Anxiety Is Bad at Card Games, Which Is the Whole Point

The Oasis Health Journal · Submitted July 12, 2026 · 1:24 PM ET

Anxiety is a story your brain tells on a loop, usually about the future, usually starring you in a scene that has not happened yet. The technical word is rumination, and its favorite habitat is a quiet moment with nothing else going on. Which is the funny thing about a card game. A card game is a terrible place to ruminate. Somebody just played a card you did not expect, it is your turn, everyone is looking at you, and the anxious monologue has to get in line behind 'wait, what does that card actually do.'

This is less a metaphor than a mechanism, and the mechanism has a name.

Flow, or why your brain can only run one program at a time

Psychologists call the good version of that absorption 'flow,' a term from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for the state where a task is hard enough to hold you and easy enough not to break you. Attention fills up. Self-consciousness goes quiet. The part of your mind that narrates worry does not get deleted, it just gets crowded out, because attention is a single-lane road and the card game is already driving on it. A tight trick-taking hand or a well-timed turn of a trading card game is close to purpose-built for this: enough decisions to occupy you, low enough stakes that losing is survivable. It will not cure an anxiety disorder. It will, for an evening, give the loop somewhere less useful to be.

They tested this on the hardest crowd: anxious online gamers

Here is my favorite study on the subject, because it reads almost like a dare. In 2025, researchers writing in Royal Society Open Science took twenty adults who were socially anxious and spending problematic amounts of time in online multiplayer games, and did something counterintuitive: they prescribed more gaming, just offline. For ten weeks, in small groups, everyone played a tabletop role-playing game modeled on Dungeons and Dragons, around an actual table, with actual faces. By the end, most participants showed lower social anxiety and fewer symptoms of problematic online gaming, and some reported feeling less lonely. It was a small pilot, not everything moved (assertiveness and self-image held roughly still), and the authors are careful to say it needs testing with clinical patients. But the direction is the interesting part: the fix for too much screen was not less play, it was play with the screen removed and the people added back.

The wider (and appropriately humble) evidence

Zoom out and the picture stays consistent, if still early. A 2024 scoping review of tabletop role-playing games as a psychological tool went through 51 studies and kept turning up the same threads: more social connectedness, more group cohesion, more confidence, and room to rehearse the interpersonal skills that anxiety normally talks you out of. A separate review of board games in health noted better social interaction and, in some studies, reductions in anxiety and ADHD-related symptoms. Both reviews then do the responsible thing and stamp the field 'emerging,' which is research-speak for 'promising, mostly small studies, please do not oversell this.' Consider it not oversold.

Why the table specifically, and not the group chat

Because the other side of the ledger is loneliness, and that one is not soft. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory calling social disconnection a public health problem, noting that about half of American adults report loneliness and that being chronically disconnected carries a mortality risk the report likened to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. Screens are extraordinary at simulating company and mediocre at delivering it. A card table delivers the real thing almost by accident: you cannot play most of these games alone, so the game quietly drafts three other humans into your evening and files it under fun instead of therapy.

How to use this without overthinking it (that would rather miss the point)

You do not need a diagnosis or a plan. You need a deck, a table, and a couple of people who will show up. If you have kids or a skeptical friend to win over, the modern trading card games are a gentle on-ramp: Pokemon and Disney Lorcana are friendly to beginners, while One Piece and Magic: The Gathering reward the sort of strategic attention that leaves no spare bandwidth for doomscrolling. The shop keeps a deep bench of all of them, which is a polite way of saying a booster box costs less than a copay and asks nothing of your nervous system except that you sit down and pay attention to something that is not your phone.

This article is for education only and is not medical advice. Games are not a treatment for anxiety, depression, or any clinical condition, and they are not a substitute for professional care. If you are struggling, please talk with a qualified mental health professional.

Sources

1. Billieux J, et al. Can playing Dungeons and Dragons be good for you? A registered exploratory pilot programme using offline tabletop role-playing games to mitigate social anxiety and reduce problematic involvement in multiplayer online video games. Royal Society Open Science, 2025.
2. A Scoping Review of Tabletop Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) as Psychological Intervention: Potential Benefits and Future Directions. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 2024.
3. A Narrative Review of the Benefits of Board Games in Health. PMC.
4. Flow State: The Psychology of Complete Immersion (overview of Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory). Simply Psychology.
5. U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.