Meditation for Addiction: Does it Help? The Benefits of Meditation

Meditation for Addiction: Does it Help? The Benefits of Meditation

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. One day she has a fall, which landed her in the emergency room with a broken ankle. Without knowing the patient’s opioid misuse history, the attending physician unwittingly prescribes an opioid medication and advises the patient to wait several weeks before resuming physical activity.

• In other words, the more time people spent in weekly metta meditation practice, the more positive feelings they experienced (31).
• This thematic issue of Substance Abuse is devoted to an emerging, promising area of research, mindfulness meditation as a therapy for addictive disorders.
• If you need to improve your focus and learn to identify body sensations, focused meditation might be suitable.

By training the mind to focus in one place and stay in the moment, meditation helps the recovering person relax and move forward. Although mindful meditation cannot cure cancer, studies have found it helps lung cancer and breast cancer meditation for addiction patients deal with pain, stress, low self-esteem and fatigue. One study also found people with chronic pain who meditated were able to reduce their pain by up to 42%, which led to better sleep, improved mood and better activity levels.

Mind-body medicine in addiction recovery

The US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) notes the benefits of recovery meditation for decreasing chronic pain and increasing the participants’ self-esteem among veterans. Meditation in recovery can help people unlearn these neurocognitive mechanisms and learn better ways to handle their emotions. Three articles,(44,45,48) based on one study,(44) described the effects of a traditional vipassana training led by a traditionally trained teacher, in a prison settings.

• Does your relationship with meditation remind you of something else in your life?
• Furthermore, a review found preliminary evidence that multiple meditation styles can increase attention, memory, and mental quickness in older volunteers (27).
• The ACT sessions took place weekly, ranging in duration from 1½ (54) to 3½ (39) hours per week, over seven (38) to sixteen (39) weeks.
• By retraining your mind through mindfulness practice, you create new neural networks.
• Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a pervasive public health problem with deleterious consequences for individuals, families, and society.

The full-text of studies describing the use of meditation, mindfulness, relaxation, yoga, breath practices or other techniques that were compatible or potentially compatible with mindfulness meditation (as the primary or comparison interventions) were then reviewed (AZ, “secondary screening”). Practices that were included as compatible with MM are described in the following section. The secondary screening resulted in an exclusion of ineligible articles (AZ); articles that were considered potentially eligible were then additionally reviewed (“tertiary screening”) by 3 independent reviewers (NC, GAM, KK), experts in psychology, meditation and relapse prevention for SUDs. With this, someone with trouble focusing on daily activities and craving substance instead can learn present moment awareness through the breath. If someone includes yoga in their practice, they have a better method to achieve wellness and control over one’s mental activity. Meditation can aid Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by reinforcing focusing on one’s behavior similar to a mindful practice.

Diazepam Addiction: Signs, Symptoms, & Treatment

While recovery meditation is not a substitute for comprehensive treatment with professional medical support, meditation can play a significant role in promoting recovery. Whether individuals are currently struggling with addiction, undergoing treatment, or already in long-term recovery, practicing meditation to break addiction can offer important benefits for their overall well-being and sustained recovery. Twenty-eight https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/cognitive-dissonance-treatment-in-sober-living/ of the reports presented the first published findings from the related study and six reports presented results of secondary analyses. Any given study could contribute findings only once to meta-analyses conducted within outcome domains. The adequacy of randomization was examined in all studies and analysis of covariance and linear mixed modeling were often used to control for any remaining pretreatment differences.

Although there are various forms of meditation, it is not known whether these approaches have similar effects on the problems or disorders under consideration. This review focused specifically on mindfulness meditation, and the term “meditation”, as used in this manuscript, refers exclusively to mindfulness meditation. Assuming an affirmative answer to the aforementioned question, studies should then aim to address research questions pertaining to mediation (“How do MBIs improve addiction-related outcomes?”) and moderation (“For whom do MBIs work most optimally to improve addiction-related outcomes?”). As discussed in “Mindfulness as a means of targeting mechanisms of addiction” section, a corpus of research has begun to amass on the mediators of MBI effects on addiction. Randomized controlled trials suggest that MBIs are a promising treatment for substance misuse and exert their effects via increases in levels of mindfulness across a wide array of substance-misusing behaviors and clinical populations.

#2 — Meditation Elicits The Same Brainwaves That Doctors Use To Treat Addiction

By cultivating a state of relaxation and inner peace through meditation, individuals can reduce their reliance on substances as a means of escaping or numbing unpleasant emotions. The titles and abstracts of all identified studies were screened (RK and AZ, “initial screening”). Studies that clearly described using only Transcendental Meditation, Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Biofeedback or Autogenic Training as their interventions were excluded.

Do MBIs decrease addictive behavior by reducing activation of bottom-up neural circuitry to drug cues? Similarly, functional neuroimaging methods are needed to test novel hypotheses, such as the restructuring reward hypothesis (“Do MBIs restructure the relative responsiveness to drug and natural rewards by increasing functional connectivity between top-down and bottom-up neural circuits?”). Furthermore, molecular neuroimaging (e.g., positron emission tomography; PET) is needed to understand effects of MBIs on neurotransmitters and neuropeptides implicated in addictive behavior like dopamine, endogenous opioids, γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and endocannabinoids. Finally, dynamic effects of mindfulness practice on addictive responses are unknown, and could be elucidated through functional neuroimaging techniques with high temporal resolution like electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG). For instance, does the acute state of mindfulness attenuate initial attentional orienting to drug cues? Or, does mindfulness facilitate attentional disengagement and recovery from drug cue-exposure?