“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” —T. S. Eliot
1: You have a goal.
You will likely encounter obstacles or challenges that you must overcome to reach your goal.
Game designer and PhD Jane McGonigal calls these “The bad guys.”
Bad guys test us and make things tough, creating challenges to overcome.
There are always bad guys in the games we play. Think of sand traps in golf. Or, the letter J in Scrabble. Or, the defense in football or basketball.
In video games, Jane writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully, the bad guys are the “obstacles that force us to be creative and clever, like the relentless chocolate fountains that block our moves in Candy Crush Saga.
“They require us to try harder and jump higher,” she notes, “like the ubiquitous turtles we have to avoid in Super Mario Bros.”
To win the game, you must “find and battle the bad guys—anything that blocks your progress or causes you anxiety, pain, or distress,” Jane explains.
2: However, facing these “bad guys” helps us “develop skills and strategies that ultimately make you smarter, stronger, and faster—so you can achieve bigger goals in the future.”
Is this just happy talk? Actually, it’s not.
“It is a validated, scientific finding,” Jane writes. “In order to become happier or healthier, you need what researchers call psychological flexibility: The courage to face things that are hard for us.”
Why is it important to be open to failure and negative experiences—not just in games but in everyday life?
Because “people with psychological flexibility have been shown to cope better and recover faster from all kinds of injuries, illnesses, griefs, economic difficulties, career setbacks, and personal losses.”
Building on this, Jane’s book SuperBetter explains how to apply lessons and strategies from games to tackle real-life challenges and hardships.
Jane would know. She created a game called “Jane the Concussion Slayer” to help her “slay” her suicidal thoughts and recover from a debilitating concussion.
Turning her real-life struggle into a game “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.”
SuperBetter players have fought more than half a million real-life bad guys. The data shows that SuperBetter players feel better, stronger, and happier after reporting a battle, whether they win or lose.
Here are just a few of the real-life bad guys battled by SuperBetter players:
- Mrs. Volcano. “She erupts inside of me and makes me yell horrible things at my little children and husband who I adore to bits.”
- The Elevator Sirens. “They call to me seductively whenever I’m trying to be more active and take the stairs. They say, ‘You deserve a nice relaxing ride, come to me, come to me.’”
- Lord Impossibility. “If I plan anything good, he comes and tells me it’s impossible. ‘You’re not good enough, you have no luck, it’s too difficult, you don’t have enough money, you never completed any of your plans, you’re quitting everything as soon as it calls for diligence.”
- My Four Devil Foods: Pizza, soda, marshmallows, and hot chocolate. “It feels really liberating to not worry so much about all the food in the world that I shouldn’t eat, and just work on battling the four big ones.”
- The Regret Parade, “in which all the things that I have done in my life that I regret scroll past at random, in my head.”
- The Late Night Computersaur and the Late Night TV-saur. “Not only do they strike at night, when I’m most vulnerable to the onslaught of distraction, but they can also battle for several hours at a time.’
- The Sad Nap. “That’s when I go to bed in the middle of the day because I’m bored or depressed, not because I’m actually tired.”
“As you can see,” Jane writes, “there are all kinds of bad guys: mental, emotional, physical, and social.”
Real-life bad guys try to stop you from getting SuperBetter.
“Spotting a bad guy means identifying a potential source of trouble or distress,” she explains.
“Battling a bad guy means experimenting with different strategies for dealing with it effectively,” Jane notes. “Succeeding in battle means not letting it stop you from having a good day or making progress toward your goals.”
The bad guys described above all have clever names.
“It isn’t necessary to get this creative,” she observes, “but it can help you spot and battle the bad guys more effectively.”
As one player states, “My bad guys all have their own distinct names and identities. . . The names help separate them from me. It’s no longer all the dark stuff I’m carrying around and can’t drop.”
3: Remember, the specific “bad guys” you face will likely change and evolve over time.
Because when you battle a bad guy, eventually you will become strong, smart, and skillful enough to defeat them forever.
“Something that’s a bad guy for you today likely won’t be a bad guy for you six months from now,” Jane notes.
She shares what happened when she was battling her concussion: “My real-life bad guys included bright lights, crowded spaces, and reading or writing for more than a few minutes at a time.
“These bad guys triggered my symptoms, so I had to avoid them.
“But little by little,” Jane states, “I built up my tolerance to them, and eventually, my brain healed. Now I no longer have to avoid them. That’s one way to vanquish a bad guy: Get strong enough that it doesn’t bother you anymore.”
For instance, another time Jane faced significant obstacles was when she and her husband were trying to get pregnant.
“It wasn’t easy for us,” Jane writes. “We went through fertility treatment, and I had to do all kinds of things that scared me: Inject myself with hormones, get blood drawn every day for weeks, and even have surgery.
“But these things weren’t my bad guys—they were actually positive steps toward my goal,” she shares. “The real bad guys were the thoughts that made me anxious or pessimistic while I took those crucial steps.”
The biggest bad guy of all during her fertility treatments?
“‘Madame Esmeralda’—the psychic in my mind who kept looking into her crystal ball and predicting that everything would go horribly wrong,” Jane states. “She never once predicted that everything would go right!
She had to tell Madame Esmeralda to stop trying to predict the future—it was better for her mind and body to stay focused on the present.
Which is another way to defeat a bad guy: Learn a new skill to overpower it.
“My anxiety lowered considerably when I learned to turn off catastrophic thinking (or always expecting the worst)—and I know this had a positive effect on how successfully my body responded to the treatment,” Jane writes.
“In the end, Madame Esmeralda’s predictions all proved wrong—and my husband and I are the proud parents of twin girls!”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What “bad guy” is most consistently getting in the way of my peace, growth, or progress right now?
Action: Name one recurring “bad guy” and identify one practical strategy to battle it this week.