Dealing with addiction is tough.

Everyone has their idea about how to overcome addiction, but so many opinions can clutter your mind.

Which method is the best one?

Over the years, therapists have developed many ways to help people overcome addiction. A couple of them are quite remarkable and can even be practiced at home.

The Truth About Addiction

If you think about it carefully, addiction is nothing more than a bad (even destructive) habit. It’s something you do over and over again, and somehow, it seems you can’t stop yourself.

Part of this is because your brain craves the chemical release it gets when you give it what it wants. There’s an adrenaline rush or dopamine hit that you thrive on.

Those feel-good hormones imprint on your brain, and you want to get that feeling again and again.

Paving the Way

The more you stimulate your brain for happiness, the more it gets used to that method.

If you are fueling it through exercise, then it will constantly crave exercise because it gets used to it.

If you feed your brain with substances, then it will seek those substances repeatedly.

Every encounter with the “thing” that makes you happy reinforces a pattern (or neural pathway) in your brain. It fires up your neurons and seeks constant reinforcement to remain active.

Bad Habits

Habits are formed through the activation of neural networks.

When you have an addiction, your brain craves that neural interaction. It wants you to stimulate it so that the brain can be satisfied.

The more you give in to the addiction, the more the neural pathway is satisfied. However, your brain becomes so used to this happening that it doesn’t want anything else.

Deciphering the Brain

Your brain drives every decision you make and action you take, yet we don’t think twice about what it is telling us to do. It’s the reason why we build neural networks and habits—be they good or bad.

The neural pathways in the brain aren’t hardwired; you can change them.

Find out how at the Brain-A-Thon.

Meditation for Addiction

Visit any doctor or facility to get assistance with addiction, and they will tell you that some kind of mindfulness and meditation is helpful along the way.

This knowledge led neuroscientists and addiction specialists to study the impact of mindfulness on individuals who smoke.

A Smoke Screen

Researchers didn’t want to tell study participants that the focus was on reducing smoking through Integrative Body-Mind Training (IBMT), a meditation technique; instead, they told participants that they were participating in a study on stress reduction.

This decision was made because they didn’t want to recruit participants that had a need to stop smoking. All the researchers wanted was to see if IBMT could work to reduce smoking and thus addiction.

All the participants smoked about 10 cigarettes daily.

Mind Training Versus Relaxation

Researchers split participants into two groups.

The first group were given five hours of IBMT over a two-week period. The purpose of IBMT is to relax the body, produce mental imagery, and be mindful.

This training was created by Yi-Yuan Tang who had been using it for years on children and adults. IBMT also focuses on personal control, positivity, and openness to new experiences.

The second group was given a relaxation exercise. They weren’t asked to do any mindfulness exercises or meditation.

Physical Effects

After finishing the experiment, researchers asked participants about their smoking habits.

At this stage, participants who completed IBMT realized they had been smoking fewer cigarettes daily. In comparison, the group doing the relaxation exercise did not smoke less.

An objective test for smoking requires measuring the carbon monoxide levels in the body. Participants from the group using IBMT had lower carbon monoxide levels at the end of the experiment, which confirmed that they had been smoking less.

The Addictive Brain

Researchers also investigated what happens in participants’ brains during the experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

At the start of the experiment, all of the participants’ brains showed similar patterns relating to their smoking habit.

The results found that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and left lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), as well as some other areas, had reduced activity. Both the ACC and PFC are responsible for self-control, but it was impaired in participants.

Follow-up imaging indicated improved activity in these areas for participants using IBMT. The ACC and PFC showed more activity in subsequent scans, which indicates continued improvement.

The same results were not observed in the fMRI scans of participants doing the relaxation exercise.

The results prove that mindfulness can assist with reducing addictive patterns.

What Makes the Brain Tick?

The neuroscience behind addiction shows us that our minds are complex.

Figuring out the brain can be a challenge, but that’s what neuroscientists are for. They determine the tough stuff and then make it available to all of us in ways that are easy to understand.

At the Brain-A-Thon, top brain experts share this knowledge with you, so join us and learn more about the brain.

Dealing With Addiction in a Different Way

Knowing that addiction is rooted in habit can help you change your approach to overcoming it.

The brain isn’t static. Just like you built a neural pathway that craves an addictive substance, it can also break down this pathway and construct new ones.

Accept Your Reality

Before you try to overcome your addiction, accept that you have one.

Name your addiction, write it down, and think about how it is affecting your life.

The more you do this, the more you challenge your current neural pathways. Confront your addiction often because it will take time to change your situation.

Decide to Change

Your brain is wired to believe that your addiction is its chosen way of life, but you know there is a dream you are chasing.

The addiction is your brain’s “set point,” and it doesn’t want to change. There is a distance between the set point and your dream life.

To close this gap, you have to start thinking and doing things that you would do if your dreams were to come true.

Break the Cycle

When you consider your dream life, you are doing exactly that: dreaming. It’s a form of meditation because you are visualizing what you really want from life.

Spending time in that moment allows you to be more mindful and changes the circuitry of your brain. It starts breaking down the walls of addiction and encourages the formation of new neural networks.

You are actively changing your set point into a favorable one, and that breaks the cycle.

Build Habits With Innercise™

Many places use meditation for addiction treatments because it actively changes the brain. It provides an opportunity for quiet introspection on a daily basis, and that can alter the brain.

One way to use meditation and to practice mindfulness is to build habits with Innercise™, which are brain exercises. They are a kind of IBMT, similar to what was used in the smoking experiment.

Changing Habits

Innercise doesn’t just help with building habits; it also helps to break bad ones. You have to substitute bad habits for good ones, as that increases your chances of success over the long term.

It takes a while to do this (easily up to half a year), so having a proven way to deal with habits is always helpful.

In this video, John Assaraf explains how to be more successful with habit-building.

Take a Breath

Although relaxation exercises didn’t make a difference in the experiment, you still need to be relaxed and in a calm frame of mind to do the Innercise™ workouts effectively.

The Take 6 Calm the Circuits Innercise™ can help you to switch off emotional thinking that’s frequently linked to addiction.

Take a deep breath in through your nose; then, exhale through your mouth as if you are blowing through a straw. Do this six times.

Creative Visualization

Visualization is a constructive form of daydreaming. It takes your ideas from dreams to tangible actions.

Follow these steps:

1. Spend 10–15 minutes to reflect on an addiction-based goal. Write down what it would be like to achieve this goal. Go into as much detail as possible so that the description allows other people to see it play out in front of them.
2. Read the description several times so that it starts to form part of your memories.
3. Close your eyes and visualize yourself achieving the goal. Use all the details you wrote down to activate new networks in your brain.

Positive Affirmations

Affirmations are something else you can use to improve self-control and overcome addictive thoughts.

You can write down affirmations based on your visualization exercise. Place them somewhere you can see them and repeat them frequently.

You are capable of overcoming your addiction, so start believing in your own abilities.

Inside the Mind

Spending time in your mind and getting to know yourself is powerful. You learn about your strengths, weaknesses, and habits.

It’s time to take that knowledge to the next level so that you can use it for success.

Sign up for the Brain-A-Thon and find out how.