How to Prevent Motion Sickness Symptoms From Gaming

Motion sickness is an uncomfortable feeling that can really impact a person’s ability to do day-to-day tasks. It’s caused by conflicting sensory signals from things like your eyes, ears, and feet. When something doesn’t match up, side effects of nausea or vomiting tend to be prominent. In my case, motion sickness is common when it comes to car rides, flying on planes, and gaming. Luckily, since I’ve lived with it for all my life, I’m familiar with remedies to the problem.

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Motion Sickness Remedies

Wristbands

Specific wristbands with balls attached, advertised as a form of acupuncture on pressure points can be found online in many e-commerce stores. Some major drugstore chains like CVS also carry them.

In my experience, I found that they are ineffective. This may be because of lack of pressure(small wrists), severity of motion sickness, or another factor. If you have the budget to test it out, it’s an easy non medicative and convenient remedy if it works for you.

Ginger

The fastest way to rid of or keep motion sickness at bay without using medicinal drugs is ingesting ginger. Using ginger chews like Ting Ting Jahe Ginger Candy where it’s long lasting and has a large amount of ginger in it helps distract your body from the side effects. The fact that it’s long lasting allows you to suck on the candy for an extended amount of time, lessening the consumption of sugar for multiple candies. I often eat a few when playing FPS games or testing out free indie games.

Gravol or Motion Sickness Pills

If the severity of motion sickness is too much to handle, an option is to use is over the counter drugs. I typically use these for long car rides or flying on planes. The best one I’ve tried is Gravol, but it does induce extreme fatigue and will put you to sleep easily. I don’t recommend using these for gaming or regularly, but if you’ve been playing a game for too long and you can’t stand the nausea, it might be a good time to take a pill. Definitely save this for extreme cases.

Building Immunity

In addition to using ginger, the best way to get over motion sickness is to train your body and build immunity. Since gaming has been a big part of what used to be a long distance relationship, playing games with a lot of movement at a high frequency has made me immune to motion sickness in 95% of car rides. I’m even able to read messages on my phone without a large wave of nausea. I used to accidentally glance at a sentence and end up feeling uncomfortable for the rest of the ride.

Some games I’d recommend to train your body are: Warframe, Vindictus, RAFT, and any mainstream shooter game. Some games are a little too intense for me like GTA V and I can never play it comfortably, so it’s a balance of finding games that initially make you feel motion sickness, but not at an extreme level.

What other methods of motion sickness remedies for gaming work for you?