Deepak Chopra Talks About How Gaming Can Help Mental Health

Gaming can have way more than a pair of health benefits, especially if it can activate your parasympathetic system. That was one of the big takeaways from my recent conversation with author and mind-body medicine pioneer Deepak Chopra, MD, at the 2025 edition of the annual Games for Change or G4C Festival in New York City. He and Poonacha Machaiah, CEO of The Chopra Foundation, had just given a keynote at the festival, talking about how intentional game design and AI-driven tools can foster emotional resilience, empathy, and mental wellness within gaming communities. In fact, they themselves have been getting into the game of gaming, helping develop the meditation quest game named Deepak Chopra:Meditation Oasis.

Chopra Warns About Being In Sympathetic Overdrive

You could say that Chopra and Machaiah are sympathetic to what’s going on in society right now. “Many people are in sympathetic overdrive with too much adrenaline,” explained Chopra. “This weakens the immune system.” Sympathetic overdrive means that your sympathetic nervous system is firing way too often and way too much. And that’s not a good thing

Your sympathetic nervous system is the part of your autonomic nervous system that’s designed to help you deal with dangerous or otherwise stressful situations. So, say a tiger or someone trying to give you a fruitcake as a gift is chasing after you. This is where you could benefit from having your “fight-or-flight” response activated. Such a response can include firing the nerves that enlarge your pupils to help you see better, increase your heart rate and blood pressure to get more blood and oxygen to your muscles, open up your airways to bring more oxygen into your lungs, trigger your liver to release more glucose to provide more energy and rev up your immune to enact repairs when needed.

At the same time, your sympathetic nervous system can suppress less urgent functions that may otherwise distract from your fight-or-flight response and consume needed energy. Accordingly, your sympathetic response may slow your digestion, keep you from urinating and pooping and hold any sexual excitement at bay. After all, you probably don’t want to be eating a pizza, pooping, peeing and feeling all hot and bothered while, for example, your boss is yelling at you.

Although your sympathetic system can provide kind of important benefits such as, oh, keeping you alive, it shouldn’t be activated and firing all the time. That would be like running the fire alarm and sprinkler system in your building constantly. Over time, things like your immune system and various parts of your body can get worn down, leading to various types of damage and malfunctions. This is why a therapist won’t typically say, “You really should be worried about everything all the time.”

The trouble is that so many things in our society these days are potentially activating your sympathetic nervous system each and every moment. The constant stream of advertising. The loud noises at the ballpark and at bars. The politicians and other talking heads telling you repeatedly about how such-and-such people are a threat. The constant chatter on social media. And your smartphone. Your pay-attention-to-me-all-the-time-or-I’ll-send-you-notifications smartphone. All of these may be keeping you in sympathetic overdrive.

Who knows, then, how much sympathetic overdrive may be contributing to the many mind and body ailments that are pervasive in society these days. I’ve already written in Forbes about how the U.S. and other countries are steeped in various mental health crises. Machaiah quoted the World Health Organization statistic that every 40 seconds someone dies from suicide and emphasized, “There are not enough therapists to deal with all the mental health issues.” All of this may be contributing further to the rising social divisiveness and physical ailments such as obesity currently seen in the U.S. and other countries.

Chopra Suggests Activating Your Parasympathetic System More

You do have a natural counter to your sympathetic nervous system. And that’s your parasympathetic nervous system, which is another part of your autonomic nervous system. Rather than “fight or flight,” your parasympathetic nervous system helps you “rest and digest” or “feed and breed,” which are kind of what they sound like.

To achieve these goals, your parasympathetic response basically is the opposite of the sympathetic response. For example, it can activate the nerves to constrict your pupils to reduce the amount of light entering your eyes, stimulate your mouth to provide more saliva, tighten your airway muscles so that your lungs don’t have to work as hard to breath while your rest, lower how fast and hard your heart pumps to conserve energy and release insulin to then decrease your blood sugar levels.

Meanwhile, your parasympathetic nervous system can focus more on helping you do fun stuff like digest food, pee and poop. Speaking of fun, let’s talk about sex for a second. You those erections or natural lubrication that you may get when you see something exciting like a person you are crushing on or a really good piece of avocado toast. Well, you can thank your parasympathetic system for all of that.

“To deal with sympathetic overdrive, you want to activate the parasympathetic nervous system more,” Chopra emphasized. “You want to keep people more in a parasympathetic state to optimize the endocrine system.” He mentioned different neurotransmitters and hormones that are integrated with these nervous systems such as acetylcholine, cholecystokinin, somatostatin and one that you may have heard lately, glucagon-like peptide-1 or GLP-1, that regulate all sorts of bodily functions including appetite and hunger. Therefore, when the sympathetic versus parasympathetic balance is off, all sorts of things in your mind and body can be adversely affected.

Chopra Emphasizes More Interoceptive Awareness

How, then, do you stay more in a parasympathetic state with all this sympathetic activation stuff around you? Chopra spoke of having “more mindful awareness” and more “interoceptive awareness.” Interoceptive awareness is perceiving the sensations from within your body such as knowing what your mind and body are doing. For example, you are aware of how you are feeling, what your emotions are at the time, how hungry you may be, what your heart rate is doing, how different parts of your body are functioning and when you need to use the bathroom. While you may typically be fairly aware of when you need to use the bathroom given the obvious consequences of not knowing what your bladder and bowels are telling you, you may not be quite as attuned to the other stuff.

Chopra pointed out how interoceptive awareness is one of the eight limbs of yoga that were originally laid out by Pantanjali, the first author of yoga. “The first two limbs are social and emotional intelligence,” Chopra explained. “The third is postures, the fourth breathing, the fifth interoceptive awareness, the sixth focused awareness, the seventh meditation and the eight transcendence.” He added that having interoceptive awareness is important, because if you can perceive what’s happening inside your mind and body, you will then know how to control your mind and body better. Yoga is just one example of a mindfulness practice that can help achieve interoceptive awareness. Chopra is well known for spending much of his career developing, teaching, writing about and disseminating a range of such practices.

Chopra Sees Gaming As An Opportunity To Counter Sympathetic Overdrive

Gaming could be a game-changer when it comes to disseminating ways for people to achieve more interoceptive awareness and spend more time in the parasympathetic state. “You can achieve more mindful awareness through imagination,” said Chopra. “How to activate the parasympathetic nervous system for more homeostasis and optimize neuroendocrine function can be a focus of gaming.”

Machaiah spoke of how people can feel more relaxed when in a “gaming state,” sort of how athletes can feel more relaxed and in a state of flow while playing a sport, artists while painting, writers while writing, musicians while playing instruments, singers while singing and anyone else while they are doing something that they truly enjoy.

Of course, not all games may naturally get into the right flow state. For example, a try-to-shoot-as-many-things-as-possible game may be more sympathetic stimulating than parasympathetic simulating. Chopra distinguished between games that create stress and games that expand the mind. Both Chopra and Machaiah urged the importance of taking the design of a game and making it more conscious. In other words, game designers can be more deliberate about creating or adapting games so that they can better help people, which is the big focus of the Games for Change or G4C initiative that Susanna Pollack has been leading since 2015 as its President.

I’ve covered previous G4C festivals such as the one in 2023 and talked to Pollack on a number of occasions about the difference between perception and reality when it comes to gaming and the gaming community. Pollack indicated how gaming has had the rather unfair stereotype amongst those not in the know of being “a waste of time.” G4C and its annual festivals have been working to change that perception. She’s pointed out the many positive aspects of gaming and the gaming community, such as how the community is “more open to sharing than many other communities” and in many cases has come together to help each other and others. So with a need for more mental health interventions throughout society, gaming could play a major role.

One way gaming may have already “meta” some of these needs and can do more is through what Machaiah has called “Metaceuticals.” He described this as the use of gaming and the metaverse, such as virtual reality, to help achieve well-being. VR can place you in tailored surroundings or even a completely new world that can allow you to relax and more safely explore your feelings and sensations and, in turn, better understand and control how you feel. It can provide an oasis from all the sympathetic nervous system stimulation.

Deepak Chopra: Meditation Oasis Is One Example Of Such A Game

Speaking of oasis, Chopra and Machaiah have already worked on an existing game called Deepak Chopra: Meditation Oasis. In fact, Chopra literally works on the game. If you play the game, you’ll hear Chopra’s voice, recognizing its signature cadence and balance. Machaiah described how this in itself can put the gamer in a more relaxed state. He also covered how they “used other aspects of acoustic design and changed the lights, colors and flicker rate to help keep users more in a parasympathetic state.”

The game has users go through different meditation quests, each of which may last different durations, typically one minute, three minutes or five minutes. “There’s already been over 100,000 quests completed,” said Machaiah. He pointed to the possibility of such games reaching more people quicker than mental health professionals and mindfulness experts could on their own.

Gaming Has Tremendous Potential For Further Positive Change

The VR games that exist today are just the tip of the virtual iceberg. Amir Dossal, the founder and president of the Global Partnerships Forum, sees the tremendous potential of gaming. He sees gaming as a way to help address the United Nations’ third sustainable development goal: to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. And he should know at least a little about the UN’s SDG as he spent 25 years at the UN where he previously led the UN Office for Partnerships

“The question is how to bring peace in difficult times,” Dossal said. “Well, mental health is a precursor.” He went on to say, “Gaming is the most intimate experience” and talked about how “games can bring people together to address mental health” as well as the coalitions and working groups that are already trying to do this. Dossal added, “Gaming is not about a game where the focus is winning or losing. Instead it’s about play.”

This is a key distinction. Many people out there continue to push the zero-sum game idea that life is about competition and either being a winner or a loser. Or being part of the “winning group” rather than other “losing groups.” That if you don’t quickly claim something as yours, then other people will claim it as theirs. That other people’s success is your failure and vice-versa. Well, that’s just not how life is supposed to work because, like it or not, no one lives on a completely separate island. We are all connected to each other via complex systems and, therefore, affect each other in many different ways. Moreover, not being more sympathetic and empathetic towards others could leave your sympathetic nervous system further on overdrive. And that may not be a good game to play for yourself and your health.