Did you know that addiction is very much driven by your brain? Because of this, mindfulness meditation for recovery can be a powerful tool in your alcohol, drug, or opioid abuse treatment. Beyond that, mindfulness meditation is also a healthy practice for your overall well-being—long after your addiction treatment ends. But what makes mindfulness so effective, and what does it look like in your own recovery journey?
Addiction and the Dysregulated Brain: What’s Happening Inside Your Mind
Cornell University defines emotional regulation as your ability to effectively manage and respond to an emotional experience. When you’re faced with a difficult circumstance that produces challenging emotions, you’ll be motivated to seek some kind of coping mechanism to achieve better emotional wellness. Healthy, normal coping mechanisms may include talking about your problems with friends, exercising, or meditating.
On the other hand, when you’re emotionally dysregulated, it means you have a hard time using healthy, effective strategies to moderate your negative emotions. When you’re going through a tough time, the negative emotions you feel are often intense and overwhelming as a result. This emotional dysregulation makes you more likely to seek out unhealthy ways to cope with your feelings, such as alcohol or drugs—making you all the more susceptible to addiction.
However, the long-term use of drugs or alcohol—regardless of your initial ability to regulate your emotions—can actually lead to emotional dysregulation, or make it worse. Take alcohol, for example. Often you begin to use alcohol to relax or forget about negative emotions. Alcohol consumption produces dopamine in your brain, a chemical that signals to you that drinking is pleasurable and rewarding. Because of this dopamine release, you remember the activity and are motivated to drink again in the future.
Yet as you use more alcohol (or drugs), the dopamine rush you receive isn’t as strong as it used to be, so you need to drink more and more often to achieve the same pleasurable effects. Eventually, your brain develops a chemical dependency on this dopamine, leading to an addiction to alcohol. Because your body is conditioned to the presence of alcohol, you simply can’t stop using it.
When you’re addicted to alcohol, it disrupts the area of your brain involved in executive function, impulse control, decision-making, and emotional regulation, shares the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. This only makes it all the more difficult to fight against addiction cravings and behaviors, especially when faced with emotionally challenging circumstances, stress, or discomfort. So, when you experience negative feelings, you keep seeking your addiction to cope, and the vicious cycle continues.
Common Addiction Symptoms
As you can see, addiction is a serious matter. It’s more than just a series of bad choices and behaviors or a lack of discipline. Addiction’s biological mechanisms behind the scenes make it virtually impossible to overcome this struggle on your own. You need professional treatment in order to break free. And the first step to healing is realizing you’re addicted. If you’re concerned you may have a drug or alcohol addiction, here are some common addiction symptoms for each:
Signs of Addiction to Drugs
- Have intense drug cravings or urges
- Eventually needing more of the drug to achieve the same effects you used to get
- Engaging in risky or unlawful behavior to obtain your drug, such as stealing
- The inability to stop using your drug even though you’d like to quit
- Continued drug use despite its negative consequences
- Needing to use the drug regularly
- Using more of the drug than you initially intended, for longer periods of time
- Neglecting personal or work responsibilities to use your drug
- Saying no to friends, activities, or hobbies in favor of drug use
- Financial difficulties due to your drug use
- Experiencing withdrawal symptoms when you stop using
Signs of Alcohol Addiction
- The inability to cut down or stop drinking
- Drinking more or longer than intended
- Excessive time spent drinking, obtaining alcohol, or being sick after drinking
- Craving alcohol or having the felt need to drink
- Engaging in risky behavior while under the influence of alcohol
- Dropping activities and hobbies you previously enjoyed in favor of drinking
- Continued drinking despite health, relationship, and work problems
- Building a tolerance to alcohol so you need to drink more to feel the same effect
Understanding Mindfulness Meditation for Recovery
Because of what’s happening inside your head behind the scenes, addiction treatment and therapy modalities that address your thoughts and mind can be particularly impactful. This is where mindfulness meditation for recovery comes in. Combining the mental training practices of mindfulness and meditation together, mindfulness meditation for recovery teaches you to slow down racing thoughts, move past any negativity, and calm yourself physically and mentally, according to Verywellmind.com.
What is Mindfulness?
While you may be familiar with what it means to be mindful of something, mindfulness itself is its own separate mental health practice. Mindfulness is all about being in the present. Because much of our stress or anxiousness can be based on dwelling in the past or thinking ahead to the future, mindfulness focuses on increasing your awareness of what’s happening right now. It’s designed to help you avoid destructive or automatic habits and responses. When you’re practicing mindfulness, you observe your thoughts, emotions, and other in-the-moment experiences without judgement or reaction, shares the American Psychological Association.
What is Meditation?
As a practice that’s been in existence for thousands of years, meditation uses both physical and mental techniques to calm, focus, or clear your mind. The act of meditation can take on various forms, ranging from concentrating on a question for a particular amount of time to repeating a specific phrase or self-scanning by focusing on physical sensations in your body. Over time, medication can help improve your ability to concentrate, overcome emotional challenges, and even decrease symptoms of certain mental health disorders.
How Mindfulness Meditation Works
Mindfulness meditation for recovery is a simple, straightforward practice. The main aspects of mindfulness meditation include deep breathing and awareness of your body and mind, VerywellMind.com shares. It’s helpful to find a comfortable place to sit that’s free from distractions. Because it’s easy for our minds to wander in this digital age, your therapist may set up a timer so you meditate for a focused amount of time.
During the act of meditation, you concentrate on your breathing rhythms as you inhale and exhale. You may also observe your surroundings, noticing how they’re impacting your five senses, which can help you remain present in the moment. When thoughts come into your mind, the goal is to observe and acknowledge them while remaining calm. Rather than honing in on them, you instead let these thoughts pass by as you stay in the present moment.
Mindfulness meditation is a practice you may utilize consistently throughout your treatment and recovery journey. You can even incorporate it into the regular rhythms of your daily life after your rehab ends. Some everyday opportunities for mindfulness meditation can include:
- Exercising
- Going on a walk or hike
- Driving in the car
- Doing laundry, dishes, or other chores
- Brushing your teeth
- Taking a bath or shower
The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation for Recovery From Addictions
Whether you’re at a residential treatment center, in outpatient rehab, or in aftercare programming, mindfulness meditation can aid in correcting an addiction’s impact on your mind, ultimately leading to healthier outcomes. Some of the benefits that mindfulness meditation for recovery can bring to your healing journey include:
Improved Emotional Regulation
By practicing mindfulness meditation, you’re more aware of your thoughts and feelings. Over time, this allows you to better identify emotions when they occur. As a result, you can address these emotions in a more thoughtful, less reactionary way. This equips you to deal with negative feelings in the present instead of letting them build up and overwhelm you.
Reduced Cravings
According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, multiple studies have revealed that mindfulness-based approaches to substance abuse treatment can significantly reduce craving levels. That’s because mindfulness meditation can actually lessen the activity in the areas of the brain responsible for cravings and addiction. You’re also more easily able to see cravings as temporary and have the thought discipline to let them subside.
Long-Term Resilience and Self-Control
Because you’re less reactionary to emotions, you can process them as they happen and learn better ways to cope. Over time, this builds up emotional strength and resilience for future challenges. And by cultivating both self-awareness and self-control in the mindfulness meditation process, you become more aware of the automatic reactions you have to substances, shares the University of Utah Health. This awareness allows you to have more control over your choices in the long run.
Relapse Prevention
Mindfulness meditation for recovery gives you helpful tools to stay the course in your sobriety. As we’ve mentioned, you’re more emotionally regulated, have greater self-control, and can remain calm and present when challenges arise. All of these skill sets ultimately help reduce your risk of relapse by preventing your addictive triggers from driving you back towards unhealthy coping patterns.
A Holistic Approach to Addiction Treatment
While mindfulness meditation plays an important role in your addiction recovery, it works best as part of a holistic, individualized approach to treatment. This combines traditional, evidence-based psychotherapies with experiential therapies like recovery yoga, recreational therapy, and more—all used together to treat the whole person.
At Defining Wellness Centers, we offer both inpatient and outpatient addiction treatment programs that integrate traditional and experiential therapies (like mindfulness meditation) into one comprehensive, personalized recovery journey. If you’re ready to overcome your addiction and achieve long-term healing, contact our team today.
