Content
Despite decades of research, SUD relapse rates remain high, underscoring the need for more effective treatments. Scientific findings indicate that SUDs are driven by dysregulation of neural processes underlying reward learning and executive functioning. Emerging evidence suggests that mindfulness training can target these neurocognitive mechanisms to produce significant therapeutic effects on SUDs and prevent relapse.
- By remembering to take part in these mindfulness practices every day, our journey of recovery can become ever deeper, more meaningful, and more rewarding.
- Even a few restful meditative minutes a day can make a huge difference in your recovery.
- The facilitator takes you through a scenario as you use your imagination to feel various states such as happiness, peace, connection, or growth.
- The benefits of meditation in recovery were once considered a pseudoscience, lacking any real scientific backing.
- Your goal is to observe your feelings and thoughts without engagement or judgment.
- Using water to relax your mind and body enhances the power of meditation by unlocking a new level of inner peace and healing.
Consider the case of a man in partial remission from alcohol use disorder who has recently stopped drinking. After successfully abstaining from alcohol for over 2 months after realizing the negative impact his drinking had on his family and work, he attends a party with old friends, where he is overcome by craving and has a drinking lapse. He could interpret this lapse as the beginning of a downward spiral into his alcohol use habits, with attendant feelings of shame and hopelessness. Alternatively, he could use mindfulness to disengage from this negative emotional state, arrest the automatic impulse and concomitant experience of craving, and then re-commit himself to recovery by contacting his 12-Step fellowship sponsor. Thus, mindfulness may help to prevent relapse by increasing awareness of high-risk situations, supporting positive hedonic tone, and preventing a singular lapse from becoming a full-blown relapse. At The Recovery Village, we offer a comprehensive addiction treatment program that includes holistic treatment options, including mindfulness meditation, recreational therapies, self-care activities, aftercare services and relapse prevention programs.
The Connection between Mindfulness Exercises and Recovery
Thus, there remains a need for more large-scale, robust RCTs to reveal the clinical outcomes and therapeutic mechanisms of MBIs for addiction. Intoxication stimulates activity in the prefrontal cortex (the brain’s happiness center), and during withdrawal, it’s extremely under-active. Dr. Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, conducted a study in 2005 and found out that meditators had more neural density, cortical thickness, and overall activity within the prefrontal cortex. That means that meditation stimulates and trains the brain to feel happy (“a natural high”) without drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, or taking drugs. Meditation has become a popular way to help treat addiction for many reasons.
Just listen to the expert’s voice and do as they instruct-it couldn’t be simpler. Meditation apps are the perfect tool to teach beginners the basics of how to breathe properly, approach your wandering mind, and manage feeling restless, taking the mental legwork meditation for addiction out of the practice and making the process more interesting. If you’re intimidated by practicing meditation, then sharing the experience with others and having the expertise of a teacher to guide you can be far more effective than trying it alone.
#1 — Meditation Makes Us Feel Good Naturally Through The Brain’s Happiness Center
To prevent relapse, individuals may be able to use mindfulness to cultivate an awareness of when substance use habits are triggered by substance cues even after an extended period of abstinence. For instance, monitoring their affective state, and knowing that increased stress, despair, or anger increases relapse risk, the individual may use mindfulness to contemplate the reasons they want to maintain their recovery. Consider an opioid-misusing chronic pain patient who used opioids to self-medicate depression and loneliness. After using mindfulness skills to successfully titrate off opioids with the help of her primary care provider, she began exercise therapy which she found helped with her pain and social isolation.
Furthermore, resting state functional connectivity between rACC and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) significantly increased in the MORE group relative to the comparison group. To be clear, MORE provides integrated training in mindfulness, reappraisal, and savoring skills, and therefore other MBIs may or may not exert similar effects on restructuring the relative salience of natural and drug-related reward. However, other potential mechanisms of mindfulness as a treatment for addiction have been identified in the literature and are discussed below. First-generation MBIs (ie, MBSR, MBCT) influenced the development of contemporary MBIs for addiction (ie, MBRP, MORE). Extant MBIs designed specifically to intervene in SUD and relapse prevention differ somewhat from first-generation MBIs in their emphasis, didactic content delivered, duration of home mindfulness practice, and style of debriefing.
#4 — Getting Our “Fix” Releases The #1 Pleasure Chemical: Dopamine. Meditation Does Too, But Naturally
Go to for reading recommendations, to source research papers or to find out about presentations at conferences. After filling yourself with love, think of a beloved person in your life. Finally, imagine sending your love to all your friends, family – and people you hardly know. If you have trouble feeling self-love at first, this is probably due to feelings of unworthiness. Even if you don’t feel it at first, with practice, it will develop. If you are with somebody, start a dialogue describing what you sense and feel in the moment and in response to one another.
