Tetris 'helps to reduce trauma' →
I’ve been thinking about this again recently. For as long as I can remember I’ve always enjoyed watching disk defragmenters run…these usually have coloured squares representing areas of a hard disk that contain fragmented files. Now it isn’t tetris or a game or even interactive but it is usually represented on the screen by blocks changing colour.
Last night I was defragmenting a netbook and felt so calm and relaxed (i.e. unusual!) while watching it, must have easily spent over an hour. Didn’t have any flashbacks to you-know-what during that time. Totally unscientific and only one occasion but I thought I’d record it anyway just because of the peaceful state it left me in and with no ‘troubling’ thoughts while I was doing it.
I wondered at one point “I wish I could get a screensaver that would defrag during idle time”.
The big problem for me in any of the advice given in the stress management course relaxation exercises was that most of them are based around visualisation - I am phenomenally crap at imagining anything, my head is filled with (to me) horrific and distressing *real* things that have happened that replay on an infinite loop in my head, re-experiencing many of the same emotions,though to a lesser degree that I felt when they happened.
Maybe watching the blocks gives me something in the *real world* to focus on, that works better for me than something made up inside my head and it’s the current real world blocks that are literally blocking older memories from coming to the fore. Well anyway, am definitely going to look to see if I can find something like tetris but not interactive to put on the ipod touch so I could carry something ‘blocky’ around with me. Now I’m going to go round defragmenting as many drives as I can find, I’m just grateful for a small instance of something being helpful :-)
