How to balance gaming in your life

If you are an ambitious and competitive person - and since you are subscribed to THE GUIDE+ chances are high that you are - then a hobby like FC can quite easily cause an imbalance in life. Because with that ambition comes significant time invest, pressure, potentially frustration and the approach that your time investment needs to lead to the results you're aiming for. And if that imbalance starts to manifest, then in turn you are going have an even harder time to improve and reach your goals in FC. So today we are going to go over three tips how you can avoid the damaging cicle of losing balance.

Don't let gaming dictate your schedule This first tip will already help you avoid a huge part of the potential frustrations that gaming can undoubtably cause. I myself have been working freelance in a gaming firm since I turned 18 years old and naturally it was not always easy to find and keep a good schedule. Especially when my motivation to compete in FIFA was high, it was easy to start slacking in work, fitness and health in order to have more time to play. And that was never a good idea.

Obviously not everyone has the aspiration to compete professionally but even for a casual player, if you start prioritising playing FC over more important tasks of your day, then this will have an immensly negative impact. If your games go well, then this might carry you over the bad conscious of having procrastinated those other tasks, but if your games go badly, then the full negative effect comes crushing in: you still have those tasks, your mood is low because of the bad results, your motivation is low because you just performed a much more fun and dopamin rewarding activity then what is waiting for you and so in the end it's likely you will procrastinate even more and slowly but surely stress will amount.

So my advice here is very simple and very clear

• get your work done first
• get your physical activity done first
• get any other important tasks that require discipline done first
• don't sacrifice sleep to play longer

and then reward yourself with your gaming session and play with a free head. You will have all the ability to focus and enjoy the game and it will be much easier to improve that way.

Don't let gaming dictate your mood This leads us directly into tip number 2 because if you play with a free head, you will also have an easier time to not let FC affect your mood. It won't be easy, just easier. Once again this is caused by our ambition: we want to improve and reach our goals and if we feel like we are putting the time in but are not reaping the rewards, then we get frustrated.

However as I have already talked about in some other mentality articles, this is a flawed approach: reaching a goal will always be a very short moment of joy before you adjust your baseline and only reaching a higher goal will make you happy. Don't get me wrong, goals are important for motivational purposes, but reaching them is not what should bring you most of the joy. The work on the way towards reaching them should.

And on every way towards a goal there will be setbacks. Losing is part of the game. It can happen quickly to get carried away in negative emotions after a bad weekend league or just a bad playsession in general. The worst thing you can do however is to carry that mood over into the rest of your life. Gaming is your hobby, it should be fun and relaxing. If it starts stressing you out, then that's bad. And going back to tip number 1 it will only lead into bad habits such as starting to play longer and trying to climb your way out of a losing streak.

So instead, after a poor session, shut off your console, take a deep breath, acknowledge how you feel about it and then turn your eyes away from the screen and do something else you enjoy. Within a minute you will have forgotten about what just happened and it won't seem like a big thing anymore. Because it really isn't in the grand scheem of things. Sometimes it really is just that little moment of becoming aware that makes all the difference.

Change your perspective Last but not least, I want to urge you to change your perspective on playing and improving. I get it, we all want to be good players, we all want to have the edge over our opponent and our ego wants to be rewarded and able to say "Yes, I'm that guy on FC!". However the only players who are going to be able say that to themselves almost every game are the pros... the top 0.01% or so of players.

For all the rest of us, the approach needs to be different. We are going to get outplayed, we are going to lose. And the natural, ego-protecting response is going to be to blame the game, luck, the sweaty playstyle of the other player, EA's wrong doing or whatever other purpose serves in the moment. Or even worse, we are going to blame ourselves in a way that's self-destructive: "I am never going to be a good player, I just can't do it."

Do something different instead. Start finding joy and motivation in those moments. You just got battered 5:0 by someone? Great, it's time to look at that recording and find out what that guy did so much better than you. You dominated someone but lost in an unlucky way? Good, it's time to look at that recording and find out what else you could have done to score 2 more goals or concede 1 less. You just can't get that one skillmove done correctly in clutch situations? Good, it's time to take a breath and go again. The mind is your best friend and your worst enemy at the same time. Blame the game or yourself in a bad way and you will never improve. Embrace the tough moments and turn them into chances and you will improve for sure.

Your choice, start chosing wiser today!

Greetings from Cuba, where I'm currently on vacation, getting some perspective ;) Georg

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About the author Georg "CruZzAve" Raffelt is creating tutorials since 2013 around which time he also started his competitive journey in the game. He was able to qualify for the Grand Final of the German National Championship "Virtuelle Bundesliga" twice in 2014 and 2015. Online he managed to reach the weekly and monthly Top100 in the Weekend League numerous times.

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