School, Sports, Social Life and Games

Getting the Balance Right

Written by PacMan

You’re a teenager. Every day you have to deal with: School... Sports... Friends... and GAMES!.. What to choose? Most teens end up picking two aspects, maybe three! Why?.. They don’t know what they’re missing out on. This article will show you WHAT you can achieve by “mixing the extremes of each world” and HOW you can achieve it.

For most teens, mixing just two of these “worlds” is tedious. Myself, I have to mix all four. Trust me, it’s tough! So why do it?  The experiences and results you get after going through all the trouble is amazing! Your outcome is a great education. Fit body. Good friends. And of course... Hard-Core gaming skills! With those experiences in your pocket, once you finish school you will have had a great few teenage years and have a great start to your adult-hood.

Still not sure if you want to do it? Let me give you an example:
We have Tom and Fred.

Tom plays video games and has a lot of friends. Great, right? Wrong! Tom fails most classes and is unfit!
Fred plays video games, has a lot of friends, gets good grades AND is fit.

10 years later:
Tom hates his job thanks to him not having a good education. He has also been having some health problems as he never did enough exercise.
Fred is working well as the assistant manager to a big corporation ready to be promoted. He’s fit and healthy and still enjoys playing video games with his friends he found on hupitgaming.com

What are they doing different? Tom spends most of his time playing games or hanging by the park chatting with friends. Fred manages his time. He plays slightly less video games and also spends less time lazing around and doing nothing. Therefore he can fit in time for friends, study and getting fit!

It’s amazing really how much you can get done in a day when you don’t sit in bed refreshing twitter! Instead you get up, get out and do more!  So enough talking... Here’s the tips!

- Get enough sleep each night so when day rolls around you can be at full awareness and maximize your time! I cannot stress how much more effective you can be with the right amount of sleep. However don’t have too much sleep as that can lead to becoming lazy! Personally I had to get my dad to turn off the internet at night. Crazy but it worked! Otherwise I stay up on my phone all night refreshing YouTube!

- Bring the aspects together! Make friends through sports or through gaming (I think there might be a website for that)!

- Don’t quit anything. Don’t stop following your favourite commentators or playing football. Instead fit it all in. More work yes but also more rewarding. Maybe try what I did. Roughly plan each day. Don’t live life by a timetable but do manage your time better. I’ll give you an example of mine:

Friday: 7:15 – 8:30 Get-up and get ready for school.
Give yourself the right amount of time but not too much. This can lead to being too being too slow in the mornings.

School - 9:00 - 16:00

After-school study(1* See note below) 16:10 – 18:00

Dinner - 18:05 – 18:30

Outside - 18:30 – 19:30 Social Life!

Gaming / YouTube - 19:30 – 20:30 Yay! Finally!

Swimming - 20:45 – 21:30 Sports!

Exercises (2* See note below) 21:40 – 22:00

Bed time! (3* See note below) 22:10 – 7:15 Nighty night!

*1 If your school provides some kind of supervised study I highly recommend it. Especially in years where you have exams. Here in Ireland we do exams in our 3rd and 6th year of Secondary School and it is not uncommon to do supervised study. Nearly everyone does it. I understand it can be “nerdy” but in Ireland in 3rd and 6th year everyone does it!

*2 This is very important to me. Every night I do a very simple routine. It is: One more sit-up than I did last-night. One more push-up than I did last night. And one more squat than I did last night. Very simple and very effective. Because you go up by one every night you notice the progression. Think about it like this. If you did one more every night for a year (which is very easy) you would be able to do 365 push-ups this time next year! Amazing right?! Right!

*3 Personally I used to think sleeping was a waste of time. Until I heard about Lucid Dreaming! I won’t go into detail but basically it lets you control your dreams. See http://www.dreamviews.com/content/ for more info. It is really great. Maybe I will write an article on that in the future! But imagine being able to visualize playing CoD while dreaming! There really is a lot to dreams so if you want to see an article on them just ask!

Of course you might not need that much sleep and maybe one day you will have dinner later. Well what I do and I think you should do is only ROUGHLY plan your day. As I said above. Don’t live life by a timetable. Just make things easier on yourself and give yourself an approximate plan. To use an old football saying “If you can’t see the goal you will never score!”.

In the long run it goes like this: School > Sports/Social Life > Games. Yeah “Games” is at the end but for me is still a big part of my life and I am not going to give up on it.

When it comes to planning I really recommend you do out a MPG list. “My Personal Goals”. YouTube vlogger Philip DeFranco made a video on this recently and I highly recommend doing one out. Whether you are a teenager or not. See the video below for more information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HZfsfvpxuI

Where do I stand when it comes to the Tom and Fred concept? Well I'm somewhere in the middle ground between them. Recently I've started swimming, and I'm also slowly getting more sleep.  I've also started doing the simple +1 exercise idea.  But with all that I still play video games a bit too much and could get out more.  However, I do have many friends so don't worry about being a “loner”.

I hope you've found this article useful and will at least make you think about the role video games play in your life.  It's been written from my perspective and based on my experiences of being a gamer, student and all round teenager.

Gavin ”PacMan” Pacini.
Dublin, Ireland.
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