blog48 games lower anxiety

Games Lower Anxiety: Learn Why and How – and Try These!

I gave a strategy a while ago about using board games to see what you can learn from your child while playing a game together. That was about a gentle means to find out what’s worrying your child. Detective stuff to see what they do and imagine why! This is about how games lower anxiety.

I want to write about how simply making time to play together as a family can lower anxiety in your child and bring back equilibrium. That’s as well as offering them a way to belonging, growing their resilience, and helping them learn patience to try things out a different way and benefit from the result!

Let’s look at why games lower anxiety.

Why do games lower anxiety?

Here are some of the reasons why, but there are many more you will discover as you play together:

1 Family involvement means they feel in their body the support they already have – anxiety can often make a child feel they’re the only one in the whole world, and different, and not managing. Playing games together in the family is reassuring and totally discounts that idea.

2 Playing any game together helps counteract rigidity. Rigidity of thinking and behaviour affect both neurotypical and non-neurotypical people (children and adults!). You cannot be too rigid in a game – there are game rules to follow (or change by agreement!), and winners and losers (because that’s what a game is!).

3 In a game your child can more easily learn to accept a different way of doing things. After all, it’s not real, is it? It’s not them at stake as a person. They may learn this as they play a game today, but if you’ve always had fun playing games, they will have already learnt it’s “just a game”. Their whole ID is not being trashed. They can try again, dignity intact!

4 Your child can learn to cope with disappointment in a game world and this experience can filter out to the real world and stand them in good stead so they don’t immediately grow anxious about something likely to go wrong.

5 Your child can experiment with being the one to organise a change of rules – a new way of doing something that might prove both effective and more fun. Many games can be adapted to the age of your child or simply for fun among yourselves for a different version. This is like a trial run at taking on a new possible way to solve something that makes them anxious.

But why have I chosen solid, traditional games here?

Traditional games to help prove that games lower anxiety

I expect you have loads of modern games in your house, but here are some more traditional ones that lend themselves to having this kind of fun. With these, I can assure you that games lower anxiety. Modern ones change all the time, and I don’t necessarily own them. You can let me know about newer ones that work just as well – I'm sure there are many.

In the meantime, these are tried and tested in my therapy room and have many uses as well as for lowering anxiety levels.

[With the exception of the card game, the links are to Amazon and I gain nothing by you clicking through. The card game image is mine and you can buy these Glen Appin Scotland playing cards from here.]

ludo

Ludo

This is a great game as the varying rules can be augmented endlessly in terms of blocking and knocking off. Your child can therefore continue to enjoy Ludo at any age and, while playing, anxiety levels lower to normal. Their thinking brain comes back on line and they start developing a strategy to make you lose! Sometimes by cheating! Fun and laughter always mitigate stress.

pickup sticks

Pickup Sticks

Calm thinking and careful movement is needed before each turn. This takes the focus off any external issue. Only their fingers and the stick matter! This is a calming activity for the aftermath of a problem.

Just get the pickup sticks out, sit on the floor, say you need someone to play with, and start your own turn. They cannot help but get drawn in – if only to do better!!

snakes and ladders

Snakes and Ladders

There’s an equal chance of winning whatever your age with Snakes and Ladders, so anxiety about winning or losing is diminished. It’s random. It’s luck.

Life’s a bit like that, so this game models how to treat life events at one remove. In other words, it’s not the end of the world! You don't have to say that, it just is just realised. 

big wood dominoes

Big Wood Dominoes

You can play dominoes properly, or your child can build them up to their height, or make a fort. This is one for spontaneous fun to distract a child who is in the throes of anxiety.

Simply get the dominoes out and start making something. The game is the blocks, whether you actually play dominoes or not.

You can, for example, help your child line them up in some kind of order – which is also a calming activity. As I said, games lower anxiety in the body. It's also a super distraction activity, although if your child is also angry there have to be rules about safety, like no throwing or they get put away.

clock patience

Clock Patience

Concentration with placing the playing cards and meaningless competition plus randomness all help remove worries for the duration of this game. Meaningless? See the rules below if you haven't met this game. It's entirely random but fun. No strategy can be used, no one is likely to be cleverer. It's all luck.

This game therefore lowers cortisol levels and brings your child’s body back into equilibrium. As I’ve said many time, they cannot think when they're in fight/flight mode!

But here, they’re pitching against probably impossible odds, so it’s fun and distracting with no strings attached. The perfect relaxation – like a silly RomCom on TV!

How to play CLOCK patience:

Take the jokers out. Shuffle the deck and lay out twelve piles of four cards each, face down in a circle to match the clock positions. The remaining four cards are placed, also face down, one at a time in the centre of the circle.

Your child turns over the first card from the four in the middle. They place it face up outside the pile at the corresponding hour (ie next to one or two or six o’clock etc). Ace is one, Jack is 11; Queen is 12. They then take the top card of the pile next to that hour and place it outside the correct pile for that new card number.

If they turn up a King, they place it face up in the centre and their turn is over. Now it’s your turn.

Play continues in this fashion. You beat the cards only if you manage to turn up all the outer ring before the 4 Kings are back in the centre. You lose the game if the fourth King is turned up while any cards remain face down. See the image above for how it looks in play.

Jenga

Jenga

This game lowers the anxiety habit in general because it offers small doses of anxiety each time it’s their turn. It might collapse on them – and then there's relief they survived the crash, whether it did or didn’t fall! So they get used to small amounts of anxiety.

In these fun, small doses they learn from Jenga that anxiety doesn’t kill them, and that if they wait a moment, it passes.

Family games can help lower your child’s anxiety – and do so much more!

So – play reduces stress. Play is where children learn about life and solve problems in miniature. Laughter and stress cannot co-exist! Games lower anxiety in a way other occupations often don’t. But only in a family situation. You with them.

It’s been proven by research, although we’ve always known it.

Despite the fact that this particular piece of research was paid for by a toy company and published to help parents during the pandemic, it holds good for all families for all time! Give it a go?

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