Staff Perspective: Crafting Calm - Why Video Games Can Be a Healthy Coping Skill
I remember being a kid, maybe nine or ten years old, rushing to my best friend’s house after school to play Mario Kart on his Nintendo. We would spend hours racing around 16-bit rainbow tracks, smashing blocks, and throwing bananas. I didn’t realize then that gaming could be more than entertainment, or that for some people it could one day become a healthy way to cope with stress.
For years, I’ve been drawn to survival, crafting, and adventure-style games. Think Minecraft, Conan Exiles, Valheim, or Enshrouded, to name a few. In these games, players gather resources, build shelters, craft tools, and shape the world around them. What I’ve always appreciated is that many of these games allow creativity without urgency. There is often no pressure to perform, no constant combat or repeated restarts after dying, and no demand to move quickly. Instead, there is space to explore, discover, and build at your own pace. For me, that slower rhythm is calming, relaxing, and restorative, rather than the stress that is often associated with gaming.
So it caught my attention when, during a recent therapy session, my client asked, “Is playing video games a good coping skill, or am I just avoiding my issues?”
The client, a woman in her mid-60s, has been struggling with significant anxiety, stress, and worry related to a number of all-encompassing life circumstances. Throughout our time together, we have been working to build coping skills that support the deeper and sometimes difficult work we are doing in session. Recently, she began playing Valheim with her adult son, who lives across the country. It has become a meaningful way for them to connect, but as she noted, it has also served as a powerful distraction from her worries.
Valheim is an open-world survival and crafting game set in a Viking-inspired landscape. Players explore a vast environment with few limits, gathering resources, building homes and settlements, and progressing through the game at their own pace, either solo or cooperatively with others online.
Her concern that gaming might be more avoidance than coping is not unfounded. Healthy distraction, unfortunately, has developed a poor reputation in many therapeutic spaces. Historically, a number of therapeutic models emphasized emotional processing and direct engagement with distress, often cautioning that anything pulling a client away from “doing the work” could be counterproductive.
There has long been a belief that growth requires sitting with distress and acclimating to it. While that approach can be helpful for some, not every person responds well to sustained emotional exposure, especially when their nervous system is already overwhelmed.
The concern that distraction equals avoidance is understandable, but it misses something important. Healthy distraction is not about permanently avoiding unpleasant or distressing feelings. It is about creating enough space for the brain and body to recover from the physical and emotional impacts of stress. When someone is chronically overstressed, their nervous system struggles to self-regulate. Insight narrows, problem-solving becomes harder, and overall well-being declines.
In these moments, healthy distraction can allow anxiety to settle, reduce reactivity, and restore balance. From that regulated place, people often return to their challenges with clearer thinking, renewed motivation, and greater resilience.
Relief is not the enemy of growth. Sometimes, when you are stressed, overwhelmed, and struggling to make sense of the world around you, you don’t need more effort or insight. You may simply need a brief visit to another world, one that allows you to rest, reset, and return.
So the next time you find yourself, or a client you support, feeling overwhelmed and dysregulated, consider stepping into a new world for a while. Harvest a few resources, build something meaningful, and allow yourself time to rest and reset. You might be surprised to find that when you return, the challenges you left behind feel a little more manageable.
If you are curious about where to start, I often recommend Enshrouded as an excellent entry point for those seeking a relaxing gaming experience. It is, by far, my personal favorite. Its emphasis on exploration, building, and creativity allows players to engage at their own pace. There are countless tutorials and creative design videos on YouTube for those who enjoy learning by watching or who simply want a bit of inspiration. It is a great option for exploring whether this kind of play feels restorative for you or the clients you support. You can visit enshrouded.com to learn more about the game, or take some time to explore the other games mentioned here and see which ones spark your curiosity.
The opinions in CDP Staff Perspective blogs are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Science or the Department of Defense.
Brian Ludden, Ed.D., LMHC, LPC, , is a Military Behavioral Health Counselor at the Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP) within the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.
I remember being a kid, maybe nine or ten years old, rushing to my best friend’s house after school to play Mario Kart on his Nintendo. We would spend hours racing around 16-bit rainbow tracks, smashing blocks, and throwing bananas. I didn’t realize then that gaming could be more than entertainment, or that for some people it could one day become a healthy way to cope with stress.
For years, I’ve been drawn to survival, crafting, and adventure-style games. Think Minecraft, Conan Exiles, Valheim, or Enshrouded, to name a few. In these games, players gather resources, build shelters, craft tools, and shape the world around them. What I’ve always appreciated is that many of these games allow creativity without urgency. There is often no pressure to perform, no constant combat or repeated restarts after dying, and no demand to move quickly. Instead, there is space to explore, discover, and build at your own pace. For me, that slower rhythm is calming, relaxing, and restorative, rather than the stress that is often associated with gaming.
So it caught my attention when, during a recent therapy session, my client asked, “Is playing video games a good coping skill, or am I just avoiding my issues?”
The client, a woman in her mid-60s, has been struggling with significant anxiety, stress, and worry related to a number of all-encompassing life circumstances. Throughout our time together, we have been working to build coping skills that support the deeper and sometimes difficult work we are doing in session. Recently, she began playing Valheim with her adult son, who lives across the country. It has become a meaningful way for them to connect, but as she noted, it has also served as a powerful distraction from her worries.
Valheim is an open-world survival and crafting game set in a Viking-inspired landscape. Players explore a vast environment with few limits, gathering resources, building homes and settlements, and progressing through the game at their own pace, either solo or cooperatively with others online.
Her concern that gaming might be more avoidance than coping is not unfounded. Healthy distraction, unfortunately, has developed a poor reputation in many therapeutic spaces. Historically, a number of therapeutic models emphasized emotional processing and direct engagement with distress, often cautioning that anything pulling a client away from “doing the work” could be counterproductive.
There has long been a belief that growth requires sitting with distress and acclimating to it. While that approach can be helpful for some, not every person responds well to sustained emotional exposure, especially when their nervous system is already overwhelmed.
The concern that distraction equals avoidance is understandable, but it misses something important. Healthy distraction is not about permanently avoiding unpleasant or distressing feelings. It is about creating enough space for the brain and body to recover from the physical and emotional impacts of stress. When someone is chronically overstressed, their nervous system struggles to self-regulate. Insight narrows, problem-solving becomes harder, and overall well-being declines.
In these moments, healthy distraction can allow anxiety to settle, reduce reactivity, and restore balance. From that regulated place, people often return to their challenges with clearer thinking, renewed motivation, and greater resilience.
Relief is not the enemy of growth. Sometimes, when you are stressed, overwhelmed, and struggling to make sense of the world around you, you don’t need more effort or insight. You may simply need a brief visit to another world, one that allows you to rest, reset, and return.
So the next time you find yourself, or a client you support, feeling overwhelmed and dysregulated, consider stepping into a new world for a while. Harvest a few resources, build something meaningful, and allow yourself time to rest and reset. You might be surprised to find that when you return, the challenges you left behind feel a little more manageable.
If you are curious about where to start, I often recommend Enshrouded as an excellent entry point for those seeking a relaxing gaming experience. It is, by far, my personal favorite. Its emphasis on exploration, building, and creativity allows players to engage at their own pace. There are countless tutorials and creative design videos on YouTube for those who enjoy learning by watching or who simply want a bit of inspiration. It is a great option for exploring whether this kind of play feels restorative for you or the clients you support. You can visit enshrouded.com to learn more about the game, or take some time to explore the other games mentioned here and see which ones spark your curiosity.
The opinions in CDP Staff Perspective blogs are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Science or the Department of Defense.
Brian Ludden, Ed.D., LMHC, LPC, , is a Military Behavioral Health Counselor at the Center for Deployment Psychology (CDP) within the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.