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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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. )
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.
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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.
Keep in mind, I'm 37 years old and have smoked since I was 13
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.
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.
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.
It seemed mildly compelling, and Tetris like.
* https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a13595750/star-t...
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...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2607539/
> Playing “Tetris” after viewing traumatic material reduces unwanted, involuntary memory flashbacks to that traumatic film, leaving deliberate memory recall of the event intact.
> 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.
[1]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel
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.
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. )