A surprising new study has found that playing the popular block-stacking game Tetris can help people kick difficult addicitons, ranging from food to drugs to smoking.

Researchers determined that the game eased cravings by about 20 percent in a study outside the laboratory on people who were in natural settings, further boosting a previous study that found people in a lab setting had their cravings reduced by Tetris, according to a UPI report.

The research team, which included scientists from Plymouth University and Queensland University of Technology, found that playing Tetris could help people tackle a wide range of problems, including sex, smoking, alcohol, and sleeping.

Scientists think it has something to do with what they call the “Tetris effect” in which the user imagines the experience of consuming a certain substance or doing a certain activity, and then plays a visually interesting game — Tetris, in this case — that occupies people mentally. This helps people block those images by focusing the brain on something else.

To come to their conclusions, scientists examined 31 undergraduate students who were between 18 and 27 years of age. They were each given iPods that had Tetris on them, and they texted each of the participants seven times each day to tell them what kind of craving sthey had and how intense they were, as well as encourage them to self-report at other times during the day.

Half of the participants were advised to play the game for three minutes when they felt cravings, and then immediately report back to researchers. The other half served as the control group.

They found that the participants reported cravings about 30 percent of the time, usually for food or non-alcohol drinks, which represented about two thirds of the cravings, although other things like drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes were reported about 21 percent of the time. They found the game reduce cravings by about 70 to 56 percent in intensity — a pretty significant drop.