Tetris Cures Anxiety Disorders, And The Medical Community Doesn’t Want You To Know About It

Tetris

In a recent news article, it was revealed that people exposed to traumatic images and events could be spared the suffering of recurring, obsessive thoughts by simply… playing Tetris soon afterwards.

From arstechnica.com:

“…the brain has limited resources, and secondly, work on memory consolidation suggests that there is a six-hour window within which disruption of that consolidation is possible. Put another way, there’s only so much your brain can do at once, and if you distract it within that six-hour window, you can prevent the memory being fully formed.”

It sounds too good to be true. But then, so does the actual cure for any disorder along the anxiety spectrum, including Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Attacks, Depersonalization, Phobias, OCD, PTSD, etc etc. People who develop these types of conditions are often terrified when their initial research or trip to their doctor tells them that there is no actual specific cure for them; but that a course of SSRI anti-depressants and/or series of sessions in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy might just do the trick.

And yes, these approaches can certainly help and even cure people in some cases. But the actual structure and anxiety-related basis of these conditions means that if the patient does recover, it’s invariably a by-product of the therapy and not the therapy itself.

I’m speaking from experience; I suffered from chronic anxiety, panic attacks and depersonalization for almost two years. And I tried everything – you name it, I paid for it – Medication, meditation, Reiki, Yoga, etc etc. None of these approaches seemed to work. But in the end, I recovered, and what cured me was an intensive course of distraction. I kept my mind occupied 24/7: practicing the guitar, reading books, playing video games. I didn’t give myself one minute to accommodate the anxiety. Basically, I had to retrain my brain to not focus on obsessive, negative thoughts – and it worked like a charm. I’ve been telling people my story via an ebook, and have received almost universally positive feedback from readers. This stuff works, and it’s really as simple as it sounds. That’s not to say that it’s not hard work – it absolutely is – but it’s not complicated.

Doctor

I’m certainly not the first person to be aware of this. For example, Charles Linden’s anti-anxiety program basically says the same thing. And the fact is that anxiety research, when viewed through this lens, absolutely backs up the distraction theory. Indeed, it makes total sense that for something as purely self-perpetuating as anxiety disorders, treating them in the traditional sense is an exercise in futility. Most of these approaches just reconfirm to the individual that there is something ‘wrong’ with them, reminding their subconscious that it’s supposedly ‘ill’. But it’s not – it’s just addicted, temporarily, to one specific train of thought. And distraction can cure it.

The whole thing is basically an extension of the Tetris/PTSD phenomenon – If the events have been stuck in your thoughts for a few hours, then immediate, intensive distraction for a little while will push out them out as if they’d never been there in the first place.  If you’re unfortunate enough to have been stuck with these thoughts for months and even years, then it’s probably going to take a few months worth of constant distraction to achieve the same effect. But it always works. It works because the mind has been diverted (by trauma, drugs, grief etc) into an anxious, introspective state, and all you’re doing now is reversing that procedure. It works because it has to work.

People often fear that the trauma of the anxiety will be with them forever, or fear that their personality will be somehow different. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it’s because of a mental phenomenon known as state-specific memory. It basically means that once you are completely out of a state, or an experience, that it’s very difficult to remember the full extent or power of  your emotions while you were in it. It’s one of the most brutal things about depression, in that when you feel very down, you can actually ask yourself, “Was I ever really happy?”  Since you are not in anything resembling a happy state, it’s nearly impossible to remember when you had one. The same goes for anxiety (which is very much linked to depression). But the fact is that it works the other way too – so that when you get out of the anxious state, you actually wonder, “What the hell was I so worried about?”  So, I can clearly remember the time I spent feeling constant anxiety and panic attacks, but I can’t relate to it anymore. Which is a good thing.

I think that’s also the reason that when we have nightmares, in which we see  the most horrendous images dredged from the pits of our own subconscious, and tailored to terrify you specifically — we can still get up, have our breakfast, go to work and forget about it. Why are we not crippled by these images, why don’t they haunt us and stop us leaving the house? Because when we wake up we lose the dream state, we are immediately back in a normal, structured reality that is entirely different from the nightmare, and requires our full concentration to navigate. We don’t have time to focus on the fear, and so it disappears. (Interestingly, at the nadir of my anxiety disorder, I was actually having panic attacks in my dreams, waking up and having another panic attack. Great fun altogether…)

Unfortunately, this goes so completely against the standard medical view of anxiety disorders that it is seen by most doctors as baseless conjecture. All of these MDs who prescribe cocktails of medications to treat “separate” anxiety-related neuroses are following their training to the T, but they are missing the big picture. I’m not going to get into a rant about how so many of them are tied up in ‘sponsored dispensation‘ of medications, but the fact is that it’s far more beneficial for doctors to prescribe a long course of anti-depressants and follow-up appointments (which is all by the book) rather than tell a patient  that they might recover completely if they spend their money instead on a Nintendo with Tetris (which is definitely not by the book). It’s what happened to me; over the course of 12 months, I saw a doctor, one of the highest-paid in the country, who really had no idea how to deal with my condition and just gave me tablets and platitudes until I went away.

It just never fails to amaze me just how little doctors know about anxiety conditions in general. I have so many emails from people who, suffering from what are blatantly obvious symptoms of anxiety, are told by their doctors that they may be having a nervous breakdown, a manic-depressive episode, even a psychotic break. These poor souls, who are experiencing nothing more than an overreaction of their fight or flight response – something easily cured – are told that they may be looking at years of medication, therapy and brainscans, at the precise time when what they need most is distraction from their condition.

It’s a disgusting level of ignorance, perpetuated by both the pharmaceutical industry and avaricious, blinkered doctors, and it ruins lives. It needs to be addressed immediately.

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Being Creative Is Not Hard

Being creative is not hard. All of the best literature on the subject tells us that by sitting down and starting to work, we somehow set in motion a chain of events that seem to push the creator towards success. Even when in the dullest of mindsets, when there is virtually no material of inspiration being fed into the mind, that same intellect can generate astonishing insights into itself and the reality it creates.

What is difficult is sitting down and starting to write. There is a line of code built into our memory which tells us that exerting yourself towards any long term goal is pointless. It constantly reminds us that at any given time, there is something more enjoyable and less exhausting to do. This could be an intellectual relic; an evolutionary meme that doesn’t really serve us any more today.

In the time of pre-humans, our environment dictated that we should exist on almost a strictly moment-to-moment basis. With a scarcity of even basic essentials like food and heat, we missed no opportunity to partake whenever they were available. As civilization has advanced, those of us lucky enough to live in first world societies have become immersed in the Westernized ideal of constant availability. We always have heat and food. We have absolutely everything we need, in caveman’s terms, to live a happy life.

However, we have also been given a new part of the brain: the neo-frontal cortex. It is the base of higher thinking; rationalization and logic. It has given us the civilization we know and all the technology that has enhanced our lived infinitesimally. And it yearns to express itself, to be involved in creative acts. It demands to feed into the evolution that surrounds it, that has created it. It longs to connect to its roots and push towards the tipping point of conscious change, on a personal and mass level.

It can be numbed by routine and distraction. In that sense, the western world that has thrived on the fuel of creative freedom is itself the worst enemy of creativity; we are totally surrounded by distractions.

On the process of writing a book on a computer, comedian Dave Gorman says:

“My computer is connected to the internet and the internet contains everything in the whole wide world ever. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find everything in the whole wide world ever to be a bit distracting. Surely it’s the curse of the modern world that so many people now work at a computer while the computer also provides the biggest distraction from work ever devised by man.”

We have all but lost the advice that all creative people will impart: that once you have begun to work, the muses will work with you. Of course, all of these modes of communication are only distractions if you view them as such. They can also be the greatest tools for linkage of ideas which is the essence of creativity. As with anything, it simply depends on how you think of them.