Balancing Between Video Games And Studying
Video games have been a very entertaining platform for people all around the globe. Gaming has become a part of most people’s lives for many years especially of the young generation. There is one major problem for the majority of people who play games especially college students; not knowing how to balance between gaming and studying.
I have been a college student for 3 years now and I had the same problem when I was a first year.
College students tend to play games more in there college years and it gets worse if they are far from home with the freedom they posses. In my first year in college, I used to go to my boarding place right after my lectures ended just to play games and I played games for the rest of the day. Some days I spent the whole night playing games, it even messed up my sleep cycle. It led me to having lot of problems including health problems such as memory loss. Even though I studied, went well prepared for my exams I struggled remembering the things that I studied due to lack of sleep.
Games are very entertaining. Games are designed to keep people entertained and playing as long as possible. But when we spend so much of our time playing games it will eventually lead you to procrastinate when the exams are near.
Without good balancing, time management and most importantly discipline, it can be difficult to balance between video games and studying. Moreover when you look back on your life you may feel, you have missed so much of it.
So, How to balance video games and studying?
- Don’t stop playing games.
The main reason for you to come reading this blog this far is maybe because you don’t want to stop playing games but you actually want to balance your work and gaming.
You like playing games so much that it has become a part of your life but you know you want to be efficient , productive. But you can’t make up your mind to work because you want to play games. So you might end up uninstalling the games thinking that it will help you to focus on work but…does it actually work?
I used to uninstall all my games thinking it will be easy to focus on my studies. But I ended up re-installing them.
You may start playing games, then stop, then playing again. But it’s never gonna work. Because playing games is already in your system, you don’t wanna get rid of it.
Then don’t! Don’t stop playing games. Gaming is not a bad habit but doing it excessively may end up in addiction. What we should do follow some steps to balance our work.
2. Know when to stop gaming.
The first and best step to balance playing games and studying is knowing when to stop. You should be able to stop gaming at a point of time without continuing playing games the whole day. This maybe hard at first but with time you will get used to it. The most effective way to do that is to set a time limit, keep a sufficient time for gaming and when the time is over stop playing start working.
3. Prioritize
When you plan to study and play games in a balanced way chances are high where you think as “I’m gonna play games first for only 2 hours and then start working”. This almost never works. We should make sure to keep our priority on what’s most important for us, which is studying. Give priority to the studying that saves you from unnecessary stressing and procrastination when the deadlines are near.
4. Make up your mind to study.
Finally you have gotten to the right path. You have come such a long way up to now. But the most important part is making up your mind to work! In other words, you must build the urge to study. In order to do that , think about your future , who you are going to become…etc. Therefore set some goals whether they are big or small.
5. Make a schedule.
At this point you’ve limited your gaming time, set up your priorities and you’ve made up your mind to work. Let’s say you worked for 4 hours and you stopped working to play some games , then you should be able to continue your work. So if you make a list of the things that you have to do , it will be easy to stay focused and continue your work while balancing games.
Like I said before video games are a very entertaining platform. We can spend some of our time to play video games to relax a bit, and also it does have many benefits that have been proved scientifically like increasing brain’s gray matter which is associated with muscle control and memories.
To conclude things, majority of people find balancing video games and studying hard. But I believe that it’s pretty easy if you put effort to it .
