Those mental images were the real problem.
The gameful solution? Joe and Elisa decided to start a new tradition: puzzle nights. Every evening after dinner they sat down at the kitchen table to work on a giant jigsaw puzzle together.
“It totally worked for us,” Joe told me. “Zero cigarettes on puzzle nights.” It worked so well, in fact, that they worked on puzzles every night all the way up to their wedding. Two years later the happily married couple are still smoke-free.
Puzzle nights had one additional surprise benefit for the bride- and groom-to-be: working cooperatively on the puzzles together for so many hours, night after night, boosted their communication and problem-solving skills. “We got really good at working together and solving the puzzles as a team.” Not a bad way to prepare for marriage!
Joe and Elisa were, as it turns out, ahead of the curve with their creative solution. In 2014 a team of researchers from the American Cancer Society, Brown University, and Stony Brook University found that nicotine-deprived smokers were able to reduce their cravings by playing two-player cooperative games with their relationship partners. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans showed that cooperative game play and puzzle solving lit up the same reward centers of the brain that nicotine does. The scientists believe this is evidence that social games and puzzles could provide smokers with an alternative neurological pathway to feeling a reward when they crave it most.12
In other words, game play provides a powerful one-two punch for changing behavior. First, it gives you control over your thoughts and mental cravings by fully absorbing the visual-processing center of the brain. Second, it gives you a pleasurable neurochemical reward—the same kind you would get from a cigarette or a cookie or whatever else you might crave. Who needs a cigarette or cookie when you already feel deeply satisfied by the game?
Sweethearts Joe and Elisa might not be surprised to hear about one final scientific discovery from the same team of fMRI-scanning researchers: falling in love also dampens cravings for food, alcohol, and drugs, by activating the same reward pathways.13 “Intense, passionate love,” as the researchers put it, is like kryptonite to cravings—they just can’t stand up to it.
The moral of the story: if you want to quit something, anything, just solve a puzzle—or fall in love. Or if you’re really lucky, like Joe and Elisa, do both at the same time.
By now, you’re catching on: purposefully controlling your attention has all sorts of real-life benefits. By why are games such an effective means of attention control, compared with other activities? Let’s explore this question by taking a look at another strength you can develop through game play: the ability to block anxiety, even in extremely stressful situations.
Surgery is scary—especially for kids. Over the past twenty-five years, doctors have tested every idea imaginable to reduce kids’ anxiety in the operating room. They’ve tested powerful medications. They’ve allowed parents to hold their kids’ hands while they go under and wake up from anesthesia. They’ve even tested clowns in the operating room.
What works best? Not surprisingly, it’s not clowns. But it’s not parents or medication either. Kids who are allowed to play handheld video games—such as Super Mario on the Nintendo DS—experience virtually no anxiety before surgery. And after surgery, they wake up from anesthesia with less than half the anxiety of children given drugs—and with zero medication side effects.14
It’s another headline-worthy scientific result: “Ordinary video games prevent anxiety more effectively than the most powerful antianxiety medications.” But what makes it work? The research team at the department of anesthesiology at New Jersey Medical School argues that—as with the Snow World and Tetris techniques—cognitive absorption is the key. By focusing intensely on something other than the impending surgery, young patients avoid becoming upset or panicked.
This hypothesis makes perfect sense, given what we already know about the spotlight theory of attention. Anxiety—just like pain, traumatic memory, and cravings—requires conscious attention in order to develop and unfold. It’s fueled by active thoughts about what could possibly go wrong. Fear is a response to something actually going wrong right now. Anxiety, on the other hand, is the anticipation that something might go wrong in the future. The more vividly we imagine something bad happening, the more anxious we get.
Physiological sensations can contribute to anxiety—for example, caffeine can cause rapid heartbeats and sweaty palms, and a sudden surprise can trigger a jolt of adrenaline. If we notice these physical sensations, we may start to rack our brains for something specific to be nervous about, which can lead to a full-blown case of anxiety or even a panic attack. But without a conscious story about what might go wrong next, these symptoms are just physical sensations. They become an emotional feeling of anxiety only when we actively start to imagine terrible things happening in the future. Such imaginings can trigger more physiological changes—more adrenaline, an even faster heart rate—that we interpret as more reason to worry, and so the vicious cycle of anxiety goes.
Game play, the research shows, helps us stop imagining what might go wrong. The game breaks the cycle of attention. Even if we feel physical symptoms of anxiety while we’re playing, we’re too preoccupied with the game to actively imagine the worst. And without a nervous imagination, there is no anxiety.
In some situations, anxiety can be a helpful emotion—if it alerts you to a potential problem in the future, and if you have the time and ability to take steps now to prevent that problem. For example, if you’re anxious about an upcoming exam or presentation, anxiety can be a useful cue to study or practice more. For this reason, you should not always seek to block anxiety. However, for most people, in most situations, anxiety does not lead to productive action. Instead, it merely creates needless suffering and can prevent us from taking helpful action. Here’s a good rule of thumb for when to safely use a gameful technique to block anxiety: if the anxiety is not helping you identify concrete positive steps you can take, but rather is simply creating distress, play a game. Likewise, if the anxiety is trying to talk you out of doing something you truly want or need to do (like getting on a plane, giving a presentation, or going to a social event), go ahead and block it with a few minutes of play.
Is any form of pleasurable distraction a viable tool for disrupting the anxiety cycle? It turns out, no. Studies have shown that other similar attempts to prevent presurgery anxiety in kids have limited or no impact. Comic books, music, cartoons—none of these distractions tested nearly as well as games in the operating room.15 The problem? They just don’t offer the same level of cognitive absorption.
When we play games, we’re not just paying attention to the game—we’re paying a special quality of attention. That quality is called flow.
Flow is the state of being completely cognitively absorbed in an activity. It’s not mere distraction or engagement; it’s full engagement. It’s being totally immersed in, motivated by, and energized from the challenge at hand. In a state of flow, you not only lose track of time, you lose a sense of self-awareness. You experience a “deep focus” on the activity and no conscious awareness of competing thoughts or emotions.16
First identified by American psychology researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s, flow is considered an extremely positive psychological state—indeed, perhaps the most optimal psychological state.17 A flow state can be achieved in many different ways, as long as the right conditions are met. It emerges when we have a clear goal, a challenging task to perform, and sufficient skills to meet the challenge—or at least to come close enough that we are energized to try again and do better. People find flow playing guitar, cooking, running, gardening, doing complex mathematics, and dancing—to name just a few ways.
