Pausing Reality: My Ode to D&D (Yes, Dungeons and Dragons)

I could not have predicted my current love affair with the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Over the last couple of months, for the first time in my life, I have started to play D&D for a couple of hours every week, over Zoom of course, with a kind group of patient people. For two hours a week, I blissfully become a Druid Wood Elf galavanting through castles and towns battling monsters and evil-doers with my dear friends, a band of hodgepodge characters. Every week we achieve victory in most battles, cultivate new skills using creativity and critical thought, and get captivated by a world where we have immediate effect and power. 

Of course being a therapist, I explored the “why now?” of my new love and found some important mental health aspects to D&D. As we are dealing with a global pandemic, isolation, economic uncertainty, political divisiveness, and a needed awakening to deep seated racial inequities, D&D offers a brief escape into a world equally chaotic to ours, but where the characters have immediate agency. In our current world state, there is so much out of our control it is often hard to find avenues for our power or ways to make change and be effective. D&D allows you to feel like you have accomplished something immediately. 

D&D can have an instrumental impact on many different mental health struggles. When dealing with anxiety, lack of control is often part of the issue. D&D offers a neutralizing reprieve to anxiety by allowing us to feel in command of something. Depression is steeped in apathy, disappointment, and lack of motivation. D&D inspires creativity and action which is often the first step in rising from the lows of depression. Isolation has never been so heightened as during this global pandemic, yet D&D allows you to participate with a collective of other people on adventures. 

Now, by no means am I asserting D&D as a cure-all for our mental health battles, but it is a lovely reprieve and a much needed pause. For me it is two hours a week where I am not focused on the perils in our current world situation. And then of course, I finish D&D and go back to the action I can take in our world: being a responsible citizen, utilizing my voice for issues I support, educating myself, participating in meaningful relationships, and taking care of myself and my family. 

If D&D isn’t your thing, I would encourage you to investigate other avenues to allow yourself some escape and the reward of immediate action. Nature is always a wonderful thing to connect to and gardening can offer a path to accomplishment. Puzzles have taken on a new and growing popularity due to a similar end result of achievement. Everything from crafting to painting to playing instruments could also lend respite and realization. Exercise is always a go-to for me because I am able to channel my energy toward the current task and the end result is my mind and body feeling energized with endorphins. Learning a foreign language, while certainly more challenging, is definitely consuming and fulfilling. There are many activities to sample, the point is to find one or two activities that bring you joy, respite, and accomplishment.