There is an unfortunate stigma around addiction that only those with a poor moral compass can succumb to such a lifestyle. This belief is completely untrue, and addiction can affect absolutely anyone. Addiction does not exist in a vacuum, and it is usually a co-occurring disorder paired with other mental illness diagnoses. Mindfulness techniques can help people cope with the root of addiction and create healthy coping mechanisms.
What Is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is all about stopping and thinking in the present moment. People suffering from addiction may find themselves turning to a vice of drugs, alcohol, or unhealthy coping mechanisms at the slightest uncomfortable feeling. Mindfulness techniques encourage the idea that it is okay to feel pain. Sometimes sad or anxious feelings are inevitable. There is no need to try and numb or dull uneasy feelings; they are completely natural and meant to be felt.
With mindfulness, you can become separate from your emotions. For example, if you are giving a big speech, you may feel a pang of anxiety in your chest. This anxiety is normal, and your behaviors can become a separate entity from this feeling. You can still go up and deliver your speech while accepting the feeling of anxiousness.
Once you let go of the mindset that negative feelings must be eliminated, there is no need to numb your feelings with the vice of addiction.
Developing Healthy Coping Mechanisms
Once you become aware of your emotions and your behavior, you can come to accept that drugs and alcohol are unhealthy coping mechanisms. Mindfulness promotes stopping and thinking about the bigger picture.
Does substance abuse promote a healthy outcome? No. On the other hand coping mechanisms such as breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, and calming hobbies can result in positive outcomes.
How to Implement Mindfulness
Feelings of stress and sadness are uncomfortable, and your instinct may be to numb these feelings and make them go away. These feelings are natural and occur in everyone. It is a matter of how we deal with them. By journaling events, feelings, behaviors, and outcomes, you can get started on using mindfulness techniques.
Event: A coworker makes a snide comment about you at work
Feelings: Embarrassed, hurt, sad, nervous
Behavior: Breathing exercises and meditation
Result: Feeling calmer and understanding you cannot change what other people say or do
Who Is Mindfulness Right for?
If you have found yourself relapsing again and again after traditional forms of treatment, mindfulness may be your saving grace. You have to deeply want to make a change. Mindfulness tends to work for people because it is a complete change in mindset that no one can take away from you. These strategies transfer over to when you are alone and do not have the aid of a support group or therapist.
Buddhism and Mindfulness
At its root, addiction is a craving. We crave the rush or numbing sensation that drugs and alcohol provide, and it becomes a never-ending cycle. Buddha refers to this state of always wanting more as “samsara”. Once you let go of this want and accept suffering as inevitable, then you can be truly freed of addiction.
Additional Help
Mindfulness is so successful because these techniques can be used when you are alone with your thoughts beyond therapy and treatment settings. To get started is hard to do alone though. Treatment facilities, such as at New Life House, help you break away from negative environments and mindsets and start on the road to recovery.
Addiction is a difficult, vicious cycle to break. By incorporating mindfulness techniques with treatment, you can build a lifelong foundation for a new mindset that creates healthy coping mechanisms.