Gamers need to be, well, on their game, all the time. Because if you’re not everything falls apart and when you’re fighting fatigue, excessive hunger, sugar crashes and overstimulation as well as the enemy in the game, you’ll burn out before you even get started.

The thing is, you need to be mentally fit and healthy to be a good gamer, not that stereotype people think of what the word gamer pops into their head. And if you want to improve your gaming sessions these tips are exactly what you need to break through without burning out.

Fix Your Lighting

Gaming involves staring at screens for prolonged periods, that’s standard. But harsh overhead lighting and dark rooms are also punishing for your eyes too and are simply bad setups for anyone, never mind gamers.

Bright lights create glare while dark rooms force your eyes to be constantly adjusting between the screen and background. Not ideal and both will lead to eye fatigue and headaches which no one wants.

To rectify these issues use a soft indirect light behind or beside your monitor, a lamp aimed at the wall works too as does bias lighting behind the screen. The goal with your lighting is to reduce contrasts between your setup and the room. You don’t need bright lights nor do you need a dark cave and ambient lighting helps avoid both of these environments.

Lower Screen Brightness and Use Night Filters

The brightness of your screen matters just as much as the lighting of the room. Again high brightness and screens too dark will impact your eyes and your ability to concentrate.

High brightness will lead to overstimulated eyes and stop you being able to wind down after game play. You need to lower the brightness of your screen until white backgrounds stop looking like their own light source. Then lower it a bit more.

Come the evening use night filters in the evening to reduce blue light exposure. Reducing blue light exposure means you stop your nervous system from staying in permanent overdrive.

Something else to think about is the physical condition of your eyes here too. Have you ever finished gaming and found your eyes feeling dry or gritty? That’s a sign your screens are too bright. Adjust them now, find the right settings and leave them there forever.

Use Wired Connections

As great as wireless equipment and connections are, they’re not the most reliable and when you experience a lag while you play this isn’t helping your performance. It impacts your mindset, delays things, creates micro aggressions and misses things you shouldn’t. And these thoughts and actions drain your mental energy fast.

Where you can use wired peripherals — mouse, keyboard, controller. Wired ethernet over WiFi. Not for perfection but for consistency and when you know you’re not going to drop connection as easily you can relax into the same mode and feel more at ease when you play by simply removing one of the more common stressors in gaming.

Warm Up

Both physically and mentally. Some light stretching pre and post gaming sessions will never be wasted and your body will thank you for them after sitting in the same position for prolonged periods. Because when you feel warmed up physically you can sit more comfortably. There’s less irritation or pain from being in certain positions. Improving mobility can have a massive impact on your ability to stay still for longer sessions and it helps you avoid injury too. Use it or lose it as they say.

But it’s not just a physical warm up that you need to do, it’s a mental one too. Try doing 5–10 min short drills before playing and then take regular breaks to give your mind a chance to keep it sharp and to retain attention in the right place.

You need something structured, mind games or puzzles like sudoku, for some players, others find creative outlets better to keep their mind sharp. But you need to find something that is for you to help you regain focus and keep your mind where it needs to be during game play.

Keep Your Setup Cool

Heat drains energy both from your equipment and you. You need a cool room with good flow to avoid overheating and to stop your equipment seizing up because it’s too hot.

And if your room is feeling stuffy constantly your brain will be working overtime to keep you focused and stay alert. At the very least open a window or use a fan. And don’t let your PC dump heat directly at you.

Where you can use accessories with built in fans i.e. laptop stands, use cooling towers around equipment that might overheat and ensure a constant supply of fresh air around your setup to avoid your setup overheating and blowing the heat back at you.

Remove Background Noise

Music, streams, videos, group chats: all of them compete with game audio too. This background noise can be overwhelming and more than people realise. The result might not seem big but missed footsteps here, missed reloads and directional cues all add up.

If you’re playing anything where awareness matters you need to cut the background noise not just were gone completely. Remove any distractions that are going to impact your focus and keep your game play directed at the game only, this includes any chats not directly related to the game and that background Spotify playlist you have going on too.

Review Short Clips

More hours playing doesn’t always equal better performance. If you’re after making your next session better, spend some time reviewing short clips of your sessions rather than forcing yourself to play the same thing over and over. Analyse what you did, how you reacted, where things went wrong and then strategise. Because repeating poor habits doesn’t build awareness, short reviews however do.

Review one or two short clips per session, look for deaths, missed plays, poor decisions and watch them carefully. Identify mistakes and close them. No overthinking no replay after reply just watch it, clock it and adapt.