Credits: Social Media
Playing Tetris for 20 minutes can alleviate ‘core’ PTSD symptom, study shows
It sounds too good to be true. Researchers investigating the efficacy of guided single session interventions to reduce intrusive memories, for example among sufferers of PTSD, have found that something as simple as a game of Tetris can work wonders.
Tetris is effective because it competes with the same cognitive resources as the mental imagery underlying intrusive memories, write the authors. In other words, if youre playing Tetris, you dont have the mental capacity to run through traumatic memories. Genius! If you bagged a McDonalds McNugget Tetris toy in a Happy Meal, once upon a time �if music be the food of love �play on. Play on. Play on.
Playing Tetris was found to help with intrusive memories associated with PTSD
First-line treatments for PTSD are psychological interventions. These include trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TFCBT) and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
One of the challenges when treating PTSD is that there are a mind-boggling 636,120 possible symptom combinations. This makes it very hard to scale treatments up to a population’s level.
Developing treatments that target one specific core symptom, such as intrusive memories, is an alternative approach. Intrusive memories affect most people who have suffered trauma, and can be a precursor to later disorder, according to the study, making them a decent candidate for a single-symptom focused intervention.
In recent years, trauma researchers have been developing interventions that involve cognitive tasks doing something that uses the brain. An unlikely success story in this search has been the computer game Tetris.
Playing Tetris for 20 minutes utilizes mental rotation, i.e., the task of imagining rotating the blocks as they fall when you play the game. In doing so, it competes with the same cognitive resources as the mental imagery underlying intrusive memories.
Healthcare workers need flexible, repeatable interventions to help with trauma
The studys aims were rooted in helping healthcare workers who suffered work-related trauma during the covid-19 pandemic.
Its authors realized how important it was to develop brief, flexible, remotely-delivered and repeatable interventions to help those suffering the symptoms of PTSD. They call it an urgent public health priority ; how can healthcare workers help people if they are burdened by suffering of their own?
While they admit more research is needed before rolling out the Tetris intervention on a large, population-wide scale, their study shows that people with PTSD who experience intrusive, negative memories can benefit from single guided sessions involving a seemingly benign computer game.�
You can do it on your smartphone. You can do it at home or on the bus. It only takes 20 minutes.�
While its worth noting that the intervention involved a bit more than simple gaming �there were instructional videos and a podcast available to participants �the study provides encouraging evidence that simple, digitally accessible interventions can have a significant and positive impact on mental health challenges.
