💌 Asking Jay Shetty on How to Deal with Chaos & Noise in Life, Tetris Effect, & More

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” ―Mahatma Gandhi

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😱 Tetris Effect & Jay Shetty's Advice

Jay Shetty is an award-winning host, storyteller, and viral content creator whose wisdom videos garnered over 4 billion views and gained over 20 million followers globally. 

At the age of 22, he went to live as a monk across India and Europe, traded his suits for robes, shaved his head, and lived out of a gym locker for 3 years. 

During my recent offsite, I had the chance to chat with him and received an answer to a question that was asked that I still think about today because it’s so simple, practical, yet effective. 

How do you deal with the chaos and noise that comes up in life throughout the day?

His answer:

This is incredibly simple, yet powerful, and what Jay was discussing is actually backed by science. It’s called the “Tetris Effect.”

The Tetris Effect, in essence, is the thing that you look at last thing in the night imprints on your subconscious mind more strongly than anything else in the day (study here). This phenomenon was observed when regular players of the Tetris video game began to see objects in their everyday lives as shapes that they needed to fit into gaps.

When people devote so much time and attention to an activity, it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It also showed that the more you engage in certain patterns of thinking, the more likely you are to use them again.

Studies suggest that the Tetris Effect can actually improve sleep quality, overcome negativity bias, and deal with trauma.

🧩 How can you make the Tetris Effect work for you?

The simplest way to start is: When we go from being asleep (i.e. hypnogogic state) to being awake (i.e. hypnopompic state), keep a physical reminder, whether it is taping your vision board or piece of paper with a quote on it so that you see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. This way, you control your focus on what you want to see and train your subconscious to focus on that instead of all the other stimuli in your life. (We’ll dive more into vision boards, the actual science behind “manifesting,” and more next week. Stay tuned!)

Another approach is one that Shawn Achor writes about in The Happiness Advantage.

In the same way that playing hours of Tetris can rewire your brain, other mental exercises can reprogram your brain to notice positive scenarios and opportunities. In order to train your brain to see the positive, try one of these strategies: 

1. Every day, take five minutes to write a list of three things in your life that make you happy or grateful.

2. Three times a week, spend 20 minutes writing about a positive experience. 

At the end of the day, the goal of the Tetris Effect is not to have irrational optimism or turn a blind eye to problems that need improvement. Rather, by adding a positive tint to your view of the world, you can maintain awareness of problems and concerns, while choosing to prioritize a positive perspective and ultimately create more positive outcomes... amidst all the chaos and noise that may come up throughout the day.

🔱  Weekly Finds:

• 🧘🏻‍♀️ If you want to tackle your self-doubt and have more inner peace (transcript here): this episode with Buddhist practitioner Jack Kornfield is full of actionable wisdom to help you find peace, harness the power of rituals, feel feelings without letting them control you, and reduce stress and anxiety. 

• 🧧 Podcast: Morgan Housel (Author of “Psychology of Money”) on Happiness, Fame, Reading, Writing, ChatGPT, & Optimism. I actually found the notes quite insightful more so than the actual quality of the conversation 😂 - you can find the Notes here.

• 👯‍♀️ Why you shouldn't "relationship test.” How to have difficult conversations with your friends when your needs aren’t met.

• 📚 In defense of the unoptimized life.. Give yourself the space to be inspired. An argument for pursuing afflatus, a Latin word meaning a sudden rush or inspiration, which worked out much better for this author than any other productivity hack he's tried.

• ♟ A bullet-proof strategy for systematically knocking any item off your bucket list.

• 😁 4 Steps to Build + Achieve Your Own Vision of Success. It seems to be all around us, happening to everyone else, but always slightly out of reach. Let's talk about what success means to you, specifically—and how to build your goals around your very own vision of success.

Some quick things to know:

• 💇🏻‍♀️ Rosemary oil works for hair growth in people with androgenetic alopecia (i.e. male and female pattern baldness).

• 😮‍💨 It's ok to sigh loudly and cyclic sighing is the most effective at improving mood and reducing respiratory rate. Here’s a video that guides you on cyclic sighing.

• 📰 I challenge you to stop reading the news - Our obsession with being informed makes it hard to think long-term. The more news we consume, the more misinformed we might become. Instead, I encourage us to read news that is interesting and may strike up some interesting discussions, like this one: a chat app used for emotional support used a popular chatbot to write answers for humans to select.

• ❤️ Jay Shetty is releasing a new book called “8 Rules of Love: How to Find It, Keep It, and Let It Go” on January 31, 2023! You can pre-order it here.

💟 Try this:

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