This “Mental Health May” guest post is from Jordan Yaklin of Phoenix Performance Coaching, whose Healthy Adventure project uses RPG concepts to promote better health! Jordan has a Masters degree in in Exercise Physiology and has helped train over 30 professional and Olympic level athletes. He’s also a true nerd at heart. He combines his love of fundamental development and all things nerdy to help those who feel forgotten by the fitness industry. He’s also an Anvilite, who uses World Anvil to support The Healthy Adventure!

Do you feel like you are an NPC in your own life? You spend so much time building your own fantasy world that your life IRL is just passing by?

It is no secret that tabletop gamers specifically have a bad reputation for neglecting their physical and mental health. The worst part is that when we neglect our physical health, our mental health declines too. That is what leads us to feel like we aren’t even in control of our own bodies. That we are just NPCs, and life gets harder to function in.

My name is Jordan Yaklin, and I help empower gamers to reclaim their health, lose weight, and build the confidence to finally become the main character of their lives.

I am going to show you 5 tips on how you can ditch that NPC mindset and become the main character you know you can be!

Prioritize Your Sleep!!

This is BY FAR the most important thing you can do to improve your physical and mental health. Having poor sleep not only affects your mood and food choices, but it also affects your hormones, which can cause a huge gamut of issues like increased weight gain. It’s doubly important to stop gaming or prepping at a decent hour.

I use the rule of 4 when helping clients improve their sleep:

  • 4 hours before bed, stop all work. Cut off all calls, emails, texts, etc. Get out of work mode!
  • 3 hours before bed, stop all eating. Eating right before bed forces your body to digest food while sleeping, which hurts your sleep quality.
  • 2 hours before bed, stop all drinking. This will cut down on how often you get up at night to go potty.
  • 1 hour before bed, shut off all screens. This is borderline impossible nowadays, but start small. No phone within 10 minutes before bedtime and NO SCREENS IN BED! If you take anything from this sleep tip, it’s removing all screens from bed. That alone will drastically help your sleep.

Touch Grass!

I know this is a meme, but getting outside can do WONDERS for your mental wellness. Getting fresh air and out of the same 4 walls can clear your head. It also allows you to do a bit of a soft reset by forcing you to unplug from work. I know if I have a problem I am working on, a boss I can’t beat, or even writer’s block when prepping for our next session, I go for a walk.

There’s an expression, “give your ideas some legs,” and it’s when you have an idea or problem, increasing activity will not only increase blood flow, but can help increase mental clarity and work through whatever mental roadblock you have. There is also some data to suggest that doing alternating movements like walking stimulates both sides of your brain in a “back and forth” style, which may also help with mental wellness. So that’s yet another bonus!

Get Daily Movement.

This doesn’t mean you need to spend hours in the gym. You can see a whole lot of progress by just doing stuff at home or outside. The point of this is to spend any amount of time to focus on YOU and prioritize YOUR health.

If you are lost and not sure where to start, I highly recommend starting as small as possible and improving from there. Think of this as fighting rats in the tavern cellar. You are not going to start your 1st level campaign by fighting Tiamat, you gotta work your way up to that.

Setting even 5-10 minutes a day to go for a light walk, stretch, or play Beat Saber is a great place to start. I like to have a small handful of activities you can choose from, so you have a few options instead of feeling like you have to do a workout every single day.

Create a Food Journal.

Having food at the gaming table goes together like a Warlock casting Eldritch Blast. This often leads to mindless eating. This isn’t unique to the table either, you sit there munching away at chips while listening to your GM do the 10-minute BBEG monologue he has had prepped for 8 months. Or watching your favorite anime and before you know it, your hand hits the bottom of the bag and you just ate a whole family-sized bag of Doritos.

Simply writing down what you eat when you eat forces the mindless eating to be more mindful because you are actively logging what you eat. This will give you more insight into what you eat. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to track your calories, but you can. Some players like the crunchier mechanics (ahem, looking at you, Pathfinder players), so you might like the data that you acquire while tracking your calories. The cool thing is that simply logging what you eat can be more than enough for you to start seeing weight loss because a behavior observed is a behavior changed!

Increase Your Protein!

This is piggybacking off the previous point. Chances are, you are eating a Standard American Diet (SAD). You are over-eating carbs and fats, and under-eating protein. Protein is great for building muscle and repairing wounds, but it is also good at keeping you fuller longer and can even help with mental clarity. A 2022 study showed that protein intake helps protect your cognition as you get older, too. Plus, eating less carbs and fats can help clear up your skin and improve your hair’s health. That will be a boost in confidence!

There you have it, 5 tips you can start doing today to reclaim your health and build the confidence in yourself to become the main character of your life.

If you liked these tips and are tired of feeling like an NPC in your own life, follow us on Instagram, where we have regular actionable tips on how to become the main character!