The Chemistry of Video Gaming: Short and Not So Sweet

Julia Grover OTR/L
Founder of In-Tuned®

Playing of video games, especially the high speed, highly graphic and constantly novel type, release similar amounts of dopamine in the brain somewhere between nicotine and cocaine, according to Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. of the Huberman Lab at Stanford School of Medicine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA50EK70whE

How do smokers behave when they can’t have a cigarette?

How do cocaine addicts behave when they are coming down from a high?

Habitual video gaming comes with consequences similar to drug abuse. High amounts of dopamine released makes us want to do it again and again, leading to it taking more and more to get the same high. When not getting the high from playing video games, the user is thinking about it, talking about it, drawing pictures about it in art class and they are poorly motivated to do other activities, because those things just don’t give them the same dopamine hit.

We wouldn’t give our children a pack of smokes or bag of cocaine, so maybe we need to adopt the same judiciousness around access to video games.

When I evaluate a student, I typically can recognize the ones whose nervous systems have been hijacked by Fortnite, Minecraft and the like.

This is not judgment, but rather hard facts. My job is to work with students towards positive neurological change for adaptive functioning, but it’s hard to make those changes when video game habits are causing depletions in the motivational system.  

I don’t mind having to work harder to get and keep attention, although I know working with me, my brightly colored weighted balls, rocker board and eye-ball chart can’t complete with the newest PlayStation.

What is a shame? All the work and support going on in the foreground being undone by gaming going on in the background.

JUST SAY NO.

Julia

Here are a few of my past blogs on the same topic:

https://www.in-tunedchild.com/blog/2020/2/5/mood-disorders-in-childhood-an-uptick

https://www.in-tunedchild.com/blog/2020/1/22/the-good-thing-about-video-games-nothing