The vast majority of people log on to their favorite online casino app and play online slots to unwind after a long, hard day at work or as a reward on the weekend after getting their daily chores done.
There are of course many out there who log on to play online slots with the sole intention of winning as much money as possible but in truth, for the majority of us anyway, playing online slots is just a great way to relax.
A reduction in cortisol isn’t the only thing you’re going to get from playing online slots though, you’ll also develop a host of other skills through osmosis. In this article, we take a look at some of the skills that you didn’t know you learned from playing online slots.
Focused Attention
The world is currently in the midst of a mental health pandemic and whilst there may be a whole host of mitigating factors to consider, one of the biggest obstacles to good mental health in the modern day is our reduced attention span.
The average human can hold their attention for an average of 8.25 seconds which is a 25% reduction from the year 2000. In fact that figure gives humans a shorter attention span than the average goldfish.
Why is that significant to our mental health? Well, people with poor attention spans typically spend the majority of their day thinking about something other than what they are doing at the moment. In a Harvard study on 250,000 people, this trait was found to be a key indicator of poor mental health.
Focusing attention on the task at hand allows people to separate themselves from their thoughts and feelings and live truly in the present moment. If you play online slots you are actively training your focused attention which will increase your attention in other areas of your life and in turn, make you less susceptible to the negative impacts of poor mental health.
Increased Resilience
If you have been playing online slot machines long enough you’ll be well aware of the fact that you lose more than you win.
That’s not to say that you’ll lose a fortune playing slots, rather it’s a fact that slot machines have a Return to Player percentage that dictates on average, how much you would lose from a £100 stake.
This means that online slots have to be resilient because they know that the wins will be followed by losses. In order to keep on having fun they have to make a conscious effort not to get too invested in the winning and losing aspect of slots.
They don’t get too high when they win or too low when they lose and in doing so they develop real resilience which can have an enormous impact on their mental wellbeing.
Budgeting
Let’s say you’re playing an online slot with a 90% RTP, you know then that on average, for every £100 spent you are going to lose £10. If £10 is your limit you have two options of how you go about spending that money.
You either make the maximum wager and risk losing that £10 within the first couple of spins or instead you make the minimum wager and maximize the amount of time spent playing the game.
If you are playing for fun and to unwind you will definitely do the latter and in choosing that option you’ll have to be quite stringent with your budget and not get carried away. Manage to do that in the world of online slots often enough and you’ll find yourself more than competent in budgeting in ordinary life.
Self-Awareness
If you’ve been playing with online casinos long enough or had any experience with online gaming you’ll be aware of the phrase ‘tilted’. It’s a word used by gamers to describe the state of mind when you have abandoned all rational thought and are playing on raw negative emotion.
This can manifest itself by playing in an overly aggressive way that is likely to get you and your teammates killed in a battle royale or in the form of chasing bad bets with bad bets when you’re playing online slots.
If you do this and you do it often enough you’ll very quickly run into problems with your gambling. In order to avoid that you’ll need to develop an element of self-awareness to catch yourself in the moment before you get carried away by a negative emotion.
Again, from a mental health perspective, self-awareness is another key pillar of feeling good.
