from people who have adopted a gameful mindset to find a better job, have a more satisfying love life, run a marathon, start their own company, and simply enjoy life more. And because everything in this book is grounded in research, you will discover the science behind these success stories—more than two hundred studies from the fields of psychology, medicine, and neuroscience that explain exactly why living by these seven gameful rules builds mental, emotional, physical, and social strengths.

If you’re facing a major challenge in your life, and you want to start using the SuperBetter method right now, you can skip directly to Part 2. Come back to Part 1 whenever you want. (I think that once you see for yourself how well SuperBetter works, you’ll be even more curious to understand the science behind it!)

Part 3, “Adventures,” brings it all together with three SuperBetter journeys I’ve created so that you can continue practicing your new gameful skills. Each journey is full of targeted power-ups, bad guys, and quests to help you achieve a major resilience breakthrough. On the “Love Connection” adventure, you’ll build your social resilience with ten quests designed to help you find love in the most surprising ways and places. In “Ninja Body Transformation,” you’ll learn twenty-one sneaky ways to increase your physical resilience. And on your final adventure, you’ll discover what it means to be “Time Rich”—the feeling that you have abundant free time to spend on all the things that matter most to you. Getting time rich is an excellent way to build your emotional and mental resilience.

Taken together, these three adventures contain just enough quests for you to keep playing SuperBetter for six weeks. That’s an important number—because six weeks is exactly how long participants followed the SuperBetter rules in our clinical trial and randomized controlled study. In those cases, playing SuperBetter for six weeks resulted in significantly better mood, stronger social support, more optimism, less depression and anxiety, and higher self-confidence. If you complete all three of these adventures—by tackling just one quest a day—you’ll have achieved a full, life-changing dose of the game.

Together, the stories and the science in this book will reveal how adopting a gameful mindset can change your life for the better. They will not only change what you think games are capable of. They will change what you think you are capable of.

Let’s go get superbetter.

Part 1

Why Games Make Us Superbetter

The evidence that games can make us stronger is all around us. Over the past decade, thousands of scientists and researchers working at hospitals and universities across the globe have documented an astonishing range of real-life positive impacts of video games and virtual worlds.

In this part of the book, you will discover games that:

 increase your motivation and willpower

 block the feeling of physical pain more powerfully than morphine

 help you overcome anxiety and depression

 make you a better learner

 inspire you to exercise more

 help prevent post-traumatic stress disorder

 make you more likely to come to a stranger’s rescue

 forge stronger, happier relationships with friends and family

Chances are, you’ve already played one or more of these potentially life-changing games—from Tetris to Words with Friends to Call of Duty to Candy Crush Saga. But even if you play games regularly, you’re probably not getting all the benefits. That’s because when it comes to unlocking the benefits of games, it’s not just what you play or how much you play—it’s why you play, when you play, and who you play with that really matter. In other words, you need to play with purpose.

As you’ll learn in Part 1, when you play games with purpose, you tap into three core psychological strengths:

 Your ability to control your attention and therefore your thoughts and feelings

 Your power to turn anyone into a potential ally and to strengthen your existing relationships

 Your natural capacity to motivate yourself and supercharge your heroic qualities, like willpower, compassion, and determination

These strengths exist inside you already. Games are just an incredibly reliable and efficient way to discover and practice them—so you’re better able to access them in everyday life.

Playing games isn’t the only way to tap into these strengths. But the scientific research on why games make it so much easier to do so will help you understand these strengths more clearly.

Let me be clear: the point of Part 1 is not to persuade you to spend more time playing video games. You do not have to become an ardent game player to benefit from games research. Instead, I want to help you learn from the science of games how to be stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient—whether you ever play any of these games or not.

One important thing to note: although all kinds of games develop these gameful strengths, including sports, puzzles, board games, and card games, Part 1 focuses primarily on digital games, for several reasons.

More than one billion people on this planet currently play digital games for, on average, at least one hour a day.¹ This number will undoubtedly rise in the future; according to a Pew Internet Life study, in the United States, 99 percent of boys under eighteen and 92 percent of girls under eighteen report playing video games regularly (on average thirteen hours a week for boys and eight hours a week for girls).² The sheer time and energy poured into digital games by such a vast and growing number of people make it crucial to understand how digital games in particular impact us psychologically. The science of games can help us minimize the potential harms and maximize the potential benefits.

Equally important is the fact that over the past two decades, scientific research on the psychology of games has focused almost exclusively on digital games, largely for the reasons stated above. This book is grounded in the science of games, which means it necessarily focuses on the kinds of games that scientists have dedicated the most time and energy to understanding.

Finally, as you will see in the next four chapters, digital technology can actually heighten and accelerate many of the psychological benefits we experience from all games. For example, all games teach us to be comfortable with failure, because loss is always a possibility. However, digital games tend to have a higher and more rapid rate of failure. In digital games, we fail as much as 80 percent of the time, on average twelve to twenty times an hour.³ This extremely high and rapid rate of failure helps players more quickly cultivate the strengths of grit and perseverance, as well as the ability to learn effectively from mistakes. You can build these same strengths by failing at basketball or Scrabble or chess, but the capability of digital games to automatically adjust the difficulty level upward so you are constantly playing at the edge of your ability helps you develop them faster.

This is just one example of the kind of research you’ll read about in this part of the book. But before we dive deeper into the science of games, you have a special quest to complete.

Chapter 1 has some of the most surprising and eye-opening information in the entire book. It contains some very unexpected scientific findings.

I want you to be fully prepared to absorb these findings and act on them in your own life, no matter how surprised you are by them! So here’s a quest to help you get ready.

QUEST 5: Palms Up!

Trying to solve a problem? Want to learn something new? You can prime your brain to be more open to creative solutions and more receptive to surprising ideas. Here’s how.

What to do: Turn your palms up, and leave them that way. You should start to notice a more open mindset in as little as fifteen seconds.

Why it works: Turning our palms up triggers a powerful mind-body response. With our palms up, we adopt an “approach and consider” mindset. We’re less likely to reject or dismiss new information or ideas, and we’re better able to spot new opportunities and solutions. With palms down, however, we adopt a “refuse and resist” mindset. We’re more likely to reject new information and overlook creative ideas.

It sounds like a simple action to have such a big effect, but the evidence is compelling: peer-reviewed research published by the American Psychological Association shows that out of seven different experiments on the palms-up phenomenon, all seven showed the same mind-opening effect.⁴

Researchers theorize that this mind-body link stems from physical behaviors we exhibited thousands of years ago before we invented language.⁵ When we offer someone a helping hand, our palm is upturned. When we ask for help ourselves, or when we prepare to receive something, we also turn our hands up. And when we welcome someone into our arms, our palms are facing up. But when we want to reject something, we slap it away with our hands turned downward. When we push someone away, the palms are turned away from us as well.

Through thousands of years of these gestures, we are biologically primed to associate upward palms with receptiveness and openness, downward palms with rejection and closing ourselves off.

So before you read the next chapter, turn your palms upward for at least fifteen seconds. Do this right now. 15 . . . 14 . . . 13 . . .

Quest complete: All done? Good job. You’re ready for some surprising science! And in the future, whenever you’re brainstorming, problem solving, or trying to wrap your head around some new information, remember the power you have to open your mind with a simple palms up.

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