How To Make Therapy Fun With These Amazing Game Ideas

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs register@allceus.com counselortoolbox hey everybody, and welcome to today's presentation on gamification in counseling. In this presentation, we're going to talk about what gamification is. We'll explore the benefits of gamification, aside from just being a lot more fun. And we'll describe several techniques that I've used for gamification that you can obviously use and modify to make especially group activities a little bit more fun. Imitation is simply using games or challenges to make something more motivating or enjoyable. When my son was little, he used to help me fold laundry. And one of the things that we would do because I really hate doing socks is we would set out the different drawers for each person's socks. And as we would fold the socks, we would throw them to try to make a basket into the drawers. And he found that wildly amusing. Now, granted, he was 2, but he was amused, so I was amused and it was good mommy son time, if you will. And it made it more enjoyable. Now, obviously counseling is not folding socks, but there are a lot of things we do in counseling, like teaching psychoeducational classes or helping people review their gratitude list, which can seem sort of mundane if you're doing the same thing, just going around the circle and having everybody share something. Yeah, you can do that. That's very expected. Or you can shake it up a little. So let's talk about some of those things. In gamification, one of the things that you can do is enhance motivation. The students with the most stars at the end of the day get the prize, for example. And we use this a lot with little kids trying to get them to behave and get their chores done and those sorts of things. If you are doing residential treatment, obviously you can use a simple token economy. When people do particular things, they get a token. So every time they go to group, they get a token. Every time they do the chores that they're supposed to do, they get a token. Every time they turn an assignment, they get a token. You see where I'm going with this? But then the addition of those tokens at the end of the week can get them some more privileges. It can let them. We used to have, in my adolescent unit, we, we had a prize closet and the young men could go in there and use their tokens to buy prizes that they would use. And it was everything from a card that would enable them to 30 minutes of video game time to snacks. Adolescent boys eat all the time, and there were more palatable snacks, if you will, that were there in the kitchen. We only had fruits and those sorts of things. There are a lot of different things you can use if you're doing this at home. For example, gamification, trying to get children to do what you want them to do. The child with the most stars at the end of the day gets to choose the movie that the whole family watches in the evening. There are a lot of different ways to do it. One of the things you have to think of, though, when you're doing gamification is what is rewarding to each person. So if you're in a family and you're doing the child with the most stars gets to choose the movie. But the kids really don't like watching movies, then they're not going to care that much. So you want to make sure it's something that is meaningful to them. Same thing if you're doing it in treatment, if you're giving out tokens and you need to make sure whatever the rewards that people are getting for winning the game or for positive behavior are things that are rewarding to them. If you work in a nonprofit, a lot of times you can solicit donations and get movie passes or various other things. You can also give people certain extra privileges or maybe an hour off instead of going to group one time, or whatever it is that you can figure out in your facility that works. In our facility, the residential wing I used to work at, we would have upwards of 85 people in residence at any point in time. And that no matter how big your building is, that can get kind of crowded. And for people who like to have a little bit of space, one of the things or privileges that we would allot people, if they earned enough points, they could choose to use their time for 30 minutes out in the meditation garden. Again, talk to your people, talk to your clients and say what is rewarding for you? And use those as the rewards. Sometimes just winning the game is enough, because playing the game was fun and winning the game was fun. And even losing the game isn't that big of a deal because playing was so much fun and it makes it more enjoyable to come to group. This is especially true with outpatient groups where you tend to have a lot of attrition. If you can make it more enjoyable, then you can also increase the likelihood that people are going to stay in treatment. So why do we use gamification? It Makes it fun and increases attention. If you are playing a game, whether it's Taboo or Scattergories or Family Feud or whatever it is, people pay more attention if they're on a team. And even if all they're doing is getting or not getting point for something, it's more meaningful to them. Gamification also encourages mental manipulation so people think a little bit more about what's going on. It encourages recall and strengthens memory pathways. When you use something regularly, the more often you use it, the stronger that memory pathway is. When you are recalling something and you have to recall it quickly, that makes it even more ever present in your mind. If you're doing something and people have lots of time to ponder and think about the answer, they have time to search their memory banks. But when you start playing games and there are things that people have to come up with the answers quickly, like Jeopardy, then it encourages them to keep that information more in the forefront of their mind. Gamification also uses multiple learning styles. It's visual. A lot of times we're asking questions or having people look at something. It's auditory. People are asking and answering questions or discussing things. And it's kinesthetic because you might ask a question such as what are the three best methods of meditation? Or you or whatever it is. But that encourages the person to mull around in their brain and say, okay, I have eight things I can think of. What are the three best for me and how would I rank them by doing that, by working with that information, they're solidifying the memory pathways. It enhances communication skills. Obviously this is more so if they're working in teams. However, it does help improve communication skills, even if it is a one on one thing. And it increases dopamine and norepinephrine, which are the memory and focus chemicals. When people are enjoying something, they're getting that a little bit of dopamine. And the norepinephrine is there because they've got a little bit of not bad anxiety, but a little bit of good anxiety or motivation or anticipation, whatever you want to call it, that they're waiting for that question and they're trying to get the right answer because they want their team to win. When you combine those chemicals, then not only are you helping the person feel better and have fun and maybe laugh for a little bit, but you're also increasing the chances that they are going to remember that information. So let's talk about some games right now that you can play. One easy one is Hot Potato. You get A ball, any old ball will do. It can be a 50 cent ball from the dollar store. Toss it around until somebody calls time. So you're just passing the ball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and the facilitator will call time. Whoever is holding the ball when the facilitator calls time has to answer a question. If they get the answer correct, then they get a token or a prize, depending on how you feel about it. One of the easiest prizes that you can do in here is some sort of candy or gum or something like that. If you're adamantly opposed to that, and I understand why you might be, you can also give tokens. And then at the end people can cash in their tokens for some sort of prize or just to know that they are the winner the game. So this is a twist on normal hot potato. The questions that you ask people when they're holding the hot potato. That can be anything that relates to your particular topic. If you're teaching self esteem, you can ask about what are three reasons that self esteem is an important skill for people to have. If you are asking about distress tolerance skills, you can ask them to identify one to three distress tolerance skills that they find helpful. If you are doing something on anger management, you might ask them what three anger triggers are or what are three ways they can identify when they are starting to get angry before they actually reach that point of being angry. And anything that you want them to be able to recall quickly and on demand when they're under some sort of distress is a great thing to put in a game because there's a little bit of artificial stress in games. And if people can think clearly enough to recall that information when they're under a little bit of good stress, then likely it's going to be easier for them to access it when they're under distress, if you will, ABCs. Now this one is, you know, not quite as fun as some of them, but you go around the circle and identify things that begin with Alphabet letters. You have a circle of 15 people and the first person says A, apples make me happy. B and the next person says B, butterflies make me happy. The next person says C, hats make me happy. You see where we're going with this? And it goes around the circle. But as soon as somebody gets to a letter, they've got to try to come up with the answer. When we were kids, we used to do it where it was a clapping game and you would go around and speak the answers to the rhythm. That may be a Little bit too much for your people, I don't know. But it's one thing you can do. So some things that I've used the ABC game for are things that make me happy, things to do when I'm stressed, things I would like to do or see in counseling. It's not just about dealing with all the bad stuff. It's about helping people focus on the fact that they do have some things to be grateful for and identify. Some of the good stuff that they can focus on, and some of the hopes and dreams they may have forgotten about. Another one that's kind of fun is doing opposites. The person has to identify, given the letter, something that makes them angry and also something that makes them happy. So we're going to balance it out. Looking at those dialectics, if you say apples make me happy, then something that makes you angry. Ants, fire ants make me angry. I don't like ants, especially in the house. It's a little bit silly, but it encourages people to think and be flexible and remember there is a yin and a yang. Mindfulness activities are also things you can do when you go around the circle. This one's a little bit harder, however, if you've already done a few groups on mindfulness activities and identified 30 or 40 of them, then it's a little bit easier to come up with. Mindfulness activities that begin with each letter, like V is often a difficult letter to fill. But in mindfulness visualization, it can be fun. And if we get stuck on a letter, then that's okay. You don't have to make it a big crisis. You can pass to the next person or anybody in the group after a certain period of time, can give a help, can give a shout out to help the person who's stuck on a particular letter. And finally, gratitude. And I like the gratitude one. We used to do it once a week when we would go around our group. It would be right before we did our treatment planning review group. It encouraged clients to really focus on what things had happened that week that they were grateful for and what things that existed in their life at that point in time that they were grateful for. And as you go around the room and somebody says they're grateful for something, other people in the room are hearing that and going, yeah, you know, you're right. I've got that. And I'm grateful for it too. Which helps people become more grateful. They're not just focusing on the one letter they had, but they're able to focus on a lot of things that are going well, Jeopardy. Now, this one is, obviously you can do it pretty much just like they do on tv. Create four to six categories, and you can use things like coping skills, foods, medications, or you can break it up. So one is coping skills, distress tolerance, activities, vulnerability prevention, and dialectics. So obviously that would be a DBT Jeopardy group. And then in each category there, you would break it up and ask questions such as the willingness to accept health as they are without trying to fight them is. And the answer would be radical acceptance. Yes, it takes a little bit of time to put this stuff together, but the nice thing is, the amazing thing is once you put it together, once you have it, henceforth and forevermore, use the information. Figure out what information it is from your psychoed lectures or the books you're having clients read that you really want them to hone in on and make questions around that. Another really fun thing to do with these is actually to break your group up into little mini groups and have them make the questions. So give them the answers, tell them what you want them to ask a question about, give them the answers, then have them create the questions and then shuffle them around. So that's another way to help people use the information kinesthetically or manipulatively in order to solidify it in their brain. If they're making the questions, they learn from it while they're doing it. You get assistance making the game, and then everybody gets to play the game at some point later. Taboo is another one that you can play. And yes, I poached these, if you will, from a lot of the games that I play with my kids. But it's. You get it. And these are things that people are familiar with. So it's not like they're having to reinvent the wheel or learn something from the very beginning. And those of us who are incessant rule followers know that it can be stressful to play a game the first time if you don't know all the rules. But if you know the rules or at least are relatively familiar, it's easier. So. So for Taboo, I divide them into two teams. Each team gets to have one minute. And if you haven't played the game before, the goal is to have the clue giver. This used to be like $100,000 pyramid if you're, like, ancient like I am and you remember that show. But the goal is to have the clue giver give clues to the guesser, and the guesser is supposed to identify the taboo word. Now the clue giver can't say, I'm talking about radical acceptance or I'm talking about irrational thoughts. They have to give all these hints and the guesser has one minute to try to figure out what the taboo word is. If the guesser guesses correctly, then that team gets a point and the next team, the opposing team gets to go after one minute. If the guesser doesn't get the answer, then I let the other team have a chance to steal that point. They don't get to do the guessing thing. All they've got the clue giving thing. The only thing they can do is say I think the answer is whatever. If they're right, then they steal the point and that's how we add points. So I do make a few modifications here and there in order to make sure that I'm able to disseminate points between teams and there's a winner. Yada yada. Jenga is another one that can be used with younger kids. Obviously the taboo is a lot harder to use with younger people. All of these can be used with adults. And I found that adults really enjoy doing some things and being able to kind of get into their playful side, if you will. So it's not condescending to do, to play, do some of these activities. I usually refer them, refer to them as doing activities instead of playing games, but whatever. Anyhow, Jenga, what I found works best all the time is make stacks of cards, each with a different color. So you may have one stack that's coping skills, one stack that's relapse prevention, one stack that's triggers, one stack that's nutrition, whatever you want to have people thinking, talking, answering questions about. And you can even get more personal when you're doing this and have one stack. For example, that's for your clients who are grieving. And each time they pull a block of the color that corresponds to that stack, then they can identify something that they remember about the person who passed, or one thing that they learned from the person who passed, or one way they feel about that person's passing. Those are different questions you can have in that stack. There are a lot of different things to do, but this makes it so it's less for some people, it feels less like an interrogation where we're going, okay, how do you feel about that and what are your thoughts? And tell me all the things you remember less, like an interview or an interrogation. And it's a little bit more free flowing and you can stop at any time and discuss something. You obviously can do Jenga in individual sessions. This isn't Something that requires multiple people. Sometimes it's just fun for somebody to have something to focus on besides just sitting there and staring across the room at the wall or at you or whomever. So you make the stacks of cards. Each stack is a different color. Paint the Jenga blocks the same colors as the cards. Then you set up the tower and your client pulls a block out. And whatever color that block is, they have to answer a question from the stack of cards. That's that color. That's as simple as it gets. When the last person pulls a block and it comes crashing down, obviously the game is over and you can talk about what you learned. You can process everything that went on during the game. There's a lot of different things that you can do. Family Feud is another game that you can play. This one, I try to keep it as true as possible to the Family Feud game. Obviously, we're not going out and surveying 100 people to get the top five answers or whatever. So you're going to have to weight the answers yourself or not. You can just give one point for each answer that's on the board. It all works out in the end. Create a set of questions that has multiple answers and assign them a point value. The top eight ways to cope with distress. The top six things to do to prevent vulnerabilities. The top six cognitive distortions. The top eight causes of depression. Those are things that you're going to have people or your teams try to guess what they are and you're going to play it just like Family Feud. They get to. Each person on the team gets to answer. If they guess something that is not on the list, then they get a X, whatever you want to call it, they didn't get the right thing after three incorrect answers, then the other team gets to try to guess something that's on the board. If they do so correctly, then they steal. Yada yada. Charades. This is one that can be fun, but it can be a little bit challenging to think of things to do. I use it a lot, obviously, in relationship counseling, communication skills, yada, yada. Divide the group into two teams. Use a timer and allow the actor, whoever's charading, one minute to act out the concept and his or her team to guess it. If they don't guess after one minute, and I know one minute is not very long, but if we're doing. If we're trying to get through multiple concepts in group, then we need to keep it down. You can obviously do three minutes if you want, but whatever. If after the time runs out. The team does not guess what is being acted out. Then the other team gets a chance to guess and steal the points. The active team switches after each turn. Each correct guess is five points. Some of the things that I've done charades with are non verbal communication. I like this one because there are so many different interpretations of different nonverbals. It's good for people to start discussing why they thought it was one thing or not, or help them become more intuitive about the varying different messages that are sent out through nonverbal communication. The ones that are super easy, angry, depressed, I avoid those. Most people can pick those up really well. But things like jealous, resentful, curious, exhausted, confident, those are ones that I may choose. And you can decide with your team. I'm usually pretty liberal with synonyms. If the word is exhausted and the team guesses tired, I'm like, okay, yeah, that's what we were going for there. So I will let you exhausted work. But if the person is acting out exhausted and the team says depressed, then they don't get the point because that's not exactly the same thing. And I want them to recognize the nuances between that and recognize that people can look exhausted and not be depressed. Other thing you can act out is concepts such as dialectics, recognizing that there is for every good, there's a bad. There's a balance in life that we can find. We can get lemons and try to make lemonade. Any of those sayings that we have, those would be easy to try to act out. Or you could do this in terms of Pictionary too. But I find Pictionary to be even harder myself just because I really don't draw well. But that's just me. Other things you can act out are cognitive distortions. For example, all or nothing thinking, which means something happens and somebody's either really happy or they're devastated. And that's something that's easier to act out. With charades, I always give a clue at the beginning because there is a lot of room here for guessing what's going on. So I might say this is a concept related to cognitive behavioral therapy, or this is a concept related to DBT to help kind of point people in the right direction. But charades can be fun. We've also done do a lot of skits, and that's not exactly gamification, but it does get people figuring out and thinking. You break. Break the group up and have each little group do skits. It has them thinking, what would this look like? The Way I do skits is I have them model what would this look like? For example, aggressive communication. But then they also have to model redo that same scenario, whatever scenario they had. And they have to model it as or play out the skit with assertive communication. So they can show the group the difference and they can model the difference and they can feel the difference when they act it out. Self designed games can also be kind of fun. Create two or three decks of cards. You're going to have a lot of decks of cards when you start doing gamification. But again, the good thing is when once you make the deck of cards, you can always add to it or even take away from it. But you have it for years and years afterwards. You don't have to reinvent the wheel with every single cohort that comes through your facility. Examples of different decks. You might create distress tolerance skills. You might ask somebody what is a distress tolerance skill? Give me an example of a distress tolerance skill. Explain to me the process of riding the wave. Any of those things can be good questions or things people have to do when they draw that card. The mind body connection is that one's super easy to make. Questions for when you talk about how does sleep impact the HPA axis? How does nutrition play into mental health? You can have a stack on grief tools that you use and you can ask them, for example, what was the grief recovery activity we talked about that used the flower pot? Anything to prompt them to remember something that you talked about. Depression triggers and mitigators. Whenever I encourage them to bring up something that is negative or stressful or triggering, I also want them to bring up in their mind a way to deal with it. I don't want to create a problem and just leave it hanging out there. The card may ask them what is a depression trigger related to the holidays and how do you deal with it? There's always the phrase at the end and how do you deal with it in order to get them to identify a trigger and identify a way to deal with it. Once you have your deck of cards, that's the hardest part. Create a game board with spaces and I'm going to show you on the next slide what that might look like. You can put a question type on each space or you can have them scattered throughout the game board. A lot of times I will put a question type on each space. That way every time somebody has a turn they have to answer a question. But you don't have to do that. Players roll a dice. However many numbers come up on the dice say they roll a seven, they move seven spaces and whatever space they land on, they pick a card from the deck corresponding to that space. If they have. If they give a wrong answer for some reason, they go back two spaces or they can't come up with an answer. If they give a right answer, they keep their space. Obviously this is very subjective. A lot of times if you're asking what are two things you can do to deal with your depression. If they say go get, you know, Schnucker drunk, of course that would be a wrong answer. But most of the time they're not going to say that. We need to look at it from their perspective. What is it that they do that helps them? That's all I'm looking for. Ultimately everybody's going to get to the end of the board. And with my self designed games, most of the time it has nothing to do with skill and more to do with whoever rolls the dice most effectively and doesn't land on any loser turn spaces. Kind of like Candy land. It is a way to go through stuff though to encourage people to strengthen those memory pathways. This is an example of a board game that I did for gratitude and acts of kindness to encourage them to think about things that they're grateful for and encourage them to think about random acts of kindness that they could do. Obviously you start at the beginning, they roll the die, they go the correct number of spaces. If they land on a G, then they pick from the gratitude stack of cards and they need to identify something that they're grateful for. Occasionally I'll have a little card stuck in there that says someone's grateful for. You move ahead three spaces or you were jealous of someone, go back three spaces in order to shake it up a little bit. You see how you can kind of play. And if you've played board games with your kids or you played board games as a kid, you can think of some of the ways that this happens. You can even get an old board game like a Candy Land and use that board and just modify it to meet your needs. Or you can print out your own or draw your own on poster board. Mindfulness is another fun activity or game. I play it kind of like the game Boggle. And in Boggle you have a lot of letters and you shake them up. And when they all settle out, you have three minutes to find as many possible words as you can among the letters that are there. So I make a little twist on it for mindfulness. And the first time I do this with a group, I Don't tell them what we're doing, because I want to get a good baseline to help them recognize whether they are mindful or they're not. And I have them either go into a room or if it's nice, we go outside for five minutes. When they come in, they're asked to write down everything they saw, smelled, heard, felt, touched. I give them about five minutes to do this, and then we go around the room and I ask what people saw, heard, smelled, felt, and touched. Each observation that a person had is a point. So if somebody went out there and they were worried about what they were going to make for dinner or whatever, and they weren't mindful, they probably didn't notice as much as people who were being more mindful. Some people may just not have any mindfulness skills right now anyway, and they may walk back in and go, I have no clue what was out there. We'll talk about what you miss when you're not present and in the moment and discuss the concept of mindfulness and how to be aware and present. We'll practice in the group room being aware and present and talking about, okay, now, what does everybody feel right now? And maybe the air conditioner just kicked on and they're feeling the air from the air conditioner, or they're feeling that the seat is really uncomfortable, encouraging them to just notice what's going on. Once we've practiced a couple times in group, then I have them repeat the original exercise and they go hopefully outside, because there's a lot more to see and do outside. They spend five minutes out there not writing, not taking notes, not doing anything, but just being mindful and being in the moment. And then they come back in and they have three minutes to write down everything they saw, smelled, heard, felt, and touched. Generally, when people come back in the second time around, they have a ton more stuff that was noticed. And at that point, we start going through and adding up the points, and the person with the most points quote wins. They're the mindfulness guru for the day. That's all there is. I've never given tokens or credits for that, but they just get bestowed the title of mindfulness guru. The second half of the game where you go out and just practice mindfulness, can be repeated weekly in order to reinforce mindfulness in your clients. You can go out, you can do it every day if you want, but it does tend to take away time from group, so I tend to restrict it to once a week. We would go out and practice that exercise randomly. When I felt like people were not really feeling it that day I walked in and they were all seemed to be distracted. That's generally the day I would pick to practice the mindfulness exercise and get them really focused on what's going on right now. Other fun ideas. An Easter egg hunt. Get the plastic Easter eggs that they use at Easter, obviously, and you can generally find them really, really cheap at Goodwill or somewhere after Easter is over so you don't have to buy new. It's more eco friendly, yada yada. Anyway. Put questions in each egg and hide the eggs around. Answering the question, whatever question is in the egg, answering the question gets you a point. This motivates people to get more eggs because the more eggs they have, the more questions they answer, the more questions they answer, the more points they get. You can scatter those all around and have people, you know, work, work together to find the eggs or work independently. It's just a fun little activity. If you remember doing Easter egg hunts when you were little, they were fun and it's something that can make people get people excited. A scavenger hunt is another thing you can do to help people build communication skills and teamwork. There generally isn't a lot of reinforcing of concepts that you've learned. Like you're not going to be asking questions about coping skills or whatever. They're going to have clues and they're going to have to talk among each other to figure out what the clues mean and work together so their team can find everything that's alluded to on the list and win. Ropes courses are another thing that really involve a lot of communication skills and teamwork. Not so much point gaining, but working together. Skits are another thing. I told you earlier that I do a lot. You can do skits with conflict management. Another deck of cards. I know you're like, oh my gosh, how many decks of cards? Another deck of cards for your different skit ideas. I keep track of different situations that clients bring up as being stressful for them or causing conflict or are causing frustration. And each one of those issues gets a card. That way, when we're doing our skits, I can say, okay, conflict management. You have to go in and meet with your boss. I want you to act that out and show me how somebody acts, how he would act. And I want you to show me how you would react assertively or dealing with customer service or whatever it is. But there are a lot of different situations that cause clients conflict or consternation. Making friends, asking someone out on a date Any of those things that people are nervous about, it can be fun to act it out because there are several. You don't know how the other person's going to react. You can play out several different things. If you ask somebody out on a date and they say yes, well, that's great. If you ask somebody out on the date and they say no, you know, how do you handle that? What do you do with it? If you ask somebody out on the date and they're rude and they laugh in your face, hopefully that would never happen, but it could. How do you handle that and play through. A lot of people, one of their greatest fears is that if they try to make friends or ask somebody out on a date, that the other person is going to laugh in their face. So, okay, let's take that worst case possible scenario and let's play it out and let's see what happens and figure out how to handle it if the absolute worst possible thing happens. And then let's go through some role plays or skits of it with something that's probably more likely to happen. And if you've watched my other classes, you know, I am very fond of beach balls. And this one, you do have to have multiple beach balls, but you can deflate them so they don't take up a bunch of room. And they're cheap. You can get them for like $1.50 or something at Walmart or the Dollar Store. Inflate the beach ball. Write questions with a Sharpie marker all over the beach ball and you toss it around in group. And every time somebody catches the ball, they look straight down and whatever question they see, they have to answer. This keeps it going and keeps it a little bit more enjoyable. And people don't feel as much like you're particularly singling them out with a type of question. What do I put on the beach balls? Relapse prevention. Things that they could do for relapse prevention. So one might be the acronym. Hungry, Angry, Lonely and tired is a sign of relapse. It's a relapse warning sign. And I will put halt down there. And I will say, what halt sign did you see in yourself this week? Or I will put, what is something that you did in order to nourish your body this week? Or what is something you did in order to address your anger or your depression? There are a lot of different questions that you can put on the beach ball because they're big and, and there's plenty of room to write in order to encourage people to think about how was I implementing my relapse prevention plan, what did I miss, et cetera. If you're doing aftercare, you can use a similar ball to relapse prevention. But we do want to add questions in the aftercare, one that encourage the person to share and reflect on what they did do in the past week and what didn't go so well over the past week. We don't want to focus on just the positive. We want to identify what were any obstacles or hurdles that you had to overcome and how did you do it. Another thing you can put identify things that people have talked about as being triggers, write those things all over the beach ball, and when somebody gets it, they look down and they see a trigger. Maybe it's driving through an old neighborhood that is the trigger that they see. They have to respond by telling us how they would deal with having to drive through that neighborhood. All of these are modifications of things that you can do very simply, just kind of going around in a circle. But it makes it a little bit more fun, a little more light hearted, and in my experience, the time passes a little bit faster. So gamification appeals to most all learning styles, which is really awesome. Some people are not auditory. They get really bored just listening to people talk and lectures and stuff. They want to see something. Some people get really bored or can't follow visual stuff, they prefer to hear it. And other people just need to work with the material and talk about it. In gamification, you're using all of those senses when you're trying to help them do things. They're seeing the question, they're talking about it, they're manipulating the information. Gamification strengthens recall pathways from previously learned information. Stuff they may have learned six weeks ago in group, it's filed back there, but they may not have accessed it in a while. And they've stacked other stuff in the closet in front of it. This encourages them to pull it out. It says this is something that's important and you want to have easily accessible. It encourages mental flexibility. The ABC game, for example. Just thinking about something that makes you happy, that begins with A. It's not just something that makes you happy, but something that makes you happy that begins with A makes you think a little bit differently. Jeopardy. Because of the way they give you the answers first and then you have to formulate the question, makes you think about things a little bit differently. It enhances dopamine and norepinephrine, which are essential for memory. It can improve communication and teamwork. And the other cool thing is it helps people tolerate loss and failure. It's not that everybody's a winner. In a lot of games there's a clear winner and a clear not winner. But it was fun just playing the game. And that's what I want them to take home from it is it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. Everybody's going to learn something from this. And yes, the winning team may get 30 minutes of meditation time or something. Okay, well hopefully that's motivation to work harder the next game or to review your notes from previous groups so the next time we play, your team can win. I appreciate you being with me today and I will see you next time. If this podcast helps you help your clients or yourself, please support us by purchasing your ceus@allce.com or getting your agency to sponsor an episode. A direct link to the on demand CEUs for this podcast is@allce.com podcastceus that's allce.com podcastceus to sponsor an episode of Counselor Toolbox and reach over 50,000 clinicians per week, go to allce.com sponsor thank you.