Mental Health within Esports

Mental health is very important no matter what industry you work in, and it is one of the biggest problems in the world today. 

Being a pro player and the stress behind it. 

Being able to compete in Esports seems like a wonderful thing, right? Just think about it, you get to play video games for your career and wake up every day playing the video game you love and making an income from it. The one thing that a lot of people do not think about is the mental health of these individuals who compete in Esports. 

There are many ways people have a low mental health level within Esports. To start off being in a competitive setting can be stressful no matter what level you are playing at. When playing at the highest levels of Esports some of the fans of set organizations can be very toxic to their players if the players do not meet the expectations of the team or win as expected. A lot of these fans will send personal attacks to these players through social media just like professional sports the only difference is because Esports are played in an online competitive setting it is very hard for a pro player to disconnect from social media. In the past few years, pro players have started to make that disconnect when needed but it is still not where it needs to be. 

Another way to be over-stressed when competing in Esports is not performing well and being at risk of losing your position. Esports is an extremely hard field to compete in. There is always someone who is trying to take your place and if you do not compete at the highest level, you can easily lose your position on a team. This can cause a lot of stress and sometimes this is the reason many players within Esports decide to retire. 

Another huge mental health problem within Esports is burning out. Anyone can relate to this, it is when you do not have any interest in doing what you are expected to do except within Esports it is 10 times harder due to there being almost no days off if you want to compete within Esports. This is caused by playing the game too much and can result in burnout. On average a daily routine for a professional Esports player will be to get up and practice with their team for close to 6 hours and then they will need to do their individual practice which can take up to 4 hours alone. If you add this up it calculates 10 hours of work a day and this is probably more on the lower end of the average amount of time an Esport pros puts into perfecting their craft. On top of this, there are almost no days off within Esports meaning that these pro players will do this 6 to 7 days a week. This means the average amount of time that a pro player works in a week would be nearly 60 to 70 hours (about 3 days) a week on a video game. Now you might think playing 70 hours a week of video games a week and getting paid might sound like fun but if you do this for 12 months a year playing the same game you will still get burned out. Luckily enough a lot of pro players and Esports organizations of recognized this and have started to allow their players to take small breaks during the year to make sure that everyone stays healthy within mental heath and not get burned out.  

Mental Health is important no matter what industry you work in, and everyone needs to take a break and take care of their mental health no matter what industry they work in. Thank you for reading our blog. If you like it, please hit the heart button below.