Life can throw you some harrowing experiences, like when the car was stolen from me at gunpoint on my birthday. My wife Edda had violent nightmares for a month after that. Or the time my brother David, walking downtown Serra Talhada during a mission campaign, saw a man gunned down right in front of him. Some people seeing that would be afraid to leave the house.
Nightmares, panic attacks or agoraphobia are all symptoms of PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), which can afflict people for days, weeks, months or even years, but they don't have to.
PSTD is like a loop in the brain that keeps flashing the feelings created during the trauma to the forefront. It can be paralyzing, but the loop is disrupted by playing a simple, classic video game: Tetris, the one with the falling blocks.
According to Jane McGonigal, who researches the therapeutic benefits of games, if a person plays twenty minutes of Tetris within six hours of the trauma, the chances of having PSTD are zero. The colors, the music, the problem-solving feature of the game activate different parts of the brain, sort of like giving it permission to focus on something else.
The game may work somewhat up to twenty-four hours after the trauma if a person imagines the experience and the emotions that came with it and then plays Tetris.
I keep Tetris on my cell, and I make anybody who has had a scare play it. Who knows, I could be saving him or her a lot of headache later on.
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