Mental Health Monday: The Magic of Proliferating

Proliferate is my favorite rule in Magic: the Gathering, and when I learned how it worked in the trading card game I started trying to Proliferate myself all over the house all the time. In Magic, you can power up cards by putting counters on them, generally to make a creature tougher by giving it +1/+1 to power and toughness. Proliferate lets you pick anything you own with counters on it (even yourself!) and put another counter on it. Generally, you want to proliferate whenever you have counters on stuff.

But sometimes, there are counters on things you control that you don’t want to add to. Like Time counters, which count down until a card comes into play. Proliferating your own Time counters would slow you down from getting that sweet Kraken, not an optimal strategy.

I think Proliferate is more than just a Magic: the Gathering mechanic; I think it’s a great way to frame up the momentum that good and bad habits can make in myself over time. The repeated nature of the mechanic (in MtG, a counters deck wants to Proliferate a lot), in my framing, also takes some away some of the self-induced pressure for success I’m always feeling. To do this, I pick something in my life I want to “put some counters on” to beef up, and I look for little ways to “proliferate” it.

For example, I often try to think of the cleanliness of my house as one big thing to Proliferate upon, over and over again. Since I rarely actualize the “big cleaning days” I fantasize about, its usually smarter to keep a constant, small-scale beat of cleaning going throughout the day. When I pick something up going from room to room to put away: Proliferate. When I rinse the cereal bowl and put it in the washing machine: Proliferate. All of the tasks I think of as “Proliferating” for cleaning are extremely small but crucially break down processes that can be overwhelming for my ADHD-PI-ass brain.

There’s plenty of other areas to try this in your own life. I can literally raise my own power and toughness a bit every time I bang out 15 minutes of yoga or take 15 minutes to make lunch rather than get fast food. Proliferate! When I text a quick meme to the group chat, I’m proliferating my social life. I like thinking of each of these big, unwieldy aspects of my life as creatures in the big EDH game of life that I’m slowly making more and more powerful. The irony is, these creatures are gigantic problems that I’m really breaking down into something more digestible as I make incremental progress. I also get a lot out of saying “Proliferate!” in my head for every little to-do.

Proliferating cuts both ways, and I’ve also used the mechanic to reframe how I think about my vices. While I won’t say “proliferate” to myself each time I have a beer, the phrase has reminded me that 3 days straight of drinking would mean a lot of -1/-1 counters on my liver. Likewise, I think that there’s an urge to “proliferate” in bingewatching and excessive gaming that I’m guilty of - numbers going up is so satisfying - and naming the feeling and bringing in both my good and the bad actions around it has allowed me to direct my energy towards more positive stuff, like cleaning.

This system, like so many lifehacks that keep me sane, probably sounds really silly out loud, but I swear it works great for your inner dialogue. Give it a try, but please do not take this as an invitation to bring Atraxa to casual commander night!