Happiness Advantage Principle 3

PRINCIPLE #3

The Tetris Effect - Training Your Brain to Capitalize on Possibility

One chilly Massachusetts morning, back in September of 2005, the author walked out of Wigglesworth residence hall (yes, that’s the real name) and almost attempted to steal a police car. Unbelievably, it was a video game called Grand Theft Auto, which the author had stayed up until 4:00 A.M. playing the night before. 

For five straight hours, his brain had grown accustomed to the following pattern: find a car to steal, engage in a high-speed chase, reap the reward (in this case, fake money). Of course, this was just a stupid video game, and should have had no bearing on his behavior in the real world. But after so many hours of repeated play, when he woke up the next morning, his brain was still stuck in this way of thinking. 

Adrenaline shot through his body as he reached for the shiny handle of the Cambridge Police cruiser. The fact that there was a police officer sitting in the front seat . . . well, that was no problem.

Playing triggers in the brain “cognitive afterimage”. The flash has momentarily burned an image onto your visual field so that as you look around at the world, neural pathways and new connections are warped to the way that they change how you view real world situations. 

That’s the way it is with our brains: They get very easily stuck in patterns of viewing the world, some more beneficial than others. But of course, the Tetris Effect isn’t just about video games; as we’re about to explain in more detail, it is a metaphor for the way our brains dictate the way we see the world around us. 

The Tetris Effect At Work

Everyone knows someone stuck in some version of the Tetris Effect - someone who is unable to break a pattern of thinking or behaving. Often, this pattern can be negative. The friend who walks into any room and immediately finds the one thing to complain about. The boss who focuses on what an employee continues to do wrong, instead of how he’s improving. 

These people aren’t usually trying to be difficult or grumpy. Their brains are just really outstanding at scanning their environment for negatives - at immediately spotting the annoyances and stresses and hassles. And no small wonder, given that, like the Tetris players, their brains have been honed and trained to do so through years of practice. Unfortunately, our society only encourages this kind of training. 

During a break from one of the author’s talks in Australia, he walked outside to get some fresh air and stumbled upon two employees, also on break. One glanced up at the sky and said “It’s nice that it’s sunny today.” The other one said “I wish it wasn’t so hot today.” Both statements were based on reality. It was sunny and it was hot. But the second person was giving into a habit that would prove debilitating to his productivity and performance the second he walked back into his office. He literally couldn’t see the positives in his life. Constantly scanning the world for the negatives comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals. 

Over the past year, as the author has been working with the global tax-accounting firm KPMG to help their tax auditors and managers become happier, he found many of them had to spend 8 to 14 hours a day scanning tax forms for errors, and as they did, their brains were becoming wired to look for mistakes. 

Like the Tetris players who suddenly saw those blocks everywhere, these accountants experienced each day as a tax audit, always scanning the world for the worst. It was undermining their relationships at work and at home. In performance reviews, they noticed only the faults of their team members, never the strengths. 

Tax auditors are far from the only ones who get stuck in this kind of pattern. Lawyers are just as susceptible, if not more so - which is one reason studies have found that they are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from major depressive disorder than the rest of the employed population. 

Over the years, the author has talked with many lawyers who sheepishly admitted that they had a habit of “deposing” their children when they got home from work (“But if you were, as your alibi suggests, at the movies until 10:30, please explain to the court how you came to be 15 minutes late for curfew?”). Others have said they find themselves involuntarily thinking about quality time with their spouses in terms of quantified, billable hours. Even during their moments of leisure, the lawyers could tell you exactly how much money they had just wasted discussing the color of the new wallpaper. 

This is the essence of a Negative Tetris Effect: a cognitive pattern that decreases our overall success rate. But the Tetris Effect need not be maladaptive. Just as our brains can be wired in ways that hold us back, we can retrain them to scan for the good things in life - to help us see more possibility, to feel more energy, and to succeed at higher levels.

Your Brain As A Spam Filter

On a daily basis, we’re bombarded with competing demands on our attention. Think about all the things our brains have to attend to even when we’re engaged in a relatively passive activity, like sitting at Starbucks. We cannot possibly listen to the music, enjoy the taste of the coffee, eavesdrop on the conversation at the next table, and note the outfits of the people milling about, all while thinking about what we have to do at work later that day. To deal with this overload, our brains have a filter that only lets the most pertinent information through to our consciousness. 

This filter is much like the spam blocker on your e-mail. Your spam blocker follows certain rules that tell it to delete noxious and unimportant e-mails without you even having to see or process them. 

The Power Of A Positive Tetris Effect

When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. The role happiness plays should be obvious - the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel. 

The third driver of the Positive Tetris Effect is optimism. This instinctively makes sense; the more your brain picks up on the positive, the more you’ll expect this trend to continue, and so the more optimistic you’ll be. And optimism, it turns out, is a tremendously powerful predictor of work performance. Studies have shown that optimists set more goals (and more difficult goals) than pessimists, and put more effort into attaining those goals, stay more engaged in the face of difficulty, and rise above obstacles more easily. 

In fact, 69 percent of high school and college students report that their career decisions depended on chance encounters. The difference between people who capitalize on these chances and those who watch them pass by (or miss them entirely) is all a matter of focus. When someone is stuck in a Negative Tetris Effect, his brain is quite literally incapable of seeing these opportunities. But armed with positivity, the brain stays open to possibility. Psychologists call this “predictive encoding”: Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise. 

Getting Stuck In A Positive Tetris Effect

Just as it takes days of concentrated practice to master a video game, training your brain to notice more opportunities takes practice focusing on the positive. The best way to kick-start this is to start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life. It may sound hokey, or ridiculously simple - and indeed the activity itself is simple - but over a decade of empirical studies has proven the profound effect it has on the way our brains are wired. 

This exercise has staying power. One study found that participants who wrote down three good things each day for a week were happier and less depressed at the one-month, three-month, and six-month follow-ups. Even after stopping the exercise, they remained significantly happier and showed higher levels of optimism. 

Beyond all those benefits, you’ll also notice that all the activities from the previous two chapters start coming to you more naturally. For instance, falling into a Positive Tetris Effect helps leaders give more frequent recognition and encouragement. 

Practice, Practice, Practice

Of course, we can build this Tetris Effect only through consistency. As with any skill, the more we practice, the more easily and naturally it comes. The more you involve others, the more the benefits multiply. This kind of social support greatly increases the chance that these positive habits will stick. 

Rose Tinted Glasses

Here’s a common question I get when I discuss the virtues of a Positive Tetris Effect: “If I can focus only on the good, won’t I be blind to real problems? You can’t run a business wearing rose-colored glasses.”

In a sense, this is true. Looking at the world through a lens that completely filters out all the negatives comes with its own problems. That’s why I like to offer a slightly revised version of the metaphor: rose-tinted glasses. As the name implies, rose-tinted glasses let the really major problems into our field of vision, while still keeping our focus largely on the positive. 

When we train our brains to adapt a Positive Tetris Effect, we’re not just improving our chance at happiness, we’re setting off a chain of events that helps us reap all the benefits of a positive brain. Focusing on the good isn’t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half fill. It’s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective, and successful at work and in life. The possibilities are there for everyone to see. Will you look right past them, or will you train your brain to see more?

Stay tuned for Principle 4 next Tuesday, as we continue our weekly summary of The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor!