How Pokémon Go Saved My Life
That’s not hyperbole
I wasn’t quite sure whether to share this story, because I’m a middle-aged woman, and it feels like Pokemon shouldn’t really be my passion. It should be my son’s, but I truly believe that playing Pokemon Go has had a positive impact on my mental health. So, here I am, at the age of 42, sharing my love for Pokemon with the Internet.
I was never a fan of Pokemon until 2016. That’s when Pokemon Go was released and until that point, the game wasn’t on my radar at all. I was curious because everyone seemed to be playing it and I had FOMO. I had to see what it was about, and the AR aspect intrigued me too. I thought it was amazing how I could hold up my phone and see a Pokemon sitting on top of my car. I still get a little buzz from it actually. It’s now been almost seven years and I’m still playing the game on a daily basis and I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the game has had a profound effect on my life for the following reasons.
It’s a good way to exercise
We all know that exercise is important for your mental health as well as your physical health. I’m a highly anxious person so I have a ton of nervous energy and nowhere to put it so movement is hugely important for mental wellbeing for me.
I also suffer from sciatica occasionally and if I don’t keep active, that can flare up. This issue started nine years ago. I was lifting my son one day and felt a hot, sharp pain shoot down my left leg. I knew exactly what that meant and in the weeks, months and years that followed, I became trapped in a cycle of pain. It’s difficult to live with a back injury because sometimes you can’t sit, you can’t stand, you can’t lie down. It feels like everything aggravates it. I was still so young too! I was only 34 and I had back pain as a teenager but never anything like what I was experiencing then. Having always been an active person who loved to exercise, I found I was unable to. Then came Pokemon Go.
I had to walk to play the game and that got me moving. The more I moved, and the more involved I got in the game, the more distracted I became. It took me a lot of physical therapy to get back to full fitness but in those difficult days when pain was normal for me, I credit Pokemon Go for helping me to stay active, offload some nervous energy and keep excess weight off.
It gets me outdoors and enjoying nature
This is a big one for me and people who don’t play the game might not understand. How can I be enjoying nature if I’m looking at a screen? It’s easy. There have been so many times when it would have been easy for me to stay at home and do something else, like write or indulge in some compulsive cleaning. Instead, I pick up my phone, put on my shoes and jacket and go out to do a gym raid on the game. While I’m outdoors, I breathe in fresh air and enjoy the rain on my face or the tickle of a snowflake on my finger. I appreciate seeing the same blackbird in the same spot every single day. What’s so great about that one garden that makes him keep coming back? I literally stop to smell roses. And for the first time in my life this weekend, I saw a real, live bat because I was out playing the game.
It’s a game on a screen but it takes me out of my own head and into the real world in a way that no other game has done for me. Sometimes, I go out in inclement weather that would usually keep me inside because I’ve had an alert to say there is a particular Pokemon that I don’t have in my collection. Sometimes, it’s to participate in a gym raid. There are even times I’ve gone out walking just to hatch an egg, because that can only be done with movement. I’m definitely more aware of nature and seasonal changes because I’m outdoors a lot more.
It gives me something in common with my son
It can be difficult to explain this to people whose children are fully verbal but when this game started, my son and I found it difficult to converse. He has autism and it took him a little longer than average to have two-way conversations. In 2016, he was parroting phrases that he had heard that he thought were appropriate for situations, and he wasn’t really able to articulate his thoughts and feelings. It could be hard to break into his world. Pokemon Go gave us something that we could both get excited about and enjoy together. I’m not sure a speech therapist would ever have recommended we play Pokemon together, but it certainly helped us. I believe that without playing the game together, it would have been much harder for us to connect and bond.
It’s also difficult to get him outdoors. If you were to believe everything parenting bloggers tell you, you’d think that every child is outdoorsy and sporty. That’s not the case. This is the real world and some children simply don’t take an interest in sports or nature, just like some adults don’t. They prefer indoor hobbies. If I suggested going for a walk, he would ask why. Why walk just to come back? We weren’t going anywhere or doing anything, so just walking for the sake of it made no sense to him.
My son is asthmatic though, so I knew the importance of keeping fit for his health and wellbeing. Getting out for walks was so much easier with Pokemon Go. I could suggest a walk and say it was because there was a raid happening at the other side of town we had to go to. Sometimes, we were going out because we had to look for new species we hadn’t found before. It made the walk a journey of discovery. We were explorers, raiders, detectives! He started to appreciate the fun of being out in the world, exploring and discovering. That’s the thing about autism. Autistic people are generally very visual learners. Explaining something with words can be futile. Taking him out and showing him a hidden Pokemon in the park opened up his imagination.
He’s now the most imaginative human I have ever known, with no exceptions. He still doesn’t really enjoy exercising for the sake of it, although he is a keen swimmer if he gets into a fun pool with slides and pretends he’s in a jungle sliding down a waterfall or something. And he loves to take his indoor hobbies out onto his trampoline and do everything there when the weather permits. He’s learned that he doesn’t have to stay indoors to have fun.
It’s a social game
What I love most about this is that even when I’m not with people, they are still present on the game, sending me gifts from places they have visited and opening gifts I have sent them. I can send total strangers who found my Pokemon Go friend code in the back of one of my books a request to remotely raid with me. I have a lifestyle that doesn’t allow much room for socialising, but Pokemon Go made me feel like I was part of a community, even when I was alone in the house.
I has gotten me through some really bad days
This is really hard to write, but there were times in the last few years when I didn’t want to be here any more. Not every day, and I never acted on those thoughts, but I didn’t see a way out of my problems. Everything I tried failed and it felt like life would never change. I can’t go into detail but to summarise, I was stalked, had chronic pain, had no social life and a business I started failed. Things were hard. I can’t sugar coat that.
What helped me enormously was the game. If I thought about suicide, I reminded myself that I had to hang on and complete my Kanto region on the Pokedex. I told myself I would wait until I caught them all. If I felt lonely, I reminded myself that Community Day was coming up that weekend. If my head was too busy with unhelpful thoughts, I’d pick up the phone and see if there were any gifts waiting for me. Sometimes, it was as simple as distracting me from everything that was going on. I would allow myself to obsess over it for a day or two because if I didn’t, I would obsess over my problems instead. It was a survival tool.
Pokemon Go is more than a game in my life. It’s self-care, self-soothing and a reason to keep moving — both literally and figuratively. If you’re outdoors and you see an adult playing Pokemon on their phone, please remember this post. That person might be exercising the only way their pain will allow, enjoying nature or planning the next conversation with a child who struggles to speak in two-way conversations. They might even be trying to save their own life.