Playing Tetris can help stop your food cravings

24/03/2016

Do you ever get to the afternoon and start thinking about reaching for that chocolate bar in your drawer? Or do you think you could use another coffee even though it's 5pm?

An 80s video game you loved playing as a kid can also be a solution to fixing your food cravings...

Playing Tetris for as little as three minutes can cut your cravings for food by approximately one fifth. The same technique can also be used to weaken other addictions like drugs, cigarettes, sex and sleeping.

UK's Plymouth University and Australia's Queensland University of Technology found that people who played the block stacking game had their visual thoughts interfered - which then helped distract them from addicting tasks.

"We've used a variety of tasks, ranging from direct instructions, to imagining scenes that are not associated with food, to making shapes out of clay without looking at your hands, [to] playing 'Tetris,' where you have to visualize the shapes rotating and fitting into gaps," Jon May, a professor of psychology at Plymouth University told Live Science. "'Tetris' is great because it is so fast-paced that you have to visualize shape after shape," he added.

Ultimately, "the more a task requires continual visual imagery, the more it will reduce a craving" because "the food images cannot sneak" into your mind.

Try it out yourself and play some Tetris below: