Why candy crush addiction

Everybody can download it for free. The player can also cover social needs. Add to this the rewarding sounds and the crushing sound that can bring you joy. Another reason also is the endless amount of levels.

You will always have the opportunity to dive deeper and run further from your everyday life. As said earlier, because it is designed to trigger certain reactions of your brain and keep you in a state where all you want to do is win win win. Next up are the promised brain hacks game developers use in such time-killing games as Candy Crush.

The main point is that some kind of animal is placed in a box with a lever. Every time the animal presses the lever it gets a treat or an electric shock. Researchers can change the frequency of treats to do all kinds of things to the animal.

This means you can make it uninterested in the lever, or you can make it so the animal obsessively presses it all the time. How is this connected to Candy Crush addiction? Every time you win in a game, your brain gives you a little bit of dopamine. By keeping you winning early on and then making it harder and harder, the game triggers some addictive tendencies. It also makes losing painful.

You want to go back to winning as soon as possible. That is why in Candy Crush Saga there is a currency lives. Unless you pay for it. This does two nasty things to your win seeking brain. Here is another experiment to show exactly what this means.

Subjects were given a piece of chocolate to eat. You get nightmares composed of chocolate and tornadoes. You see everything in candy shapes and colors. Everything you see are candies.

You may even be afraid to walk into a candy store or even the candy aisle in your supermarket. Part 2. Put down the game. The most basic and simplest way to stop your addiction is to put down the game. You just have to control when and how your play it. Wait for people to respond to your requests without bugging them. Play some other game to take your mind off it. Delete the app. If you find that you cannot control yourself, go ahead and delete the game permanently. Restrain yourself from re-installing it.

Out of sight, out of mind. Forget about the game. Block app invites and requests. It would be hard to keep your focus if others keep on sending your app invites and requests from Candy Crush. Refer to this article for details on how to do this. Get a sponsor. Call a friend to act as your sponsor.

Every time you feel the urge to play Candy Crush, call him or her right away. Get a life. This means you can never be completely satiated when playing and always leaves you wanting more. And by not letting you play, the game actually becomes even more rewarding when you are let back into Candyland. Researchers from Harvard and the University of British Columbia have demonstrated this effect, called hedonic adaptation , in a study using real-life candy bars.

Participants were divided into two groups: one was told to abstain from eating chocolate for a week, while the other was given pounds of the stuff and told to go wild. After one week, the participants were brought back into the lab and given a piece of chocolate to savour. The results? Those who had been deprived rated the chocolate as significantly more pleasurable than those who had been able to eat it freely. So it seems the deprivation makes the reward that much sweeter in the end.

Finally, it is no coincidence that the game is played with pieces of candy. As Sharman points out, food is often used in gambling games think of the infamous fruit machine , tying our happy associations and the pleasure we derive from eating into the game.