Mindfulness may seem like an eccentric fad to some, but the science shows the wide-reaching benefits of mindful therapy. Even better? There are serious perks to utilizing mindfulness for addiction, to support you throughout your recovery and beyond.
Instead of perceiving our reactions to situations as “right” or “wrong”, mindfulness helps us to take a step back, assess the situation logically, and accept how we are feeling at any given moment.
What is mindfulness?
So, what is “mindfulness” exactly? The American Psychological Association (APA) classifies mindfulness as “awareness of one’s internal states and surroundings.” There are a plethora of benefits to mindfulness, including helping individuals learn how to observe their thoughts and feelings, resulting in positive habit-breaking responses and intentional, carefully decided actions in their day-to-day (as opposed to harsh judgements or irrational reactions).
You can identify the presence of mindfulness in therapy in many ways, including the reduction of stress, meditation practice, and mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy (MBCT) to name a few.
Commonly used for depression treatment, MBCT patients reap many benefits including the learned ability to identify patterns of negative thoughts, replacing them with positive ones that are more rooted in reality.
Similar to MBCT, mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP) is implemented for individuals in recovery from addictive behaviors. MBRP, a treatment approach born from the University of Washington’s Addictive Behaviors Research Center, aims to help the individual garner an increased awareness of their triggers, identify their harmful habitual patterns, and pay attention to their “automatic” reactions, all in an effort to prevent a relapse.
In 2010, a study suggested that 30 minutes of mindful meditation each day for eight weeks increased the density of gray matter in brain regions associated with memory, stress, and empathy, and one of these regions happens to be the hippocampus, in which you will often see a reduction of gray matter when individuals are dealing with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
There are a lot of studies like this one focused on meditation, leading some people to mistake mindfulness as simply just meditation, and while meditation is a practice within mindfulness, it is only one component of it.
Mindfulness activities for addiction recovery may include body scanning (“scanning” your body in your mind and sitting with how your body feels in this very moment), mindful walking (taking in all of your surroundings and paying attention to details on a walk outdoors), mindful breathing (focusing on your breath and using this to bring yourself back to the present moment) and cyclic sighing (a variation of calming your nervous system through breathwork), and much more.
For those struggling with substance use disorders, there are some tangible ways that mindfulness can work to your advantage.
Benefits to Using Mindfulness for Addiction
Helps reduce avoidance
Mindfulness focuses on bringing you back to the present moment and encourages you to tap into your feelings, therefore helping you to reduce avoidance when it comes to your addiction. The more present you are, the more you are able to assess what is or isn’t working in your life, and make any appropriate adjustments.
Helps you find and maintain peace
One of the core goals of mindfulness is to bring about a sense of peacefulness in yourself, if even for just a fleeting few moments at first. Once you practice mindfulness consistently, you will be able to return to this peaceful state when you need it the most. Inarguably, this will improve your quality of life overall as well as positively contribute to overcoming addiction.
Helps increase emotional intelligence and improves relationships
One of the most impacted areas of life for an addicted person is their relationships with loved ones and the negative emotions they may experience. Mindfulness gives you the necessary pause to collect yourself and tap into why you may be feeling a specific emotion, as well as assess a situation logically before reacting out of an emotional response. This can improve your relationships overall and help you to meet others where they are.
Helps with intentional responses
Similar to the point above, being able to pause before you respond helps you give more intentional responses within conversations, both with yourself and with others! Mindfulness allows you the time to regroup and get a game plan for how you would like to move forward with any sort of conflict or important matter. In the case of addiction, it helps you gain the tools to respond with meaning, being able to make sense of the consequences of any action.
Helps manage cravings or thoughts of addictive substances
Most commonly, individuals struggling with food addiction find a lot of good in a regular mindfulness practice because of its ability to help you recognize your cravings and redirect your thoughts in a healthier direction, so the same idea can be applied to those dealing with substance use addiction. This takes a substantial amount of intentional practice, but mindfulness is able to help you identify and manage these types of intrusive thoughts.
Helps you become more aware of your triggers
Being able to sit with your triggers is key to making healthier choices, whether these triggers are emotional, environmental, behavioral, or psychological. Mindfulness will pull you into the present moment and allow you to also recognize patterns and habits that may not be serving you.
Helps you cultivate self compassion
Learning to be able to sit with your emotions without judging them will also help you cultivate better self compassion and self love. Many individuals who struggle with addiction will judge themselves for their own failures or shortcomings - this is not conducive to a healthy recovery.
Helps build coping skills
Leaning on mindfulness can help you cope with your ongoing addiction and stop destructive behaviors in their tracks. As soon as you catch a trigger or observe yourself spiraling, you will be able to utilize your mindfulness toolkit and rely on it for self-soothing.
All in all, mindfulness can be an incredibly helpful tool throughout your addiction journey and is a fabulous pairing with your pre-established therapy treatments.
Here at ICS, we work with our clients to build a framework for understanding their compulsive and self-destructive behaviors, and help them in creating a plan to prevent relapse from happening. View our philosophy to learn more about us, and reach out if you’re ready to take the next step in your recovery.