1: Are you facing a challenge that feels overwhelming? Are you walking through something really hard right now?
There is good news, Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.
Let’s start here. “You are stronger than you know. You are surrounded by potential allies. You are the hero of your own story,” Jane notes.
How do you access these powers that are already inside you?
You play a game.
“Being gameful,” Jane writes, allows you to access “the psychological strengths you naturally display when you play games—such as optimism, creativity, courage, and determination.”
Jane would know. Yesterday, we explored how, at her lowest point, she created a game called “Jane the Concussion Slayer” to help her “slay” her suicidal thoughts and recover from a concussion.
“I felt more in control of my own destiny,” she explains. “My friends and family knew how to help and support me. And I started to see myself as a much stronger person. . .
“It felt like a miracle to me,” Jane recalls. “It wasn’t a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms—they lasted more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far.
“But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain,” she explains, “I stopped suffering.”
2: What happened next surprised Jane.
“After a few months, I put up a blog post and a short video online explaining how to play,” she shares. “Not everybody has a concussion, and not everyone wants to be ‘the slayer,'” Jane writes, “so I renamed the game SuperBetter.
Before long, people from around the world were reaching out to her, sharing their own SuperBetter games. Like Jane, they assumed secret identities, enlisted their friends (what Jane calls allies), and battled their bad guys.
“They were getting ‘SuperBetter,'” she shares, “at facing challenges like depression and anxiety, surgery and chronic pain, migraines and Crohn’s disease, healing a broken heart, and finding a job after years of unemployment.
“People were even playing it for extremely serious, even terminal diagnoses, like stage-five cancer and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS),” Jane writes.
“And I could tell from their messages and videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me.”
These SuperBetter “gamers” were feeling more courageous and confident. They felt better understood by the people they loved and cared about.
“And they talked about feeling happier,” she notes, “even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenges of their lives.”
3: You, too, can learn “how to be gameful in the face of extreme stress and personal challenge,” Jane writes.
“You have the strength to find support in the most unexpected places, and deepen your existing relationships,” she observes. “You have a natural capacity to motivate yourself and supercharge your heroic qualities, like willpower, compassion, and determination. . .
“You already have these qualities within you. You don’t have to change a thing. You are already more powerful than you realize. You have the ability to control your attention—and therefore your thoughts and feelings.
How do you create your own “SuperBetter” game? Here are the simple steps:
Rule #1: Challenge yourself: Choose a clear, meaningful real-life challenge you want to tackle (healing, a habit change, a big life goal, etc.).
Rule #2: Collect and activate power-ups: Identify small, easy actions that reliably make you feel a bit stronger, happier, calmer, or more connected, and deliberately use them throughout the day.
Rule #3: Find and battle the bad guys: Identify and name obstacles (thought patterns, situations, triggers) as “bad guys,” and practice strategies to avoid, resist, adapt to, challenge, or convert them.
Rule #4: Seek out and complete quests: Break your bigger challenge into tiny, do‑able actions you can complete and treat each as a “quest.”
Rule #5: Recruit your allies: Proactively enlist friends, family, or community members who know your challenge and agree to support, encourage, and “play” with you.
Rule #6: Adopt a secret identity: Create a heroic alter ego (name, strengths, maybe a symbol or theme song) that captures how you want to show up while you work on your challenge.
Rule #7: Go for an epic win: Define a realistic but ambitious long‑term outcome that would feel “epic” to you, and let that be the motivating north star that your quests and power‑ups aim toward.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I viewing my current challenge as something happening to me, or as a game I can actively play and influence?
Action: Choose one challenge I’m facing and define a simple “quest” I can complete today to start building momentum.
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