Increase Your Productivity by 30% – The Tetris Effect

Would you like to increase your productivity by 30%? You can, by becoming happier! This lofty claim is made by Shawn Achor, who has spent over a decade researching happiness at Harvard University. Achor argues that the happiness formula that most people follow is all wrong. Here it is: “Work harder and you’ll be more successful; if you’re successful, then you’ll be happy.”

Achor explains that the field of positive psychology has found that this formula is broken. One of the problems with this formula is how we define success. Every time that we’re successful, we simply move the goal posts of what success looks like. For example, if we hit our sales target one quarter, then we change our sales target for the next quarter and make it even higher. If happiness is on the other side of success, then every time that you change what success looks like, happiness gets pushed further away.

Furthermore, Achor indicates that the formula for success is actually backwards. Happiness fuels success; not the other way around. If you can make your brain more positive, your success rate will increase. After all, by becoming more positive you’ll be maximizing your brain’s potential. You’ll become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive. This has been proven by research in neuroscience and psychology, and in management studies.

In addition, you’ll be happier right now, in the present, instead of waiting until you achieve some illusive “success” before you can be happy.

In his book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, Achor sets forth seven practical, actionable principles that will help you to become happier. One of these principles is “The Tetris Effect”, which is about training your brain to constantly scan the environment for the positive, instead of the negative. “The Tetris Effect” is further explained below.

What is “The Tetris Effect”?

You may be familiar with the game Tetris. If you’re not, it’s a game in which shapes fall from the ceiling and the player manipulates these shapes by moving them sideways and rotating them so that they fit into the blocks that are arranged below. If someone plays Tetris for a long time, when they stop playing the game they retain something called a “cognitive after-image”. That is, they start looking for patterns of how shapes fit together wherever they go.

Here are two examples:

• When they go to the supermarket and see packages arranged on the shelves, the brain automatically starts reorganizing the packages and thinking: “Oh, that shape would fit in there, and that other shape would fit over there.”
• When they walk down the street they look at the buildings and do the same thing.

Even when the person isn’t playing Tetris, their brain keeps looking for patterns of shapes, because it’s been trained to do so.

What does a video game have to do with happiness? Your brain is probably used to focusing on your workload, everyday hassles, stresses, problems, distresses, and complaints. If you’re constantly scanning your environment looking for the negative, that’s what your brain will pick up on. After all, your brain is a single processor. This reinforces negativity and makes you feel unhappy.

What you need to do is to retrain your brain to look for ways to be more optimistic. Achor explains that after about 21 days of consciously looking for ways to be more positive, the pattern of positive thinking can be retained permanently in the brain. After the 21 days, when you look out at the world, your brain will be looking for that pattern, or that block shape, that looks like happiness.

Five Things You Can Do to Create a Positive “Tetris Effect”

In “The Happiness Advantage”, Achor reveals five things you can do in order to create a positive “Tetris Effect”. That is, in order to train your brain to constantly scan your environment for the positive. These five things are explained below. (Source.)

1. Jot down things you’re grateful for. For the next 21 days, write down three things that you’re grateful for every morning. At the end of the 21 days your brain will retain a pattern of scanning your environment for the positive.

2. Keep a happiness journal. For the next 21 days, journal for five minutes a day about one positive experience you’ve had over the past 24 hours. Make it as detailed as you can. This will make you relive the positive experience.

Achor explains that our brains have a very difficult time telling the difference between something we’re visualizing and something that we’re actually experiencing. Take a look at the following:

• If you put your hand in front of your face and look at it, area 17 in your visual cortex lights up.
• If you close your eyes and think about your hand in front of your face, that same part of your brain lights up.

Experiencing something and visualizing it has the same effect in your brain. So when you journal for five minutes a day about a positive experience, you get a double positive whammy from that experience.

3. Meditate. Meditation teaches your brain to focus on one thing at a time. This allows us to start focusing all of our attention, like a laser, on the task that’s directly in front of us. In turn, this increases our levels of engagement and happiness, and decreases our stress.

4. Perform a random act of kindness (or conscious act of kindness) each day. Achor asks executives that he works with to do the following:

When they first open their inbox in the morning, they have to write a one or two sentence email praising or recognizing somebody on their team, a co-worker, a family member, or a friend (someone in their social support network).

Achor explains that this changes the brain of the person who writes these emails since they start scanning the world for things they can praise and recognize in others. In addition, it has a positive impact on the people who receive the emails, which strengthens the social support group.

5. Exercise. When your brain sees that your behavior creates results in one domain—when you exercise you start to lose weight, you look and feel more fit, and so on—this cascades across the board. That is, when you exercise, it creates the belief that your behavior matters. Thinking that your behavior matters creates optimism, which encourages you to go after what you want in other areas of your life.

Conclusion

Achor explains that just as you can train your body to be faster, stronger, and fitter, you can train your brain to reverse the formula for success: be happy and success will follow. The Tetris Effect explained above is just one way to do this. For another fabulous six principles that will allow you to become happier, get Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work.

I’ll leave you with the following statements presented by Achor:

• The lens through which you view the world changes your reality.
• Your external world is not a predictor of your happiness. In fact, your external world is responsible for only 10% of your long-term happiness.
• Ninety percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by your external world, but by the way in which your brain processes and interprets your world.
• You can train your brain to process and interpret your world in a way that will increase your happiness.
• Train your brain for happiness, just like an athlete trains for the Olympics.

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