Jane McGonigal - SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient--Powered by the Science of Games

You are stronger than you know.

You are surrounded by potential allies.

You are the hero of your own story.

T hese three qualities are all it takes to become happier, braver, and more resilient in the face of any challenge.

Heres the good news: You already have these qualities within you. You dont have to change a thing. You are already more powerful than you realize.

You have the ability to control your attentionand therefore your thoughts and feelings.

You have the strength to find support in the most unexpected places, and deepen your existing relationships.

You have a natural capacity to motivate yourself and supercharge your heroic qualities, like willpower, compassion, and determination.

This book will help you understand the powers you already haveand show you that accessing these powers is as easy as playing a game.

And yet this book is not about playing gamesat least, not exactly. Its about learning how tobegameful in the face of extreme stress and personal challenge.

Being gameful means bringing the psychological strengths you naturally display when you play gamessuch as optimism, creativity, courage, and determinationto your real life. It means having the curiosity and openness to play with different strategies to discover what works best. It means building up the resilience to tackle tougher and tougher challenges with greater and greater success.

The best way I know to explain what it means to be gamefuland how being gameful can make you stronger, happier, and braveris to tell you a story. Its the story of how I invented the SuperBetter methodand the life-threatening challenge I had to overcome to be able to write this book.

In the summer of 2009, I hit my head and got a concussion. It didnt heal properly, and after thirty days I still had constant headaches, nausea, and vertigo. I couldnt read or write for more than a few minutes at a time. I had trouble remembering things. Most days I felt too sick to get out of bed. I was in a total mental fog. These symptoms left me more anxious and depressed than I had ever been in my life.

I had trouble communicating clearly to friends and family exactly what I was going through. I thought if I could write something down, it would help. I struggled and struggled to put together words that made sense, and this is what I came up with:

Everything is hard.

The iron fist is pushing against my thoughts.

My whole brain feels vacuum pressurized.

If I cant think who am I?

Unfortunately, there is no real treatment for postconcussion syndrome. You just rest as much as you can and hope for the best. I was told I might not feel better for months or even a year or longer.

There was one thing I could do to try to heal faster. My doctor told me I should avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. That meant no reading, no writing, no running, no video games, no work, no email, no alcohol, and no caffeine. I joked to my doctor at the time: In other words, no reason to live.

There was quite a bit of truth in that joke. I didnt know it then, but suicidal ideation is very common with traumatic brain injurieseven mild ones like mine. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me: Jane, you want to die. It said, Youre never going to get better. The painwill never end. Youll be a burden to your husband.

These voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life.

And then something happened. I had one crystal-clear thought that changed everything. Thirty-four days after I hit my headand I will never forget this momentI said to myself, I am either going to kill myself, or Im going to turn this into a game.