Mindfulness: An Emerging Treatment for Smoking and other Addictions?

Special Article - Tobacco and Smoking Cessation

J Fam Med. 2015; 2(4): 1035.

Mindfulness: An Emerging Treatment for Smoking and other Addictions?

Judson Brewer* and Lori Pbert

Center for Mindfulness, UMASS Medical School, USA

*Corresponding author: Judson Brewer, Center for Mindfulness, UMASS Medical School, USA

Received: August 26, 2015; Accepted: September 02, 2015; Published: September 03, 2015

Prospective

Why do young mothers buy a daily pack of cigarettes instead of spending this money on nutritious food for their children? Why are treatments that help roughly 33% of people overcome their substance use and have a 70% relapse rate hailed as the “gold standard”? In other words, why are addictions so hard to overcome?

Our brains are set up to learn. From an evolutionary perspective, to survive, when we come upon a good source of food or water, it is helpful to remember where it is. When we stumble upon something dangerous, it is helpful to remember this too. And this rewardbased learning system,that is conserved all the way back to the most primitive of nervous systems (the sea slug with roughly 20,000 neurons), in its most basic form has three elements: trigger, behavior, reward. We see berries, we eat them, and if they taste good (reward), we lay down a memory to come back for more.

Fast forward to modern day, where food is plentiful, and our environment is relatively safe, our brains still have the same rewardbased learning system. Under the names of operant conditioning, associative learning and positive and negative reinforcement, a lot more is known about how it works. This is the good news.

The bad news is that over time, humans have stumbled upon substances that literally hijack this reward-based learning system. In fact, every substance of abuse from tobacco to crack cocaine affects the same brain pathways –the mesolimbic pathway which mainly acts through the neurotransmitter dopamine. And each time we do a line of cocaine and feel the high or smoke a cigarette when we are stressed out and feel better afterwards, we reinforce the “habit loop” (see Figure 1). This combination of tapping into the dopamine system and behavioral repetition is deadly –for example smoking is the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the US [1].

Citation:Brewer J. Mindfulness: An Emerging Treatment for Smoking and other Addictions?. J Fam Med. 2015; 2(4): 1035. ISSN : 2380-0658