 What's up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And today I have a guest on my channel. But first to introduce him, something that I've been touching on on my channel lately is my history in gaming. For those of you who haven't checked it out yet, you can look up in the info card. I used to be in the professional gaming world and my addiction kind of ruined it. But for a very long time, gaming actually helped with my depression, my anxiety, especially my social anxiety. And I will make a video about that and share a little bit more about that. But like something that's a little bit better now in 2018 is I don't think as many people are giving gaming such a bad rep, but there's still a lot of people out there who think gaming rocked your brain and you should go outside more and all this other stuff. So I will make a future video on how gaming actually helps people. Those of you who follow my channel or even me and my son's channel, you know that me and my son are big gamers. And this is an important topic to discuss. But anyways, today I have brought over my buddy, Jared, who goes by Pacific, the casual gamer. I will put a link to his channel in the info card above. He has an awesome gaming channel. He's been helping helping to teach me and my son Dylan about Call of Duty and stuff. But anyways, he came over to my channel to kind of discuss how gaming helped impact his life and potentially saved his life when he was going through some depression. So without further ado, here is Jared. Hello, everyone on the rewired soul. My name is Pacific, the casual gamer. You guys know Chris. I'm Jared. I'm one of Chris's friends in his Facebook group and hit our Facebook group for our mentor. And he reached out and said I could make a video for him. Talking about suicide because I mean, like I'm not an expert in suicide, but I'm one of those people that has gone through it and come out alive. And I want to talk about that. Now, I am a gamer. I mean, it's in my name, but games, to me, are something that have been a part of my life forever. I don't remember not knowing what a video game or video game controller is. In fact, that's how long I've known how to play video games. But what I want to talk about is when I was about 13, I started not necessarily wanting to die, but more of just started thinking about it. It was like, what if this happened to me? What if this happened? And it slowly spiraled down from there. And really, I kind of look back and I wonder if my... I always wonder why I wanted to do it. I don't know why still. I come up with answers sometimes. And I mean, they're not right. So, I mean, I used to think it was because of emotional. I used to think it was this, that or the other. I think it was a mix of stuff that I know for a fact. It was a mix of stuff, but I don't really know. And there was a big thing in the background, though, which was a lack of purpose. I felt like I wasn't doing anything. I mean, it was 13, it's middle school, really. And middle school, if you guys have gone to school, you know that middle school is kind of the schooling where there's a lot of BS homework you got to do unless you want to do something specific. So, where does video games play into this? And it kind of gave me a purpose, really. And it was the simple fact of leveling up my character, doing this quest or learning this skill that really helped me out with my video games. At this age, I was playing a lot of video games where I played them before. And, yeah, I was exploring them, but I mean, it's playing the same game, right? Call of Duty was a big one, actually, that helped me because of the leveling system and the skill gap that was in the game. Oh, my gosh, I sucked at that game and I just wanted to get better. That's all I wanted to do. So, you know, I didn't get my homework done. I just want to play Call of Duty. That's what I wanted to do. And maybe afterwards, I found some more games that really weren't as important to me as Call of Duty, but they were still good. And then I found, you know, that at this point I found YouTube and it was nice to see how other people felt about video games. And all of a sudden I was like, hey, I like to play Call of Duty. Let's share my experiences with my friends. And so I talked to them about it and I kind of had a purpose. After that, my purpose was getting better at video games. I mean, it sounds actually, looking back on it, it sounds really stupid, but it may be stupid, but it was my purpose as a 13, 14, 15 year old. And after that, the suicide thoughts kind of changed. And they got into more heated things like religion and politics. Some of those of my house were very bearing down on me because they disagreed a lot with my gaming. And I wasn't addicted, mind you. This is very important to remember is I wasn't addicted. Like I could be like, oh, I got to do the dishes, video game down, go do the dishes, what was I doing? I'm gonna do this instead. Like I don't have ADHD, but I mean, I would just, oh, I'm done playing the video game. I forgot what I was doing. I'll, oh, I have homework to do. I'll do that. That's kind of how I was at that time. Oh no, video games gave me a big purpose. And actually I wouldn't be a YouTuber if it weren't for me trying to find a purpose with video games. When I was 16, I was like, wait a second, I'm putting all this time into these video games, but maybe if I took just like an hour and I made a video, oh, I could do YouTube. And then I, all of the sudden, started sacrificing video game time for YouTube time. In fact, now, I think if exactly my circumstances was the same, but I didn't even do YouTube, I would go from like on an average day where I have to work on YouTube videos, four to eight hours of video game time, which I worked my butt off by the way to earn that time. Sometimes it's less to 12. I would be playing video games all day and all night. Obviously, I kind of lost some video game time after that, but still. So yeah, of course you could get addicted to video games. I think that's something that definitely is a real threat, but I think between addicted to video games and suicide, I mean, the answer is clear to anyone, right? And that there was a while where I almost got addicted and then I was like, oh, I'm getting addicted to video games, I need to stop. That's kind of what the mindset was. But now because of that time period, I played with a lot of my friends that I'm with now and I built some friendships out of it. So that's really it for this video. That's all I had to say. Chris asked me to keep it between two to, I think seven minutes and I'm running and my recording software, the six minute mark. So thank you everyone for watching. There's gonna be links to the side over here. I'm gonna guess that my channel is over there, along with Chris's, you can subscribe to Chris's for more mental health and wellness. You can subscribe to mine to learn how to be better at video games and other random video game stuff. I really need, I suck. If any of you are a personal brand people, you know that, yeah, what I just said there sucks. Also, there's probably another suggested video down below this. I'm taking guesses here folks. All right, I'm Pacific Casual Gamer. I suck just as bad as you do at video games and I will see you later. All right y'all, that was great. Jared, thank you so much for coming over to my channel and sharing some of your experience with everybody. I really love when people come over to my channel and share their experience. So one of the reasons being is like, I want my channel to be a place where you all can see not just my beautiful face, but you see that like depression and other symptoms of mental illness, like they can affect literally anybody. And the more faces that I get on my channel, I think the more that message is kind of spread. So be sure that you go out and you check Jared's channel. I will put a link to his channel in the info card as well as in the end screen. So you can go check it out, subscribe if you're into gaming. But if you are interested, I will put another thing for my Instagram right here. You can message me on Instagram. I'm on Twitter too. Like if you're ever interested on making a guest video and just sharing some of your experience dealing with mental illness, like feel free to hit me up and like, let's chat. And like if you want to come on my channel, like I said, I would love to have you on and share a little bit of your experience, all right? But anyways, if you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you are new here, I'm always making videos about mental health. So make sure you hit the little round subscribe button. And as I mentioned, go over, check out Jared's channel. It's right there. And if you want to check out another one of my videos right below, click or tap on that thumbnail, all right? But thanks everybody for watching and I'll see you next time.