8-Week Yoga Programme Reduces Gaming Disorder Symptoms Across All Domains — Indian School-Based RCT
- RCT of 120 Indian adolescents meeting IGD criteria, randomised to 8-week Integrated Yoga Module (n=60) vs control (routine academics, n=60)
- Significant Group × Time interactions across all six IGDS symptom domains: salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse (all p < 0.001)
- Parent-reported IGD severity also significantly improved (p < 0.001) — not just self-report
- Secondary improvements: depression, anxiety, stress (DASS-21), quality of life (WHOQOL-BREF), and cognitive-emotional functioning all significantly favoured the yoga group
Gaming disorder is the behavioural addiction that most clinicians encounter but few have structured interventions for. CBT adaptations exist but are Western-centric and often inaccessible in low-resource settings. This Indian school-based RCT offers an alternative: yoga as a scalable, culturally appropriate intervention that addresses the emotional regulation deficits underlying compulsive gaming.
Why yoga makes mechanistic sense for gaming disorder
The connection is not intuitive until you consider what drives gaming compulsion. IGD is maintained by three psychological mechanisms: emotional dysregulation (gaming as affect management), attentional capture (inability to disengage), and reward sensitivity (dopaminergic reinforcement). Yoga directly targets the first two: breathing and meditation practices improve affect regulation, and sustained attention training strengthens the capacity to disengage from absorbing stimuli.
The results across all six IGDS domains are notable. This is not a general improvement in wellbeing that incidentally reduces gaming — the intervention changed salience (how much gaming dominates thinking), tolerance (needing more gaming for the same effect), and withdrawal (distress when not gaming). These are the addiction-specific mechanisms.
The cultural dimension
This study comes from India, where gaming disorder among adolescents is a growing public health concern and where CBT-trained therapists are scarce. Yoga is culturally embedded, school-deliverable, requires no technology, and costs nothing per session. For low-and-middle-income countries where digital addiction is rising but treatment infrastructure is not, this model has scalability that clinic-based CBT cannot match.
For Western practitioners: yoga is not a replacement for CBT in gaming disorder. But as an adjunct — particularly for adolescents who resist traditional therapy framing — it addresses the somatic and attentional components that verbal therapy often misses.
An 8-week yoga programme reduced gaming disorder symptoms across all six addiction domains in Indian adolescents — offering a scalable, culturally appropriate intervention where CBT is unavailable.
Control was routine academics, not active intervention — placebo effects possible. Single school setting in India. 8-week post-test only — no long-term follow-up. Yoga format may not generalise across cultural contexts.