There is a process whose official name I've forgotten, but I call spiraling and hard stopping.
So when you feel yourself spiraling into rage and anger, you need to throw a curveball at it. Something that makes your thoughts pause for a moment because it needs to regroup. Often that momentary freeze is enough to break the cycle of "angry thought leads to more angry realizations leads to all the little anger jumping up leading to more angry thoughts" that causes the spiral.
Rage addiction is an issue a lot of people face, but its still an addiction and one you can never truly "cold turkey" out of. So you need to have a healthy alteration between letting steam cool out through minor vents and then also an ability to just ice out a situation you know will blow faster than it can be vented.
One personal example from a while back. I was playing Dead by Daylight (big mistake) and was just getting rolled by SWF groups who were beyond toxic. Like, I've got maybe 10 hours in the game and I'm playing horribly, while they teabag, flashlight and all sorts of other unnecessary drag outs on top of their clear victory. But I feel the rage building (as anyone who played DBD knows), so I say literally aloud "you were never gonna be a high rank player."
This small moment allows me to realize none of these victories mattered, as I was never going to get a high winrate or reach a leaderboard. It was all for giggles, and I should be giggling. Both at my own mistakes, and the level of tryhard on the other end. So my next games go about the same level of competency, but I'm having a good time losing and noting where I obviously fucked up.
I'm the complete opposite of you, in that I was a calmer child who was pretty non-angry and my adulthood has just become a long chain of growing rage barely below the surface. But I also am self aware enough to know when I'm catching myself in a spiral of anger far beyond what is valid for the situation, and have developed that process for it. Same with making sure I have games for days when I know I'm hot that are low stakes (comfy as the kids call em), and games for when I'm quite relaxed and a lot more unflappable.
I get like that when I play Dark Souls. I'd be an internet lolcow if I ever streamed some games.
It's like this man, some people just have that. Everything else checks out yeah? You make all of the marks of a mature adult - but then there is that. I think it comes from the same place that made dads yell at the screen watching the game but not everyone has that or understands the phenomena outside of sports, so anywhere else it manifests makes you look and feel like a chump.
Intentionally do misplays that cause you to lose and control your anger, or try to ensure that it never appears. That might help you in cases where it is unexpected.
One oddly effective learning measure with games is to play some reasonably challenging coop game with friends, with difficulty settings almost at max. If your friends are the jovial types, then you may quickly learn to accept the punches and laugh at the absurdity of how badly you lose, over and over.
Just make sure it's something more round or mission based than a survival game, since you want to make sure it's the kind of game where you're not actually going to have any stakes when you lose, other than for your pride.
Vermintide 2, Left 4 Dead 2, are good examples for this kind of game.
The issue with both is that they take feelings of boredom (i.e. motivation to do something new) and trick your brain into releasing neurotransmitters so you don’t feel bored anymore, despite not necessarily doing anything new
The benefit of both is that they can elicit new experiences and new mental connections (aka creative thoughts) through these new experiences
But they can also both be abused, as described above - do you think “exercising” your brain with 8 hours of counter-strike every day provides any tangible benefit? Obviously not, so it’s clearly not quite as simple as you’re making it out to be.
There are no circumstances when consuming pot is good. It always damages the brain. Every pot smoker I have ever met has been the dregs of society. Whether it's the antifa tattoo "artist" that my best friend married and eventually divorced (Thank god), or the redneck bums that lived in trailers in rural Georgia and ranted about republicans, they have all been poor nobodies. That is not so with gamers.
Every comedian you’ve ever liked smoked pot, and I think you undersell the overlap between 420-enjoyers and gamers, because in my experience it’s been nearly 1:1 lol.
It sounds like you’re describing fentanyl addicts, over half of Americans have tried pot and it’s legal in more and more states. Honestly, there probably are some harms (with chronic use, and which mostly go away with abstinence), but I state confidently they’re far smaller than the harms caused by alcohol. If your response is “alcohol is degenerate too”, then atleast you’re consistent lol, but the question was “how to chill while gaming” and I think those are both valid answers
You assume I have ever watched a comedian or even comedy in general. Laughter is either a defensive mechanism or latent psychopathy. Either you are the target, or someone else is. After all, many people laugh when a man gets kicked in the testicles, and that is anti-empathetic behavior. Comedians are also in the same category as actors, lawyers, doctors, bankers, and politicians, and should ultimately suffer the same punishment.
Of the gamers I know, it's less than 1 in 10 that partake in pot while gaming. If you hang out with degenerates, don't be surprised that they are all degenerate.
They weren't fentanyl addicts, fentanyl wasn't a thing. They were pot smokers. Every potsmoker is a democrat or worse. The harms of alcohol are temporary unless you partake excessively. Even then the long term effects affect the liver and not the brain. The effects of pot are not temporary. I'd rather be around someone who is currently drunk than someone who regularly smokes pot, even if they are not currently partaking. The former will be back to normal the next day, the latter will always be a flaming liberal. They are incapable of higher order thinking, so they cannot even realize the damage done to their brain. It is much like severe altitude sickness, where in just a few moments a person is no longer capable of rescuing themselves do to decreased cognitive function. A pot smoker can't even realize how bad they are after just a few months of partaking. They are just intolerable people.
How to chill with gaming is to play a different game? Play something non competitive, that makes you think, like Factorio or KSP. Play a game that you can use OP mods with out a problem like Rimworld. You don't have to play normie crap. I especially don't want drunks and potheads ruining others games. They are almost identical to having a hacker on the opposing team. Not only can they not perform, which isn't that big of a deal, they hurt their team by wasting resources or teamkilling or blocking LOS or , in games with collision, bumping you and throwing your aim and pushing you into line of fire or blocking your retreat. Even in less competitive games like ARK they are fuckups that kill your dinos by downing them after crashing into the water or in games like Starcitizen, they crash entire servers by filling your ship with ground vehicles and trying to drive them around the hallways. I hate them.
I was similarly violent in my young childhood. We had broken N64 and GameCube controllers left and right because of me. That habit completely reversed between Middle School and high school, and now I'm considered an extremely calm person amongst my social group 15+ years later.
Looking back, something that helped me was the sport that I decided to take up: fencing. much like gaming, fencing has a lot of direct competition between you and an opponent and there's plenty of opportunity for banter and ridicule. however, unlike video games, if you have a bad outburst in fencing you get kicked out of the club, and possibly go to jail depending on how bad it gets.
Additionally, fencing is a sport that is all about control. there's a quote in the 1990s Zorro movie: "never attack in anger". This is very good advice for fencers and martial artists alike, because anger tends exaggerate movements that don't need to be exaggerated and can destroy your precision.
These two aspects, as well as other positive influences in my life, contributed greatly to reversing my anger issues.
On the subject of anger and video games, the thing that helps me in both fencing and video games is to recognize that you can always be better. There's only ever one person in the world who is the best, and even they have room to improve. Thus, when you have a catastrophic misplay, take a deep breath and go over it in your head. Focus on how you could have played it better, maybe even meditate on it before bed. That way, instead of an embarrassing moment, the misplay becomes another rung on the ladder to improvement.
Hang out with people that are calm on this issue. When I was younger I had a bit of an anger problem. It had more to do with being a big guy and not being able to use it very much, and lots of bad situations. The anger led to worse situations.
It didn't end the problems, but the calmness let me figure out what was going on. I played games for their beauty and fun more than my place in society. I baked bread when really frustrated. They asked me what I did to win so many baking awards and I had to say the secret ingredient was rage.
I also started doing things just to enjoy them. A lot of people said it was weird that I would go to restaurants or movies alone, but I enjoyed it. Once there, I found people who I could hang out with without worry of bad situations. As strange as it sounds, those lefty friends used to be very important people in my life. By learning to be social on my own terms, it got better and easier.
I'm a lot more chill than I used to be, but that's a combo of weed + menopause + two NDE, and I can't say I recommend for everyone.
Frustration is now usually expressed only with the raising of my voice, which happens only rarely, I hope.
As for games, oddly enough, I can take my butt getting kicked by another player, but I really hate getting stonewalled by the computer itself; the most frustrating thing about console is the lack of cheats in SP.
View losing as part of the game and a step in the process of improving, not as a final state. If you can think and learn from what went wrong, instead of becoming emotional over the result, you'll actually improve yourself in several ways.
I have exact similar problem. I have big anger issue, even a few years ago, I had hard time controlling it. However ever since I found some hobby that requires some skills, I could calm my temper down these days. I don't play competitive or easily frustrating games. You are on your own to deal with it because hardly anyone will understand it like you mentioned in the last paragraph. Even now being informed of western politics still frustrates me to no end, I take a break from any western entertainment or websites and never try to go any western message board for a few days.
If you go to a therapist they shouldn't even be telling you to take pills. If pills are being prescribed on the first visit (when no one has been hurt and you clearly aren't at risk of going to jail) then you have a shit therapist who is just trying to farm people for money.
As for actual anger management, you should always work on different ways of interpreting things so that they don't become offensive to you. Lengthening the fuse won't really be helpful if too many things set off the fuse. When it comes to misplays costing you the game, it always helps to see it as a learning experience (or potentially as a game you'd have lost anyway since there was no telling how your opponent might have reacted had you even done your "correct" action) instead of as a one-time missed chance that you personally ruined. How you frame things deeply affects how you interpret them.
In my career I've sometimes been criticized for being overly harsh on people due to high standards I set for myself and my coworkers. I didn't always think that was fair criticism, but I worried if I tried to change I would over-compensate in such a way as to lower my standards. And if I wasn't confident I could be less harsh and keep standards high I would rather be the "asshole" with high standards.
Which is to say that personalities are a complex thing, and maybe there are trade-offs involved when you try to adjust your personality. If you aren't a pro gamer, if being mad at making mistakes when you're gaming is the only time you lose control then all things considered you're doing pretty well.; If you "fix" that, maybe you risk blowing up at a colleague at work because you no longer have the "pissed off at making mistakes" outlet in your gaming.
To give the "sometimes the best solution is 'do nothing'" perspective...
Watch some DarkSydePhil streams, realize he’s what you look like when you lose your shit over a game, you’ll want to correct your behavior instantly.
There is a process whose official name I've forgotten, but I call spiraling and hard stopping.
So when you feel yourself spiraling into rage and anger, you need to throw a curveball at it. Something that makes your thoughts pause for a moment because it needs to regroup. Often that momentary freeze is enough to break the cycle of "angry thought leads to more angry realizations leads to all the little anger jumping up leading to more angry thoughts" that causes the spiral.
Rage addiction is an issue a lot of people face, but its still an addiction and one you can never truly "cold turkey" out of. So you need to have a healthy alteration between letting steam cool out through minor vents and then also an ability to just ice out a situation you know will blow faster than it can be vented.
One personal example from a while back. I was playing Dead by Daylight (big mistake) and was just getting rolled by SWF groups who were beyond toxic. Like, I've got maybe 10 hours in the game and I'm playing horribly, while they teabag, flashlight and all sorts of other unnecessary drag outs on top of their clear victory. But I feel the rage building (as anyone who played DBD knows), so I say literally aloud "you were never gonna be a high rank player."
This small moment allows me to realize none of these victories mattered, as I was never going to get a high winrate or reach a leaderboard. It was all for giggles, and I should be giggling. Both at my own mistakes, and the level of tryhard on the other end. So my next games go about the same level of competency, but I'm having a good time losing and noting where I obviously fucked up.
I'm the complete opposite of you, in that I was a calmer child who was pretty non-angry and my adulthood has just become a long chain of growing rage barely below the surface. But I also am self aware enough to know when I'm catching myself in a spiral of anger far beyond what is valid for the situation, and have developed that process for it. Same with making sure I have games for days when I know I'm hot that are low stakes (comfy as the kids call em), and games for when I'm quite relaxed and a lot more unflappable.
I get like that when I play Dark Souls. I'd be an internet lolcow if I ever streamed some games.
It's like this man, some people just have that. Everything else checks out yeah? You make all of the marks of a mature adult - but then there is that. I think it comes from the same place that made dads yell at the screen watching the game but not everyone has that or understands the phenomena outside of sports, so anywhere else it manifests makes you look and feel like a chump.
OK, this will sound strange, but bear with me.
Intentionally do misplays that cause you to lose and control your anger, or try to ensure that it never appears. That might help you in cases where it is unexpected.
One oddly effective learning measure with games is to play some reasonably challenging coop game with friends, with difficulty settings almost at max. If your friends are the jovial types, then you may quickly learn to accept the punches and laugh at the absurdity of how badly you lose, over and over.
Just make sure it's something more round or mission based than a survival game, since you want to make sure it's the kind of game where you're not actually going to have any stakes when you lose, other than for your pride.
Vermintide 2, Left 4 Dead 2, are good examples for this kind of game.
You ever try playing video games....
on weed?
Degenerate
But playing video games isn’t harmful in the same exact ways?
1 != -1
Pot kills your brain. Games exercise it.
The issue with both is that they take feelings of boredom (i.e. motivation to do something new) and trick your brain into releasing neurotransmitters so you don’t feel bored anymore, despite not necessarily doing anything new
The benefit of both is that they can elicit new experiences and new mental connections (aka creative thoughts) through these new experiences
But they can also both be abused, as described above - do you think “exercising” your brain with 8 hours of counter-strike every day provides any tangible benefit? Obviously not, so it’s clearly not quite as simple as you’re making it out to be.
There are no circumstances when consuming pot is good. It always damages the brain. Every pot smoker I have ever met has been the dregs of society. Whether it's the antifa tattoo "artist" that my best friend married and eventually divorced (Thank god), or the redneck bums that lived in trailers in rural Georgia and ranted about republicans, they have all been poor nobodies. That is not so with gamers.
Every comedian you’ve ever liked smoked pot, and I think you undersell the overlap between 420-enjoyers and gamers, because in my experience it’s been nearly 1:1 lol.
It sounds like you’re describing fentanyl addicts, over half of Americans have tried pot and it’s legal in more and more states. Honestly, there probably are some harms (with chronic use, and which mostly go away with abstinence), but I state confidently they’re far smaller than the harms caused by alcohol. If your response is “alcohol is degenerate too”, then atleast you’re consistent lol, but the question was “how to chill while gaming” and I think those are both valid answers
You assume I have ever watched a comedian or even comedy in general. Laughter is either a defensive mechanism or latent psychopathy. Either you are the target, or someone else is. After all, many people laugh when a man gets kicked in the testicles, and that is anti-empathetic behavior. Comedians are also in the same category as actors, lawyers, doctors, bankers, and politicians, and should ultimately suffer the same punishment.
Of the gamers I know, it's less than 1 in 10 that partake in pot while gaming. If you hang out with degenerates, don't be surprised that they are all degenerate.
They weren't fentanyl addicts, fentanyl wasn't a thing. They were pot smokers. Every potsmoker is a democrat or worse. The harms of alcohol are temporary unless you partake excessively. Even then the long term effects affect the liver and not the brain. The effects of pot are not temporary. I'd rather be around someone who is currently drunk than someone who regularly smokes pot, even if they are not currently partaking. The former will be back to normal the next day, the latter will always be a flaming liberal. They are incapable of higher order thinking, so they cannot even realize the damage done to their brain. It is much like severe altitude sickness, where in just a few moments a person is no longer capable of rescuing themselves do to decreased cognitive function. A pot smoker can't even realize how bad they are after just a few months of partaking. They are just intolerable people.
How to chill with gaming is to play a different game? Play something non competitive, that makes you think, like Factorio or KSP. Play a game that you can use OP mods with out a problem like Rimworld. You don't have to play normie crap. I especially don't want drunks and potheads ruining others games. They are almost identical to having a hacker on the opposing team. Not only can they not perform, which isn't that big of a deal, they hurt their team by wasting resources or teamkilling or blocking LOS or , in games with collision, bumping you and throwing your aim and pushing you into line of fire or blocking your retreat. Even in less competitive games like ARK they are fuckups that kill your dinos by downing them after crashing into the water or in games like Starcitizen, they crash entire servers by filling your ship with ground vehicles and trying to drive them around the hallways. I hate them.
This was going to be my suggestion
Go slay some gym equipment man. If you're mad after that, you've got more fight in you than I do.
I was similarly violent in my young childhood. We had broken N64 and GameCube controllers left and right because of me. That habit completely reversed between Middle School and high school, and now I'm considered an extremely calm person amongst my social group 15+ years later.
Looking back, something that helped me was the sport that I decided to take up: fencing. much like gaming, fencing has a lot of direct competition between you and an opponent and there's plenty of opportunity for banter and ridicule. however, unlike video games, if you have a bad outburst in fencing you get kicked out of the club, and possibly go to jail depending on how bad it gets.
Additionally, fencing is a sport that is all about control. there's a quote in the 1990s Zorro movie: "never attack in anger". This is very good advice for fencers and martial artists alike, because anger tends exaggerate movements that don't need to be exaggerated and can destroy your precision.
These two aspects, as well as other positive influences in my life, contributed greatly to reversing my anger issues.
On the subject of anger and video games, the thing that helps me in both fencing and video games is to recognize that you can always be better. There's only ever one person in the world who is the best, and even they have room to improve. Thus, when you have a catastrophic misplay, take a deep breath and go over it in your head. Focus on how you could have played it better, maybe even meditate on it before bed. That way, instead of an embarrassing moment, the misplay becomes another rung on the ladder to improvement.
You need to do something more important with your life to realize games aren't worth expending any emotional energy over.
Or just stop playing any competitive game, there is plenty of other stuff to do.
But don't see a therapist, they will tell you there is something wrong with you if you aren't an enthusiastic gay commie.
Hang out with people that are calm on this issue. When I was younger I had a bit of an anger problem. It had more to do with being a big guy and not being able to use it very much, and lots of bad situations. The anger led to worse situations.
It didn't end the problems, but the calmness let me figure out what was going on. I played games for their beauty and fun more than my place in society. I baked bread when really frustrated. They asked me what I did to win so many baking awards and I had to say the secret ingredient was rage.
I also started doing things just to enjoy them. A lot of people said it was weird that I would go to restaurants or movies alone, but I enjoyed it. Once there, I found people who I could hang out with without worry of bad situations. As strange as it sounds, those lefty friends used to be very important people in my life. By learning to be social on my own terms, it got better and easier.
It takes some work, but you can ask yourself why you are angry and respond to that, not the gut instinct to blow up.
I'm a lot more chill than I used to be, but that's a combo of weed + menopause + two NDE, and I can't say I recommend for everyone.
Frustration is now usually expressed only with the raising of my voice, which happens only rarely, I hope.
As for games, oddly enough, I can take my butt getting kicked by another player, but I really hate getting stonewalled by the computer itself; the most frustrating thing about console is the lack of cheats in SP.
View losing as part of the game and a step in the process of improving, not as a final state. If you can think and learn from what went wrong, instead of becoming emotional over the result, you'll actually improve yourself in several ways.
I have exact similar problem. I have big anger issue, even a few years ago, I had hard time controlling it. However ever since I found some hobby that requires some skills, I could calm my temper down these days. I don't play competitive or easily frustrating games. You are on your own to deal with it because hardly anyone will understand it like you mentioned in the last paragraph. Even now being informed of western politics still frustrates me to no end, I take a break from any western entertainment or websites and never try to go any western message board for a few days.
If you go to a therapist they shouldn't even be telling you to take pills. If pills are being prescribed on the first visit (when no one has been hurt and you clearly aren't at risk of going to jail) then you have a shit therapist who is just trying to farm people for money.
As for actual anger management, you should always work on different ways of interpreting things so that they don't become offensive to you. Lengthening the fuse won't really be helpful if too many things set off the fuse. When it comes to misplays costing you the game, it always helps to see it as a learning experience (or potentially as a game you'd have lost anyway since there was no telling how your opponent might have reacted had you even done your "correct" action) instead of as a one-time missed chance that you personally ruined. How you frame things deeply affects how you interpret them.
In my career I've sometimes been criticized for being overly harsh on people due to high standards I set for myself and my coworkers. I didn't always think that was fair criticism, but I worried if I tried to change I would over-compensate in such a way as to lower my standards. And if I wasn't confident I could be less harsh and keep standards high I would rather be the "asshole" with high standards.
Which is to say that personalities are a complex thing, and maybe there are trade-offs involved when you try to adjust your personality. If you aren't a pro gamer, if being mad at making mistakes when you're gaming is the only time you lose control then all things considered you're doing pretty well.; If you "fix" that, maybe you risk blowing up at a colleague at work because you no longer have the "pissed off at making mistakes" outlet in your gaming.
To give the "sometimes the best solution is 'do nothing'" perspective...