Group uses meditation to help tackle addiction

Imagine living in a village where you must cross a jungle to get to water. There’s an easy pathway to follow already created by repetition, but you decide to make a new one. Can you create one with your bare hands? It’s possible, but very difficult. But what if you had a machete? It’s still difficult, but you could go much faster.

Going along with Dr. Aleksandra Zgierska’s metaphor, creating a pathway through the jungle is the difficulty in drug addiction recovery, and a potential machete is the practice of mindfulness meditation. An assistant professor in the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Zgierska’s research about mindfulness meditation for alcohol relapse supports the idea that meditation can be a beneficial addition to addiction recovery.

A Meditation and Recovery group meets each week on Wednesday at the Madison Neighborhood House Community Center. Those meetings focus on using meditation in the context of addiction recovery.  

Zgierska stressed that addiction is a chronic brain disease. Those who suffer with addiction have often learned abnormal coping patterns in response to stress or other challenges, she said.Grabbing a drink work can become comfortable and routine, and one’s brain positively rewards the perceived reduction in stress. The brain initially creates just a pathway for this behavior, but through repetition in eventually develops a huge highway where impulses fly automatically. The question again becomes: How can you create a new pathway?

Mindfulness meditation acts one sort of tool that can help those with addictions create a new pathway for coping with challenges. Research shows that meditation provides several benefits to one’s wellbeing, including mood improvement, a decrease in depression and anxiety, enhanced brain functioning, and stress reduction, according to Bob McGrath, a psychologist at UW-Madison.

McGrath defines mindfulness as “being in the moment. Being present, so when you’re walking on the street. And when you’re showering, you’re in the shower, not thinking ‘I’ve got to this tomorrow, I’ve got to do this today, or I should’ve done that.”

Thinking about the past or future instead of the present situation often leads to stress. Mike Brown*, who has been in addiction recovery for six years and meditates for 30-40 minutes every morning, has found that mindfulness helped him develop skills that allow him to relax in stressful situations. “Mediation is all about practicing that ability to stay present in the moment without getting lost in the story line,” he said.

 This sort of mindfulness enhanced through meditation can allow people to uncouple their thoughts and emotions from the behavior. “If you have a thought about using, you may try to toss it away out of your brain, but it may not work,” said Zgierska. “Mindfulness says not everything has to be changed. There are some things that might exist in you that maybe the goal is not to change it, but to not be led by it.”

Kerry McGrath works individually with people suffering from addiction using meditation in a medical setting at UW-Health. She said the most recent studies indicate that people who partake in mindfulness-based practices have a stronger recovery than people who do not.

“How much meditation people are willing to do plays a big role,” she said. Even just meditating for three to five minutes a day can make a big difference, along with making meditation a part of one’s schedule.

The Meditation and Recovery group’s sessions begin with 30 minutes of undirected, silent meditation. Brown, who attends these weekly meetings, said the group is free to meditate however they like and is mainly for those who have already developed sobriety. It is not a replacement to 12-step meetings or other recovery programs, but it is a supportive group where people can be surrounded by others with the same goal.

Although meditation is not the sole answer in recovery, it may be useful for more than just a tool carving a path through addiction. Proponents say the benefits can extend beyond recovery and into creating a better life.

“It’s a part of positive psychology, it’s not like one thing, but it’s moving towards a better life,” said Bob McGrath. “Instead of just getting rid of the alcohol or other drugs, it’s going for the positive.”

When Brown finds himself in a stressful situation in general, he turns to tools he’s learned through mediation. “I’m developing more and more of a reflex to take a breath, and take a step back and look and what’s happening in the current moment and ask, ‘How I can respond in a healthy and compassionate way?’ instead of letting my anxieties run away with me,” he said.

Meditation may be some addicts’ ways of carving a sober pathway. And at the end of that path they create, they may discover that meditation has added general positivity to their lives in areas other than just sobriety.

“It’s something that becomes useful at any given moment throughout the day,” said Brown.

Zgierska compares meditation to a sort of “positive addiction.” “People get really hooked on it. Some people describe that they feel high after meditating,” she said. “By all means, go for it, compared to the alternative.”

*He asked that his name be changed for anonymity