ADVENTURE 2. NINJA BODY TRANSFORMATION
Before You Play, Here’s What You Need to Know
The SuperBetter method is designed to make you stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient.
It’s based on the science of games—and there’s a lot of evidence that it works.
A randomized, controlled study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania found that playing SuperBetter for thirty days significantly reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety and increases optimism, social support, and players’ belief in their own ability to succeed and achieve their goals. The study also found that people who followed the SuperBetter rules for one month were significantly happier and more satisfied with their lives.
A clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital found that the SuperBetter method improves mood, decreases anxiety and suffering, and strengthens family relationships during rehabilitation and recovery.
Meanwhile, data collected from more than 400,000 SuperBetter players has helped me improve the method, to make it easier to learn and more fun to use in everyday life.
Every single day for the past five years I’ve heard from someone who says that the SuperBetter method has changed their life. It is my greatest hope that SuperBetter will help you tackle your toughest challenges, and pursue your biggest dreams, with more courage, creativity, optimism, and support.
Please remember, the SuperBetter method is not a substitute for medical advice or treatment. Many successful SuperBetter players—including a majority of participants in the University of Pennsylvania study and all the participants in the clinical trial—followed the SuperBetter method alongside some form of continuing counseling, medication, or rehabilitation, or with a doctor’s supervision. The SuperBetter method is NOT an alternative to therapy, counseling, ongoing medical treatment, or medication—nor is any game recommended or discussed in this book.
Now that you know—let’s play!
You are stronger than you know.
You are surrounded by potential allies.
You are the hero of your own story.
These three qualities are all it takes to become happier, braver, and more resilient in the face of any challenge.
Here’s the good news: You already have these qualities within you. You don’t have to change a thing. You are already more powerful than you realize.
You have the ability to control your attention—and 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 have—and show you that accessing these powers is as easy as playing a game.
And yet this book is not about playing games—at least, not exactly. It’s about learning how to be gameful in the face of extreme stress and personal challenge.
Being gameful means bringing the psychological strengths you naturally display when you play games—such as optimism, creativity, courage, and determination—to 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 gameful—and how being gameful can make you stronger, happier, and braver—is to tell you a story. It’s the story of how I invented the SuperBetter method—and 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 didn’t heal properly, and after thirty days I still had constant headaches, nausea, and vertigo. I couldn’t 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 can’t 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 didn’t know it then, but suicidal ideation is very common with traumatic brain injuries—even mild ones like mine.1 It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me: Jane, you want to die. It said, You’re never going to get better. The pain will never end. You’ll be a burden to your husband.
These voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to