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If you had the kind of mother who nagged you for playing video games, you can now tell her that you were simply keeping yourself on a healthy, well-balanced diet, and an overall healthy lifestyle.
A new study has revealed that playing Tetris for a mere three (3) minutes, will make your craving for drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, food, coffee, sex and sleep, decrease by 20 percent (20%).
And the best part is that the more you play the game, the more your craving will reduce. Professor Jackie Andrade, co-author on the study and researcher from Plymouth University (the UK), offered a statement saying that “Playing Tetris decreased craving strength for drugs, food, and activities from 70 percent (70%) to 56 percent (56%)”.
She went on to stress that this study is the first to demonstrate that the cognitive interference may be used outside a lab setting in order to reduce cravings for activities and substances other than the food related ones.
The researchers picked out 31 students with an age somewhere between 18 and 27 and surveyed their cravings by sending them seven (7) text messages per day. The texts asked subjects to inform the research team of what they were craving at the moment of receiving the message.
The intensity of these cravings also had to be rated with a number ranging from zero (0) to a hundred (100). And on top of this, they had to report whether or not they consumed any alcohol at the time of answering.
The subjects said that they had food and non-alcoholic beverage cravings 30 percent (30%) of the time, they had addictive substance cravings (cigarettes, beer, wine, coffee) 21 percent (21%) of the cravings, and they had other cravings such as video games, sleep, sex and socialization 16 percent (16%) of the time.
Professor Andrade and her colleagues concluded that playing Tetris had an even impact “across the week and on all craving types”. And Professor Jon May, co-author on the study and researcher colleague from Plymouth University, insisted on adding that the effect the game had didn’t wear off even after people played Tetris 40 times over the course of the study.
This is an important specification as Tetris is not a new game that kept subjects distracted simply because of its novelty. Such a game would have probably lost its efficiency in the long run, but Tetris has been around since the 1990s.
Image Source: koreaittimes.com
