‘SuperBetter’ is an online movement that encourages those suffering through all kinds of illnesses, injuries and conditions to try and better cope with their situations by employing ‘gamification‘ techniques to help make things more bearable.
What this essentially means, is turning a difficult and traumatic experience into something that is more akin to a game. This can help to give you a structured plan to follow, it can help to distance you from what’s happening, and it can give you much more optimism and courage to tackle your situation with.
SuperBetter has particular guidelines on how to go about this and recommends a few steps to help you conquer your illnesses and injuries. These steps are:
Recruit Your Allies:
Recruiting allies involves finding people who are willing to help and asking them to stand by you in your time of crisis. This is something that is normally very difficult when you are injured – asking for help can sometimes feel like asking too much, it can be embarrassing, and it can make you feel helpless and vulnerable. When you have turned your trial into a game though, all you have to do is say: ‘I’ve started playing a new game to help myself feel a little better, would you like to join in?’. Then, once you have these allies on your team, you’ll feel that right away you feel much stronger and more able to tackle anything that comes your way.
Activate the Power Ups:
Activating power-ups means essentially doing anything you can do that will make you feel better or that will help to combat your condition. Of course a tablet can be a power up (and that’s a much more way to think about them) as can be simply finding a good reason to laugh, or taking a warm bath. These power-ups can give you a good boost whenever you’re feeling low, and viewing them in this light can provide a great sense that you can cope with whatever you’re going through.
Defeat the Bad Guys:
Conversely, the ‘bad guys’ include anything that makes you feel worse. This might mean loud noises, or it might mean not getting washed all day. By addressing and combating these problems, you can help to create a more comfortable experience for yourself and feel much more positive as a result. The ultimate ‘bad guy’ of course is the illness or injury itself, so make sure that you build your strength for that ultimate showdown!
More Ways to Gamify
This is only one framework however for gamification, and you may find that there are many other ways you can turn your illness into a ‘computer game’ of sorts to feel better. Perhaps that would mean awarding scores for certain behaviours and then trying to beat your score every day, or perhaps it could mean actually playing games that you know help you to feel better.
You can enhance this experience further of course if you are actually willing to physically turn the process into a game. You could do this if you know how to program by creating a game around your goals, or alternatively if you have an iPhone you can download the SuperBetter app to use theirs.
Note as well that the same principles can be applied to almost everything – it doesn’t just have to be illness. If you want to improve your business, if you want to try and find love, or if you just want to stay on top of your chores then you can make those bitter pills much easier to swallow and you can motivate yourself far better if you turn it into a game. These gams really speak to what drives us as human beings and how we are motivated, so turn your every challenge into a game and they will become things that you can win!
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The author of this article is Jack Turner, a sales executive at Freedom Lift Systems, manufacturers of residential wheelchair lifts. Jack is a gaming enthusiast and can spend hours demolishing the opposition in Call of Duty.
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