Ideas can be powerful drugs. If a person is simply convinced that a pill or treatment is going to yield real results, it can—even if that pill or treatment is completely bogus. Those results can be pretty substantial, too. Mental maneuvering, or placebo effect, can improve pilots’ vision, help people lose weight, and even up their IQ by a few points. And, according to a new study, it may also be able to help patients manage a chronic illness.

In an experiment in which researchers duped participants about how much time had passed, the researchers found that participants’ blood sugar levels tracked with perceived time rather than actual time. That is, blood sugar dropped faster when the participants thought more time had passed. The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, support the idea that mindsets and psychological processes, like the abstract internal representation of time, can have profound influence over what our bodies do, the authors conclude.

Moreover, it raises the idea of using the mind to help manage certain chronic conditions, particularly type 2 diabetes, which causes periodic and dangerous rises in blood sugar levels. “Official standards for care and treatment of diabetes make no explicit mention of the influence of subjective cognition on diabetic metabolism, but our results indicate otherwise,” the authors argue. They suggest that mindfulness, coping strategies, and trained cognitive styles may prove useful in controlling blood sugar levels in further studies.

For the study, researchers recruited 47 participants, all of whom have type 2 diabetes. The participants fasted over night and then arrived at a psychology lab at Harvard at 9am, where researchers assigned them to one of three groups. All of the groups played video games for a 90-minute period, but each group had a different clock in the room where they played: one group had a normal clock; the second group had a clock that was slow, showing only 45 minutes had passed in the 90-minute experiment; and the third group had a fast clock that showed 180 minutes had passed.

The researchers measured each participants’ blood sugar levels before and after the 90-minute session, plus collected a week’s worth of entries in a glucose diary and glucose fluctuation chart to know their baseline blood sugar variations. And, as each participant emerged from playing games, the researchers polled them to see how much time they felt had passed. Their answers generally tracked with the clocks in their room. And so did their blood sugar levels.

In the experiment, all of the participants saw their blood sugar levels drop over the 90-minute time period, as expected. But, the size of the decrease seemed to depend on how much time the participants thought had passed. Those in the slow-clock group had the smallest drops in sugar levels, while those in the fast clock group had the biggest.

The researchers liken the result to office workers who feel fine one moment, then look at the clock, notice it’s lunch time and suddenly feel hungry. In fact, the authors speculate that hunger hormones and perceived meal schedules may play a role in the time-based blood sugar changes. They say more research is needed to know the answer, as well as whether it would work for other conditions, such as type I diabetes, and if the finding could translate to useful treatment strategies.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1603444113 (About DOIs).