Off on vacation

After a grueling week at work, I'm off to Cape Cod for a vacation. We've rented a small house on a lake with a dock and I'm so ready to swim, relax, eat clams, go boating, walk on the beach, read novels....

This will be my first sober vacation. I was feeling very ambivalent about this but this morning I know that I am going to do it. A sober friend noted that you don't get many family vacations in life and it's important to be present for them. So I will be. See you next week, everyone.

P.S. Grace, the ginger beer is an awesome substitute for wine. I only allow myself to drink it when I would otherwise have been having a glass of wine. Yummy stuff!

I've got to say, I absolutely agree that gaming can be addictive. I absolutely refuse to play MMORPGs anymore, because I lost so many hours of my life to Dark Age of Camelot. Not that it wasn't fun, it was. It was just the type of game where you could spend hours and hours and not really accomplish that much. That's fine when you're single, but as soon as I got married I realized that much gaming time would be unhealthy not only for me, but for my marriage as well.I still play games (Starcraft, mostly), but I try to be much more moderate about the time spent playing them.

An interesting, if excessively alarmist, article on addiction to gaming, something I think I can speak on. I'm not addicted to gaming but I know how it can draw a person in. Well, I may suffer a temporary "addiction" aound November 9th.The article focuses on what the therapist in the article, Kim McDaniel, calls "the God effect"."You're the center of the universe" in more addictive role-playing games, McDaniel says. "Which is very attractive for teenagers without a lot of power, psychologically, in the world.""God effect" is a misnomer, though. The cause, while it can manifest as a power complex, is biological.Video games cause a significant release of the neurotransmitter dopamine- a "feel-good" hormone - and also affect serotonin and norepinephrine. Norepinephrine (adrenaline) is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Serotonin is a calming neurotransmitter. One of Dopamine's effect is a feeling or sense of reward (or expectation of reward). Of course, I'm grossly oversimplifying the explanation of the three and their interlocking roles and effects. But people with mood disorders (depression, bipolar, etc.) and psycoses have the these chemicals all out of whack. Video games, as well as narcotics, opiates, canabanoids, alchohol all elicit a strong release of one or more of these hormones. Except that video games don't destroy your body or brain (in moderation). People with mood disorders are drawn to video games (or drugs or alchohol), not the other way around. These things can worsen depression (almost always with drugs) if abused, but they do not cause depression. Indeed, moderate gaming may be beneficial, if controlled. Unlike chemical stimulation, it does not attack the body or brain.Study on Dopamine Release in Video Games (PDF)Are Video Game Players Better at Laparoscopic Surgical Tasks? (PDF)This one helps illustrate the fact that moderate gaming (a few hours per week) might actually aid in learning, spatial reasoning, and hand-eye coordination.Oh boy!