Playing Tetris Can Reduce Cravings

 In Blog, Healthy Steps

tetrisKeep thinking about those chocolate chips cookies cooling in the kitchen?  It may be time to bust out that old Nintendo, or let’s be serious,  downloading Tetris to your phone.

According to a new study in the journal Appetite, cravings have a lot to do with imagery, so “therefore a visually based task should decrease craving and craving imagery.”  To test this, scientists asked participants to rate their cravings, and then they broken up into groups. One group played Tetris, the other, had to wait fora computer program to load, that was designed to never load (worst group ever.)

Results: The group that played Tetris had significantly lower craving and less vivid craving imagery.

“You look at the brightly colored shapes and have to manipulate them to make them fit the gaps,” study author Jackie Andrade, a psychology professor at England’s Plymouth University, told the New York Daily News. “It occupies the same mental process that you need for imagining the food, drink or drug that you are craving. You can’t do both at once, so the craving suffers, which is good if you want to abstain from what you crave.”

What do you do to avoid giving into your cravings?