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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One Thought At A Time

 

In his book, “Zen Meditation In Plain English”, John Daishin Buksbazen outlines a basic meditative technique; that of counting from one to ten with each in-breath and out-breath.

This might seem easy at first, but your mind must be absolutely still as you do it. If your thoughts wander at any time, you must start again from ‘one’ with more determination to do it properly. The goal of this practice is to train your mind to stay focused, to not go off on flights of fancy.

It is based on the intriguing fact that the mind can only ever focus on one thing at a time. As Buksbazen says, “Nobody can really concentrate on two things at once.” Basically, this means that whatever thought we have automatically expands to fill our entire consciousness for time we allow it to stay there.

This could be wondering where you put your car keys, or working on the big project you have to have prepared for Friday. Not only that, but it is of course reflected in how we interact with the world: the car keys will bother you while you should be enjoying your dinner or that movie, and even though you’ve have a month to work on that project, you are still making last minute changes on Thursday night. Just as the thought of the project expands to fill the mind entirely, the project itself expands to fill entirely the time allotted to it (another truism, this time of design / multimedia production).

We can see the results of this on a practical level, every day. It could be argued that it is why textual information (books, magazines etc) are separated into sections, chapters and even paragraphs. We recognise that this is a reflection of how we think, and it seems more attracive to us than uncut reams of text. Pictures, in particular, are attractive to us because, to paraphrase the old saw, we can take in a thousand words at once.  

It is a well-known fact in the publishing world that if you want your audience to feel smarter and more involved, make your chapters shorter. Dan Brown’s bestseller the Da Vinci Code used this technique brilliantly to help weave together historical information and fiction without losing the reader’s interest.

In fact, it feeds directly into the standards of memory theory. For example, languages are always best taught not when the student is presented with pews of black and white text, but when the language is a part of a narrative, a small adventure, something interesting. In that case, the primary thought is to complete the adventure or task at hand, and the language becomes secondary. It becomes a means to an end, not the end itself. The mind absorbs the information so much faster because it is feeding into a larger, more entertaining thought.

If we can take this basic Zen axiom and use it to convey information more effectively, we could not only improve obvious things like the educational system, but change how we think about our own mental processes, and the erronious belief that our thoughts are in control of us, rather than the other way around.

Practice Epicurus – 1

Epicurus was a philosopher who lived in ancient Greece in the 3rd century BC. He is famous for having come up with a series of tenets that describe the essentials for human happiness.1: We need friends. We should surround ourselves with them at all times, eat with them, even live with them if possible. He himself at one stage bought a house specifically to do this.

2: We need freedom; that is to say, self-sufficiency. We need to be able to make decisions for ourselves, and be free to depend on ourselves for our livelihoods.

3: We need to contemplate our own lives when we can. Epicurus believed that periodic examination of one’s own life would reveal the rational paths to follow that will lead us to happiness. This should be done in quiet solitude.

Epicurus believed that the importance of each of these was virtually self-evident. We all know in our heart of hearts that money and all financial matters are inferior to these pursuits. However, day to day living made this truth very hard to follow; not because of any pressures as such, but rather because they become so difficult to remember in the face of constant desires created by advertising (yup, advertising was a scourge even in Ancient Greek society).

This seems to exemplify one of the major obstacles associated with any type of positive lifestyle; it needs to be reinforced every day. Practice makes perfect, but even perfection evaporates unless it is polished and renewed frequently. Perhaps that is the benefit of prayer; it reminds the individual every day, or at least once a week, that their life has purpose.

David Lynch, the visionary director of films like Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet practices (note the term “practice”) Transcendental Meditation twice every day, a method which he describes as diving into the unconscious and returning with ideas. The point is that he does it every single day, and has done for the last 30 years.

That seems to be a universal human trait – that in order to maintain something we want, be it a way of thinking, the ability to sing or play music, read or write, whatever – that we need to make a habit out of it. If we don’t, it becomes replaced with the negative habits that cause us to doubt ourselves, to believe that we somehow need more than our friends, our thoughts and our freedom in order to feel happy; and that a product will fill that gap.

Here is the video lecture, “Consciousness, Creativity and The Brain” in which Lynch describes how daily meditation can positively affect every aspect of the person who practices it.