A rich piece of cake. An ice-cold soda. A steamy romp between the sheets. Call these cravings to mind, and your desire to experience them can quickly grow to near-irresistible proportions.
Now scientists have figured out a creative way to fight strong urges for food, sex, sleep, and even drugs—with a decades-old computer game.
A quick round of Tetris appears to weaken your desire to behave badly, making those urges much easier to resist. "Cravings tend to last for only a few minutes, but in that time they can feel unbearable," says study author Jackie Andrade, PhD, of Plymouth University in the UK. "Playing Tetris can help reduce the strength of a craving to the point where you can tolerate it until it goes away."
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For the study, published in the journal Addictive Behaviors, volunteers each carried around an iPod Touch for a week. Researchers regularly pinged them with texts to ask about their cravings, and also encouraged them to check in whenever an undesirable urge emerged.
Half the participants played Tetris for 3 minutes after these check-ins, then reported their craving levels again. Over the course of the week, the strength of their desires for food, addictive substances, and other bad behaviors decreased by about 20%.
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Though they seem to spring from nowhere, cravings actually require a bit of mental legwork to get going. For example, when you really want a cigarette or a snooze, you begin envisioning the taste of the first puff, or the feel of your head hitting the pillow.
"Tetris blocks this imagery because we use the same mental processes to look at the shapes and mentally rotate them to fit the spaces," Andrade says. "It is difficult to do both things at once"—play Tetris and fantasize about our craving—"and the craving fades when the pleasurable mental imagery of indulging is absent."
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So if cravings continually thwart your best intentions to eat right or cut back on wine or soda, consider taking a Tetris break. Other games that rely heavily on visuals should work just as well, Andrade says.
If you don't have a smartphone, tablet, or computer handy, some of Andrade's previous research shows making shapes out of clay also puts a damper on your desires.
Cindy is a freelance health and fitness writer, author, and podcaster who’s contributed regularly to Runner’s World since 2013. She’s the coauthor of both Breakthrough Women’s Running: Dream Big and Train Smart and Rebound: Train Your Mind to Bounce Back Stronger from Sports Injuries, a book about the psychology of sports injury from Bloomsbury Sport. Cindy specializes in covering injury prevention and recovery, everyday athletes accomplishing extraordinary things, and the active community in her beloved Chicago, where winter forges deep bonds between those brave enough to train through it.
