SuperBetter: How a gameful life can make you stronger, happier, braver and more resilient. Jane McGonigal
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Someone repeatedly “sees” a traumatic event in their mind’s eye, as vividly as if it were really happening all over again. Psychologists consider these flashbacks to be the single most stressful and difficult-to-treat symptom of PTSD.
But what if, instead of trying to treat flashbacks as an unavoidable symptom of trauma, we could prevent them in the first place? Cognitive scientists have shown that memories change and take shape for up to six hours after a traumatic event. That has led some researchers to wonder: Is there anything we can do in the first six hours after trauma to inhibit our brains from forming the kinds of visual memories that lead to flashbacks?
Yes, there is. You can play Tetris.
In 2009 and 2010 a team of psychiatrists at Oxford University completed two studies showing that playing Tetris within six hours of viewing traumatic imagery helped reduce flashbacks of the traumatic events. It worked so well, in fact, that the Oxford researchers proposed that a single ten-minute session of Tetris could effectively serve as a “cognitive vaccine” against PTSD. Play the game as soon as possible after a traumatic event, and you may significantly reduce your likelihood of experiencing severe post-traumatic stress.8
How did the Oxford researchers figure this out? It’s not easy to study trauma in a laboratory, as you can imagine. It’s simply not ethical for researchers to do horrible things to study participants just to measure their traumatic response. So the Oxford team used an experimental method that has been tested and validated in hundreds of other trauma studies: they gathered together test subjects in a laboratory and showed them a series of extremely graphic, gory images of death and injury. (Trust me, these are the kind of images you truly hope you will never see.) Then they measured the subjects’ emotional response to the images to ensure that they were truly disturbed.
In the hours that followed, half of the test subjects played Tetris for ten minutes while the other group did nothing special. Here’s what the researchers found: most of the group that did nothing special reported a high number of disturbing visual flashbacks from the images over the next week. The group that played Tetris, however, had just half as many flashbacks. And when both groups completed a psychological survey one week later, the Tetris players had significantly fewer symptoms of PTSD than the group that did not play.
So how did ten minutes of game play prevent flashbacks and PTSD symptoms? The Oxford researchers explain that Tetris occupies the visual processing circuitry of the brain with something other than what it’s usually preoccupied with after a trauma—involuntarily remembering and replaying the trauma over and over again. It’s similar to how Snow World works to prevent pain, but it’s a more targeted approach. To interfere with involuntary visual memories of the trauma, you have to swing the attention spotlight to something that specifically demands a huge amount of visual attention.
Crucially, the Oxford researchers found that not every video game can successfully hijack the visual processing centers. It must be a game that requires a massive amount of constant, visual processing—ideally, a pattern-matching game like Tetris or Candy Crush Saga, in which your goal is to move and connect game pieces according to a visual pattern. These kinds of games are so visually engaging, players notoriously report seeing game play flashbacks—typically, colored blocks falling, or matching candies swapping places—whenever they close their eyes, even hours after they’ve stopped playing. But if you play a less visual game, like Scrabble or a trivia quiz, this technique doesn’t work. Your brain will have too many visual processing resources still available to replay traumatic images.9
One more important detail from the Oxford study: playing Tetris did not prevent individuals from voluntarily remembering details of what they saw. A week later, when they were asked questions like “What color was the hair of the man who drowned?” or “About how old was the woman on the stretcher?” the Tetris players accurately recalled as many details as the group that did not play. Their memories were intact—they just weren’t as haunted by them.
This is extremely important, so I’ll say it again: the Tetris technique does not erase memories; it simply stops the cognitive process of involuntary memory. It gives you control over the memory. You won’t think about it when you don’t want to.
The Oxford researchers have not followed up their initial study with research on how well this technique works in real-world contexts. However, since they publicly shared this work five years ago at scientific conferences and in the media, many individuals have had the chance to learn and try it outside formal scientific studies. As part of my ongoing work to understand how people use games to become stronger and heal faster, I’ve heard from many people who have conducted successful Tetris-style interventions in their own lives: a runner who, after the 2013 Boston marathon bombings, found herself worried about whether she would ever be able to participate in road races again; a high school student in Norway who lost a friend in the 2011 mass shooting and kept replaying media images of the scene in his mind; a woman who did not want to suffer flashbacks of her elderly father’s final moments, which were not peaceful. What I have heard from individuals like these is that a short period of game play in the hours, days, and even weeks after the trauma gave them control over what they were thinking and seeing in their mind’s eye—and that this level of control not only helped limit flashbacks but also gave them a sense of comfort and strength.
Let’s put this Tetris research into a bigger perspective. The power to prevent flashbacks can potentially help anyone, even someone not directly involved with a traumatic event. We often see traumatic images of violence or accidents in the media. Children can be especially disturbed by these images. But a quick session of visually absorbing game play can help them avoid nightmares or intrusive memories.
The Tetris technique also has potential to change how you respond to ordinary negative events. When you have a particularly upsetting day, or if you can’t stop thinking about something that went wrong, you can activate this gameful ability.
You can put a stop to involuntary thoughts quickly and simply. This power to control what you’re remembering in the moment, right now, ensures that you can choose to truly leave difficult moments in the past when you need to.
There’s one more surprising—and potentially life-changing—way to apply the Tetris technique in everyday life.
To find out what it is, try this quick quest!
QUEST 7: Control the Mind’s Eye
What to do: Think of something you often crave—something that, once you start thinking about it, it usually feels impossible to resist. Imagine it in detail. Picture yourself enjoying it, as vividly as you can. Do you have a specific craving in mind? Good.
The next time this craving kicks in—including right now, if you’re already feeling it!—I want you to play a pattern-matching game like Tetris for three minutes. Do this, and you will be much better able to successfully resist your craving.
Why it works: Multiple studies have shown that playing Tetris for three minutes while feeling an intense craving cuts the intensity of the craving by 25 percent.10
This may not sound like a lot, but a 25 percent reduction in craving intensity is enough to change behavior. It’s just enough of a boost to give your willpower a fighting chance. (Keep in mind that if you’re hungry when you play Tetris, you’ll still be hungry afterward—but you’ll be less likely to give in to a specific, unhealthy craving, and more likely to make a smarter choice about what to eat.)
This anticraving strategy works on exactly the same scientific principle as the strategy of using a pattern-matching game to prevent flashbacks and PTSD. Research has shown that cravings have a very strong visual component. The more you mentally imagine yourself enjoying what you crave, the more likely you are to give in. To resist a craving, you simply need to give your brain’s visual-processing centers something else to visualize—and you’ll find the craving significantly reduced.11