Online gaming has transformed from killing free time to a significant source of income for many people. The Covid pandemic has turned most game enthusiasts into professional gamers. Technological advancement has also contributed to the rapidly growing gaming sector.
Gaming organizations and gaming studios have done a lot to attract a vast audience. With the introduction of engaging storylines, inclusivity through multiple modes, and outstanding graphics, the gaming industry is gradually reaching its peak of popularity.
Gaming also has several benefits, such as enhancing response time, encouraging teamwork, stimulating focus, creativity, and visual memory, increasing critical thinking ability, improving Strategy making approach, and most importantly, helping to grow leadership quality. But there are several drawbacks too.
Multiple health problems have been increasing for the past few years due to a lack of physical activity, affecting the quality of gaming time. Most of the issues are familiar to gamers as they spend most of their time sitting in a place and playing for hours. Unhealthy food habits, lack of proper hydration, and imbalance in lifestyle increase the chance of illnesses.
Gamers must build and maintain a robust immunity system to dodge the common cold, fever, headache, pain, obesity, and other diseases. They can have medicines to cure these illnesses, but they may affect gaming careers and provide them with an uncertain future.
To get a healthier future and spend good quality gaming time, it is essential to adopt healthy habits to get prolonged gaming.
As a gamer, you should grind and play for hours to improve your skills and maintain synergy with teammates, but the long hours of grind come with a few health issues, which can be prevented by establishing healthy gaming habits. Here are five tips for developing healthy gaming habits to help you out.
Table of contents
Take breaks and manage playtime
Healthy gaming habits include taking breaks. Playing games for hours without taking breaks is not suitable for gamers. Playing continuously for hours is a common phenomenon among most gamers. But taking breaks can help gamers to boost their gaming skills. It is one of the best options for gamers to prevent body aches, eye pain, headache, and other injuries.
While gaming, gamers sit hours and hours in one place, staring at the screen of the platforms. Sitting in one place for hours can hamper brain function and blood circulation. Staring at the system’s screen for a long time can strain the eyes due to blue lights. Eyes can also dry out, and it will cause headaches or nausea. It also deeply affects mental health.
What to do?
- As a gamer, if you sit still for hours, you should take a break, stand up, and move around your gaming setup. While playing games, your eyes mainly focus on the system screen. You should take a break and look around with your eyes.
- You can focus on different objects around you and away from you. As you are staring at the screen, your eyes get dry. To prevent it, you should blink regularly to ensure your eyes are not drying out and burning.
- Whether you are a professional gamer or a gaming enthusiast does not matter. It would help if you had a gaming schedule. Continuous, imbalanced gaming schedule can harm your health and you may become bored while playing the game.
- Managing game time is one of the most required things for healthy well-being. Limiting gaming to a specific place and adjusting game time can help you to maintain other things in your life.
Correct posture and ergonomics
While gaming, gamers sit for hours, and continuous sitting in the same place increases the chance of postural pains and aches. It also increases the risk of muscular imbalance and joint degeneration of the hip, shoulder, and spine.
What to do?
- It can be said that correct posture is one of the crucial parts of healthy gaming. Correcting postures, including sitting straight, keeping shoulders back and down, and keeping the head around, can reduce the chance of body and muscle aches.
- Gamers need to sit in a comfortable way to increase in-game performance. But slouching for hours affects posture and harms the balance between esports and health. To maintain an excellent stance with comfort, you may look for sitting arrangements based on a Perfect balance of efficiency and comfort.
To maintain a correct posture, purchase an excellent ergonomic gaming chair from here.
Get a sufficient amount of sleep
Sleep is one of the most important aspects of gaming and everyone’s health and well-being. Most gamers face problems related to sleep. Considering how the eyes of a gamer are exposed to the screen, it is evident that it will cause a hard time sleeping.
Staying up late and playing games resists the production of the sleep hormone Melatonin and makes it challenging for gamers to concentrate and sleep well. Even if someone is tired, sometimes it is difficult to fall asleep. But healthy gaming habits need a healthy sleep cycle and decent sleep.
What to do?
- You need to maintain your sleep cycle to stay healthy and enhance concentration while playing games. You have to resist playing games for approximately one hour before you sleep. Do not drag games to your bed and harm your relaxation time.
- It can provide you with enough time to rest your eyes. Dinner also affects sleep. So, you need to consume healthy and light snacks and give yourself enough time to digest them before sleeping.
Exercise
Most gamers spend most of their time indoors. With this habit, they tend to lead an inactive lifestyle. Only getting decent sleep, food habits, and drinking water cannot fix the issues related to gaming habits. Even small breaks are not enough to fix this.
What to do?
- As a gamer, it is not mandatory to join a gym, but you do a workout at home and maintain your healthy lifestyle. As mentioned before, sitting in one place can harm your health. Keeping the blood running in the body needs a few efforts from the individual.
- Nowadays, games give enough time to take small breaks and exercise. Most of the games have loading screens, so you may have time to move a bit in that duration. In the multiplayer game, you can do basic exercises before the match starts while waiting in the lobby or joining a queue.
- In games, when you die and are waiting for respawn, you can utilize that time to invest in healthy gaming habits. Before gaming, you can do a warm-up to strengthen your reflection. Introductions do not include static stretching. With a dynamic warm-up routine, you can enhance your movement and reduce stiffness in the muscles of your hands.
- Routine warm-ups include exercises related to finger taps, finger pads, forearms, wrist, radius, and Ulna and eye exercises that prepare the body for healthy gaming time. While gaming, you are sitting in one place, but you can still keep your legs active by paddling your legs.
- After finishing your game time, you can do static stretching to help you further. Static stretching assists in preventing and curing pains, aches, and injuries that a gamer tends to face. Following the basic exercises and physical activities, stretching enhances blood circulation and releases chronic muscle tension but ensures you are not overdoing it.
- Stretching at the right amount is a staple of healthy gaming habits. You can also explore the outdoors, do basic cycling, or participate in sports to enhance your full potential.
Healthy food habits and hydration
Food habits are one of the topics to be concerned about. Food habits are directly related to healthy well-being. Food is the source of energy level in the human body. What you eat matters whether you are a gamer or not.
It can be seen that gamers focus on snacking in between gaming hours. You may spend several hours gaming and consume some water, but that may lack the amount you need. Consuming ready-to-eat processed foods and sugar-contained food increases insulin levels frequently, leading to several health problems.
What to do?
- Snacking is addictive, and it is hard to avoid while gaming. You can eat cashew, peanuts, Pistachios, and other healthy snacks to balance your urge and health. If you stick to a healthy diet, you will be energetic and lead a healthy gaming life.
- Fluid intake is also necessary for gaming as well as general health. It would help to have hydration to stay healthy and focused during game time.
- You can keep a reusable water bottle beside you and drink it in short intervals. With constant water consumption, dizziness and chances of headaches can be reduced. Your body would be more active and feel fresh. You should avoid coffee and fizzy drinks when you are thirsty.
Conclusion
Long gaming hours and staring at the screen can harm your eyes in several ways. Difficulties like eye strain, eye dryness, and other eye-related issues can be caused by blue light from the system screen. Including the prevention and cure, you can buy CNLO Blue Light Blocking Glasses to minimize eye difficulties.
You can purchase CNLO Blue Light Blocking Glasses from the link given below:
