Tetris shows promise in reducing PTSD symptoms | Hacker News Reader

Tetris shows promise in reducing PTSD symptoms

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Video games are an excellent distraction to break up invasive thought patterns, too. There are several methods to use distractions that therapists tailor to their clients.

This is part of why I work in the games industry, grandstanding as it may sound. Games have helped me deal with complex PTSD at a point in my life. It is important to do the other work and not just rely on distraction as forever.

But distractions give you breathing room and some space away from invasive thoughts. The trauma can then begin to heal.

That's a highly compassionate reason to get into an industry, bravo.

Is there a specific type of game you found healing, or especially one that you prefer to create for such a purpose?

I personally strangely find a mix of 'brain turn off' games such as ARPGs healing but then can also find great peace in crushing my brain through another Factorio run.

Thank you for your compliment.

I think the type of game most healing is the type of game that gives you what you need — good emotions, wisdom, coming of age stories and role models, escapism, or a distraction. There is a lot in the medium that can be healing.

As all art, games have a message and a purpose. What speaks to you is what will be most impactful.

I have no PTSD, but I recently lost my job, and while I am looking for another one I decided to use the time off in order to stop smoking, so far it's been a bit more than 3 weeks, and I think it's been the period I've been playing the most videogames since high school, it is really useful to overcome temporary cravings by doing something that doesn't require much mental efforts but still keeps the mind busy to don't think about smoking, every day I am suffering less and less, and I think without videogames it would have been much harder.

Keep in mind, I'm 37 years old and have smoked since I was 13

This is so cool! From one random internet person to another: you can do it!

Thank you!

That is a great strategy. It gets easier over time though. My tipp is to still join smoking friends, but just don't smoke. Makes you robust against the temptation longer term.

You should probably avoid other smokers in early stages though

I'm in Italy right now, and it's not really possible, here everyone smokes, I am trying now to stay away from society, but went for a walk saturday and in the bar I usually go, you can even smoke inside (it's a little underground bar hidden from law/society)

Don’t worry about grandstanding, it’s not.

It’s good to have found an angle that you care about and can apply yourself to.

This is a really nice way of explaining it and I didn’t consider it before despite being a very heavy gamer at one point.

Hey, any chance you would be into connecting and talking about healing trough playing games?

Thank you for asking. Apologies, but I enjoy the anonymity here and am not looking to connect outside HN. Hope what I shared has been useful.

I respect that. If you change your mind, feel free to comment here. Am infantry vet studying psychology and super interested in the topic!

Do you wish for the Star Trek AR game with the tubes gobbling up the discs, and the mind control side effect?

It seemed mildly compelling, and Tetris like.

As somebody who is currently experiencing depression/anxiety can you talk more on what happened with you and how you improved?

My reading of the research is quite a bit of positive impact of video game usage on mental health, and the negatives come up when they take away from healthy habits due to extreme use (exercise, socialization, education).

And it’s hard to tell causality of the negative side (maybe video games are being used to cope with something terrible)

https://www.charliehealth.com/post/video-games-and-mental-he...

This is a newer application of an existing approach

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2607539/

From the conclusion:

> Playing “Tetris” after viewing traumatic material reduces unwanted, involuntary memory flashbacks to that traumatic film, leaving deliberate memory recall of the event intact.

As someone living with PTSD, distraction is absolutely the best tool for dealing with the effects. I'm lucky enough to have a career that does that job for me, I get really absorbed in what I'm working on and then I don't have to think about the awful things that happened to me.

Some of what they're saying reminds me of EMDR therapy which is also used (with mixed success) to treat PTSD, and is briefly mentioned in the underlying paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_a...

This was my first thought when I saw the title. Lots of rapid eye movement and stimulation alongside therapy might release some of the stored trauma.

From your link:

> There is debate about how the therapy works and whether it is more effective than other established treatments.[3][9] The eye movements have been criticized as having no scientific basis.[10] The founder promoted the therapy for the treatment of PTSD, and proponents employed untestable hypotheses to explain negative results in controlled studies.[11] EMDR has been characterized as a pseudoscientific purple hat therapy (i.e., only as effective as its underlying therapeutic methods without any contribution from its distinctive add-ons).[12]

I always assumed EMDR's effectiveness had nothing to do with eye movements.

I support your assumption. The mechanisms of how EDMR affects the PTSD symptoms are still debated, but indeed a quite prevalent opinion (which i also subscribe to) is that EMDR is not at all about the eye movements but about the exposition therapy happening concurrently. Exposition has been robustly proven to be effective at PTDS treatment and as far as i know, there is no rigorous evidence for EMDR having more effect than standalone exposition, highly suggesting that the exposition part is what makes EMDR work.

I'm only an educated reader, not a doctor, but I think the role of eye movements (or Tetris!) in these types of therapies is simply to consume the patient's full attention and brain power without being tiring or frustrating in the short term - those things just happen to be quite effective at it.

Well, this Tetris is addictive... Tangram as well (for mind-benders): https://blocks.ovh

Article says rotation is a crucial operation to the purpose.

The study hypothesizes that rotation is significant, but didn't specifically test that. I wouldn't be surprised if the effect were more general.

The hypothesis is that mental rotation as one way to induce high cognitive load hinders my brain from plaguing me with intrusions. As my sibling commenter already stated, this mechanism's evidence level is "unproven hypothesis" but on top of that, the hypothesis does not explicitly assume mental rotation to be the only effective task for this use case because there are a lot of other very brain-consuming tasks.

Reminds me of the shape rotator meme[1].

[1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel

The paper itself: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

Does this effect last after they stop playing tetris, or just while they play? I know when I played tetris a lot, my brain seemed to be stuck on it in a way. I would close my eyes and almost see tetris shapes. I'd have dreams about it. And I would kind of see various problems through a tetris lens, so to speak.

I wonder if that phenomenon is what is going on here. Your brain uses slightly different pathways that are tetris influenced and have lower risk of jumping into the PTSD paths.

I wonder if that lasts after they stop playing and their brain reverts to non-tetris influenced ways of thinking.

Kind of related, the days when I pick weeds from my lawn I’ll see the weeds for hours when I close my eyes or even just flashes with my eyes open. I guess the weed picking activity stresses my pattern recognition and it continues working afterwards. Very trippy, at least for regular garden weeds.

This is totally a thing.

I think it also strengthens the neural pathway so that <speculation>when the next time you face the many options, the weight would be just slightly higher</>.

(I am assuming human brain works similar to how neural net works. I can be wrong here. )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

"With just one guided treatment session, we saw positive effects that persisted after five weeks and even six months after treatment."

The only time I've ever lucid dreamed was when I played an obscene amount of tetris, and I could actually play games in my sleep. Like games that followed the rules, falling pieces randomy, I could rotate them, lines would disappear, the whole thing. It was really really wild.

My childhood is full of stressful memories of all these shapes falling, I can’t fit them into place fast enough, they begin to pile up, the Nutcracker music starts playing faster, soon I realize its hopeless, I hear a crashing sound and the screen blanks out.

Some would even call it traumatic.

This answers a lot of questions for me.

I was obsessed with Tetris from 2018-2021, specifically NES Tetris (because I grew up with it) to the point that my Max score on a NES CRT was 943252(1) on level 28, with DAS.

Not long ago I got a C-PTSD diagnosis, oddly cause I was able to finally see the situation I used to be in, and that was during a hard decade which included 2019-2021

I got out of that situation and have played Tetris maybe twice in the past year.

So yeah feels right

(1) https://kemendo.com/tetris.jpg

Variants like block puzzle are great as stress relievers and tend to be a better tetris implementation for a phone screen than having scrolling blocks.

I love how the banner image is of an unlicensed Tetris knockoff.

The state shown in the image is not even from tetris game. Probably a shooting game.

https://tetris.com/play-tetris/

More HN-esque:

  ssh playnetris.com

https://playnetris.com

It says it's waiting for 2 players to join. I don't understand why is it a collaborative game?

The version I linked supports both single player and online (competitive) multiplayer. The 'Practice' option allows playing single player.

Could the conclusions generalize to other types of anxiety such as GAD or OCD?

try just about anything made by Nintendo (not just for Nintendo, but by Nintendo). strong focus on wellbeing... If Tetris isnt involving enough, you will find something. The nice thing about the good video games is that- unlike drugs and alcohol, the effects wear off faster and its easier to create a healthy rhythm for that reason. Disclaimer- it can be addictive and as bad as any- but Nintendo games are self-aware of this by design (usually). And some games are deliberately made to foster addiction, but generally not games made by Nintendo

Don't most coping mechanisms? What's needed is to reduce it without reliance to continue doing it.

MDMA, eat your heart out

this is nonsense. people will believe this but not believe that being in ketosis cat put PTSD into remission. it has for many people including myself. that frustrates me so much

Guess the point of studies, is to prove something is or is-not non-sense.

There are a lot of different treatments for PTSD, it doesn't have to be only one. So if ketosis works for some people, that doesn't mean video games can't work for others. So if it helps some, it isn't non-sense.

I think Ketosis sounds interesting, I'd hope someone would do a study on that also. Since it seems like Ketosis has been shown to help a variety of conditions, even if PTSD wasn't singled out.

Here is a positive one on Ketosis. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/04/keto-diet-men...

There doesn't have to be a single silver bullet for PTSD. The beauty of science and medicine is that we can explore multiple avenues simultaneously. Ketosis has shown promise for some, including you, which is great. However, different people respond differently to treatments. Instead of pitting methods against each other, why not advocate for a more inclusive approach? Embracing multiple methods makes sense because PTSD is complex and affects individuals differently. The goal should be to find what works best for each individual, not to win a treatment popularity contest. Let's push for more research into all promising methods. That way, we can build a more comprehensive understanding of PTSD treatment options and hopefully help more people find relief.

Belief is irrelevant, it’s what evidence exists for that matters. Any intervention for PTSD that has an evidentiary basis and consistent effect across multiple studies is good. There is a tiny bit of that building behind Tetris as an intervention for traumatic experiences, including evidence that it may help prevent conversion of traumatic experiences into post-traumatic mental illness; be glad for that because it means people in the future may not develop PTSD at all. By any measure that potential preventative effect is more important than treatments that only work (if they work at all) for people who already have developed it, so Tetris is getting some serious research study… good, nothing to be frustrated about here. If ketosis worked for you, great, but there’s little more than exactly that anecdotal evidence yet, it needs time and investigation too.

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