How Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me to Slay My Anxiety
I've been playing the new Baldur’s Gate as my self-care lately. The Baldur’s Gate series is based on Dungeons & Dragons, my hobby for the past 13 years. Most of that time has been spent in the Dungeon Master’s chair.
To give you an idea of what Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is, it’s a tabletop role-playing game where players create fictional characters and embark on adventures in a fantasy world.
The dungeon master (DM) serves as the storyteller and referee, guiding the narrative, controlling non-player characters, and describing the environments and challenges the players encounter. These worlds are bound by the magic contained in rulebooks, character sheets, alluring dice, and the shared imaginations around a table (or virtually) with your friends. It’s an experience that is in our DNA, the core of who we are. Humans everywhere have always gathered together and told stories in groups, and that’s exactly the experience that D&D and other role playing games provide.
How did D&D help me slay my anxiety though? Initially it helped me in building a community of friends who were interested in similar geeky things and giving me a much needed creative outlet.
Also, having a regular event on the calendar every week (mostly just monthly these days) built the opportunities to be around other people in a safe environment. Having this safe environment where I was free from my anxiety gave me the breathing room to discover how regularly anxiety was my default.
From there, I was able to recognize a divide in who I was and who I wanted to be. This creative space let me try on different personalities and traits in my own little ecosystem, and see the cause and effect in real time with my fellow gamers. Building a community where I felt safe, and had a degree of consistency made for one of the first baby steps towards slaying my anxiety.
One of my favorite parts of being a DM is setting up a situation without a solution in mind. Part of the fun is setting up the structure for an encounter, imagining how it might go, and being surprised when it goes entirely differently. It took a while to build up a tolerance to letting things play out differently than I had imagined. But learning to let go of some expectations and just go along for the ride is a source of confidence. Confidence that I have the skills and the flexibility to adapt to a new situation or the unexpected. It was okay to let the dice fall as they may. Part of this process might be that I have to “take the L” as the kids say, and just let my cool boss fight get steamrolled because that’s ultimately a better story anyways. Letting go of certain expectations and letting the situation unfold was a way to relinquish some of that anxiety tied up to my expectations.
Lastly, the most important way that Dungeons and Dragons taught me to slay my anxiety, was discovering that we as humans are all made up of stories.
The story of my anxiety, and how I experienced it was mine to write. I might not have gotten to choose to be given this anxiety to hold in the first place, but it was mine to transform. Like a magic spell, I turned this anxiety into a positive energy. It took a lot of work in the therapy chair, and some reframing of my heart and mind. But now I write my own story, and that dragon is slain.
If Dungeons and Dragons could help you slay your anxiety, check out our Dungeons and Dragons Group and set up a free 15-minute consultation with Montana today!
