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thepastisalreadywritten · 7 months

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By Sarah Kuta

September 20, 2023

Tetris is one of the world’s best-selling video games and even the subject of a recent film — but the beloved 1980s digital puzzle may also help improve your mental health.

More specifically, psychologists are studying whether playing Tetris can help reduce the number of flashbacks or intrusive memories people have after a traumatic experience, such as sexual assault, a car accident, combat, a natural disaster, or a difficult childbirth.

Most people — roughly 70 percent — have had some traumatic experience in their lives.

But only a small fraction of the population, around 4 percent, will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a diagnosable psychological issue with symptoms ranging from sleep disturbances to self-destructive behaviors.

But whether trauma leads to full-blown PTSD or not, painful memories can spring to mind without warning.

Flashbacks are not only emotionally distressing, but they can also make it difficult to concentrate, which can lead to problems at work or school.

These intrusive memories often pop up as a picture or a short movie in our mind’s eye.

Against this backdrop, British psychologist Emily Holmes wondered if she could reduce the number of flashbacks people had by giving their brains a competing image to focus on shortly after they experienced trauma, while their memories were still forming.

The painful recollection would still exist, it just wouldn’t intrude as often.

“The human mind isn’t like a video camera — it doesn’t just immediately record everything we’ve experienced,” says Emily Holmes, a psychology professor at Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University in Sweden.

“It actually takes some time, possibly hours, before a memory gets solidified into mind. What we were interested in was: Is there something we can do as the memory is still consolidating that would help it not become a flashback?”

A ‘cognitive vaccine’

Her team began testing an array of visuospatial tasks that involve generating or manipulating images in the mind’s eye, such as imagining a constellation or tapping out a complex pattern.

One day, a student suggested they try a video game — and Tetris became the obvious answer.

“It involves colors, it involves space because you’re having to move blocks around to complete lines and, critically, it requires you to rotate the shapes in your mind’s eye,” Holmes says.

“You really have to use your mental imagery skills because you’re trying to fit the blocks into the right place.”

They started to experiment with Tetris — first, in the lab, by showing participants a traumatic film and, later, in the real world, by meeting with people in hospital emergency departments who’d just been in car accidents.

In both settings, people who played Tetris within hours of the trauma experienced significantly fewer flashbacks over the course of the next week compared to those who didn’t.

(58 percent fewer in the film study, and 62 percent fewer in the car accident study)

Based on the promising results of this proactive, preventative approach — which Holmes describes as being like a “cognitive vaccine” — they next turned their attention to established memories.

“The reality is, we’re not going to be able to get to most people within a few hours of a traumatic event occurring,” she says.

“People can have intrusive memories for years or decades, so clearly we need to do something for those older memories.”

In one study, Holmes’ team asked people receiving treatment for PTSD to focus on a specific flashback while playing Tetris for 25 minutes once a week for several weeks.

By the end of the experiment, participants saw a 64 percent reduction in the number of times that specific memory popped up, as well as an 11 percent reduction in memories they hadn’t targeted.

In another study, they worked with intensive care unit nurses who had established intrusive memories — including many that were more than three months old — of traumatic events from the COVID-19 pandemic.

After four weeks, nurses who played Tetris experienced one-tenth the number of intrusive memories compared to those who did not play.

They also reported improvements in other symptoms, such as insomnia, anxiety, and depression.

Overall, nurses who played Tetris saw a 73 to 78 percent reduction in flashbacks.

As Holmes points out, there’s probably nothing special about Tetris specifically.

She suspects any task with high visuospatial demands — like drawing, doing a jigsaw puzzle, or making mosaics — might achieve similar results.

However, tasks that are verbally distracting, like doing a crossword or reading, probably wouldn’t work as well.

Tetris as a coping tool

Importantly, in their experiments, researchers aren’t just handing over a Game Boy and telling people to start playing Tetris.

Rather, they first ask participants to call to mind a particularly bad piece of a memory, called a hotspot.

Then, during gameplay, they instruct patients to mentally rotate the shapes, called tetrominoes, in their mind’s eye before they fall into the field of play.

They also ensure participants play Tetris for a sufficient length of time, usually between 10 and 20 minutes.

So far, all of their work has involved this procedure, which the researchers suspect is important to achieving results.

“Historically, intrusive memories of trauma are quite difficult to treat because they’re stuck in your mind for a reason — your brain’s gone into red alert and is trying to keep you safe,” says Holmes.

“They’re just really tricky things to alter. So if you’re just playing a game, it may help take your mind off things or reduce distress, but it might not help stop the flashbacks from intruding in the future.”

Still, playing Tetris on your own, without following the research procedure, likely won’t hurt you — and it may even help you feel better.

Canadian therapist Morgan Pomells recommends it to her clients as a coping tool for soothing feelings of anxiety or hyperarousal.

She doesn’t use Tetris during therapy sessions but, rather, suggests it as a potential option for moments when distressing memories or mental images arise during daily life.

“It’s one of the tools in the toolbox,” she says.

“A lot of people find it to be really helpful, especially people who have a really visual element to some of the symptoms they experience.

Turning to Tetris and being able to really sink into that game, even just for a couple minutes, allows them to feel a little safer and it really quiets their minds.

And when they resurface, they’re in a calmer state and actually able to take stock of their surroundings.”

However, Pomells cautions, Tetris or any other type of coping tool is not a substitute for seeing a therapist.

Holmes echoes that sentiment, adding that people who are suffering from flashbacks should first seek evidence-based treatment from a healthcare provider.

While Tetris may eventually become an evidence-based treatment itself, right now, researchers are still in the early stages of gathering clinical evidence.

“This is more of a journey of curiosity,” says Holmes.

Additional clinical studies are underway now. In the future, researchers also hope to test the long-term effects of Tetris on flashbacks, as well as understand what’s actually happening in the brain.

More broadly, they want to see if Tetris is effective at reducing intrusive memories related to other conditions beyond trauma, such as substance abuse disorders and depression.

“Mental images can haunt people in a variety of forms and I think it’s a real scientific challenge of the future,” says Holmes.

“It’s like being a physicist some centuries ago. We’ve just started to see the stars and planets, now we’ve got to go explore them.”

Tetris is a puzzle video game created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet software engineer.

It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the appropriation of the rights in the late 1980s.

After a significant period of publication by Nintendo, the rights reverted to Pajitnov in 1996, who co-founded the Tetris Company with Henk Rogers to manage licensing.

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Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov (born April 16, 1955) is a Russian computer engineer and video game designer who is best known for creating, designing, and developing Tetris in 1985 while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre under the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy of Sciences).

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iamthunderhearmehowl · 5 months

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Let me tell you about the tattoo that my mom hates (this is a long ass post btw)

✨️Trigger Warning✨️

Suicide / Depression

- - - - - -

Hey, hi, it's me. This is the only place I feel really open about sharing things - but with the holidays and cold months coming up I know how hard it can be for people who are struggling with depression/ bi polar / familial trauma, etc. So here's this post to remind you (and me) that we'll be okay. You and me. We will be okay. We are still breathing, and with every breath we take, we still have a shot at living the lives we've dreamed of.

You see this tattoo? I got it as a reminder. Oh yeah, also it's a Dark Souls tattoo. It says "Don't You Dare Go Hollow".

My mom HATES it, but she has come to terms with how much I love this tattoo.

But anyways, I got this tattoo to remind myself to keep going. I got it about 1-2 years after I attempted to leave this earth on my own accord.

Background (skip if you want)

It was 2020. I had been a Veterinary Assistant (technician basically depending on what state you're in, TN treats the assistants the same as technicians). Clients were beating me down dude. I had phones thrown at me. I had death threats. I had people telling me I was a worthless piece of shit. I wanted to help these animal, but to do that I felt like I had to take and accept this slurry of abuse. I was unmedicated. I felt alone. I felt like I was nothing. An empty vessel. So one day I was supposed to go to work and we were working on a skeleton crew. 12 to 13 hours a day, days in a row, sometimes we would still have to go in on our off days. I couldn't do it anymore. I called out. I said I was sick. The response "I'm sorry you're sick, but that puts our team in a hard spot". That was it. The last straw.

I ended up going to the ER. I stayed there for a week. And thrn I ended up in a mental institution for 3 days. I was started on Zoloft.

All was well for a little bit. I stayed in my profession and decided to go to Tech School to brighten my future and make some more money.

It was. The most stressful time of my life. While I did leave my previous clinic I switched to ER and Specialty and lasted only about 6 months there. Before I realized I was spiraling again. I felt like a failure as a tech. I was worthless. I wasn't enough. I got let go. If I had been doing this for 5 years and could do this what fucking good was I? I saw the signs. I understood what was happening. I sought help and went to group therapy at a behavioral hospital.

It was amazing. The people I met, the counselors, I made so many friends and people who believed in me. We increased the dosage of my meds.

Now. I'm at a new clinic. I'm spiraling again. I'm in bad health. The doctors don't know what's wrong with me, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's stress from my career. I still come home sobbing. I come home feeling empty. No amount of medication can help free me from the unhappiness of my job. At one point I loved it. Somewhere along the way I realized that this isn't the life I want. I love your pets. I love my current clients. But I can't take the pressures of possibly getting hurt or sick. My back is messed up from this job, all of my joints pop and hurt, I have damaged and fractured my teeth from grinding them from stress. I am always tired. Working 10+ hours with just a one hour break isn't cutting it. I am miserable.

So.

I took the fucking leap guys. I'm doing it. I'm switching my career. I'm going back to my roots. I'm being creative and doing what. I started podcasting and realized how much I missed being myself. My VTNE is next month and I don't give a shit.

The game changer was really being inspired by the voice acting in Baulder's Gate 3. Hearing Neil Newbon's speech when he accepted his award made me cry. I took one of Steve Blums voice acting classes and . . . My God it was like finally hearing the affirmation I never got from my parents.

Back to the Tattoo

My point is, no matter how hard it gets, please allow yourself to enjoy the things you love and fuck what everyone else says. You do yourself a disservice if you don't give yourself a break. If you don't be true to yourself, if you don't strive for the life you've dreamed of.

It's why my tattoo is the Bonfire from Dark Souls. In your journey, you're going to fail multiple times. Sometimes, you get hung up on the same damn spot over and over and over again. Sometimes, you have to reface your enemies. DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE BOSS BATTLES. You may fail thousands of times, but you know what you do? You go back to your bonfire- your safe place- and you heal up. You get the fuck back up the next day and do it again. Sometimes your game plan changes. You don't have to fight this boss today. You can fight him when you're ready. You don't have to make huge progress in the game today - you can dick around and look for good armor. You can change the whole path you take if you want to - it doesn't matter. In the end you will eventually accomplish what you've came to do.

I have really been fighting for my life lately, but I don't want to lose hope. If I give up, then I'll never see the end of the game or move on to the next one.

It's hard sometimes. But my favorite quote is:

"So if you ever find yourself in a slump, remember your purpose - whatever it may be - and never stop fighting for your goals, no matter how crazy they may seem. And don't you dare go hollow"

I don't know you guys but I love you. And if you need someone to tell you that personally my inboxes are open.

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lexiklecksi · 6 months

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youtube

Everyone who has ever liked, reblogged or posted a “sad girl aesthetic” post needs to watch this video essay. Yes, we should all be able to express how we experience living with mental illness, but we need to stop romanticizing mental illness! It doesn't help anyone to get triggered online. It helps even less to perceive trauma, depression, anxiety etc. through a desirable lens that blurs how painful it is.

#sad girl aesthetic #mental health awareness #mental illness #stop romanticizing it #video essay #educational post #Youtube

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mansorus · 20 days

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I ain’t like your daddy I’m not gon leave ya ima thug it wit ya 🤷🏾‍♂️🫡🫶🏾

#art #generationalwealth #mansorus #mental health awareness #philly #florida #real boston richey #boston richey #ytb fatt #maybach #music video #vibes #SKYAMI

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growingwithem · 1 year

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There is something that strikes me about haters and the first thing is their little self-awareness. They are so blinded by their desire to feel power (since they want attention and validation) and to put people down to feel superior that they don't realize that they have problems. People who have not taken the time to go through the long and continuous process of self-awareness are obviously the most ignorant in recognizing their own weaknesses because they are so fascinated and obsessed with finding them in others because they don't want to do it in themselves. The mind is so impressive that its creates different ways to sustain the wounds that you don't know you have to make you survive but you are the only one responsible for wanting to heal them or not.

The second is their weak judgment. This is not surprising because if you have not had to break mental schemes and question the thoughts, feelings, values and perceptions you have of life and of yourself, you do not know how complicated it is to understand the human being and the diversity of personalities that we may have so that you just want to label people "good" and "bad" because of a twitter thread created by tweens who grew up with the "cancel" trend. People can make mistakes and not want to learn from them and people can make mistakes and want to learn from them, each one decides what kind of life they want to live and that is their problem. Although it is difficult to accept, we are not in control of changing others but ourselves, so focus on you. Also, giving all your energy to people you supposedly don't care about is a waste of time you'll never get back. And please, let's normalize that self-growth means accepting that we are not perfect and we never will be, mistakes are part of our path and it is valid to learn from them. Don't let anyone make you believe that you should be ashamed of them because acknowledging your own mistakes and showing the world that you have learned from them is very difficult but totally worth it.

I know that it is very difficult for hateful comments not to affect us because we are social beings and it is a human need to feel accepted and loved in order to have a healthier life, but remember that everyone has a different type of magnifying glass with which they see the world and you are not responsible if theirs are blurred, so live your life firmly because if you know who you are, no one can make you believe otherwise. And remember, sharing love and being kind is sexier than throwing hate at people you don't know on the internet ;)

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