Healing Faster From Trauma: Playing Puzzle Games?

By: Jadon Webb, M.D., Ph.D.

Getting safe, effective help after a traumatic experience can be difficult. Trauma can cause many different symptoms, including insomnia, nightmares, severe depression, generalized anxiety, panic attacks, and of course post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  

Psychotherapy and prescribed medications can be very helpful. In severe or treatment resistant cases, ketamine can also be helpful.  Meantime, most of us would prefer the least invasive, most “natural” way of addressing these symptoms. 

One of the challenges in treating trauma is helping the brain to re-frame bad memories as being less threatening. Research is underway to figure out how to help the brain “re-learn” to remember a safer version of the past event so that it does not continue to haunt the patient. Ketamine can help facilitate this neural rewiring process, and can be a very helpful way to boost the effectiveness of trauma therapy.

It also turns out that a simple puzzle game, Tetris™, can help speed the healing of intrusive traumatic memories during therapy. In a 2018 study, patients who had just been in an auto accident were randomized to usual talk based trauma therapy, with half of patients also playing Tetris™ for 20 minutes during the session. The patients who played the game had fewer intrusive memories about the event. 

Simply playing a game reduced distressing memories from a trauma. This is truly amazing! We can’t wait to see how this safe, affordable, “natural” idea can be used to help people recover from the serious symptoms of trauma.  

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