Stop Smoking Cigarettes By Applying
Mindfulness Meditation As A Strategy
By George Shears
Summary: Mindfulness is a powerful aid for anyone who wants to stop smoking cigarettes or any other compulsive habit. Although challenging, it's profoundly simple and has a huge positive payoff.
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For anyone who is a long-time habitual smoker, the challenge to stop smoking cigarettes is usually overwhelmingly difficult. As is well known, even for smokers who are successful in quitting, relapse rates are very high. In order to be successful, therefore, it's essential to utilize the most powerful long-range strategy that's available.
There's a strong argument to be made for including mindfulness meditation as one part of such a strategy. It can be very helpful in two distinct ways.
On the one hand, it can provide an effective means of coping with the intense symptoms of nicotine withdrawal and craving that inevitably arise with smoking cessation. There is now abundant evidence that this particular application, which is commonly called mindfulness-based stress reduction, provides a highly effective way to cope with all forms of physical pain, discomfort, or distress.
Secondly there's growing evidence that mindfulness, when applied consistently over time, can help weaken the subtle but powerful mental habits that underlie all compulsive forms of behavior and which make them so strongly resistant to change. There is now also solid neuroscience evidence that the consistent practice of mindfulness can actually alter the structure of the brain in measurable and seemingly positive ways, giving rise to increased equanimity and positive affect.
So what is mindfulness? Most basically, it consists in simply paying careful, moment-to-moment attention to all internal and external experience while simultaneously accepting it and allowing it to be just as it is, without judging or trying to change it in any way whatever. It is, in other words, a means of living fully, consciously, and non-reactively in the present moment, instead of reacting negatively, or getting attached, to current experience and/or getting lost in thoughts about the past or the future.
This tendency to get "lost in thought" is strongly habitual for most people. At the very least, it tends to deprive us of "capturing our moments"--i.e., of living fully in the present. Even worse, however, since much of our thinking is negative, it's a major root cause of what we commonly call "stress."
Since mindfulness training has been shown to decrease stress, which is known to be strongly correlated with both smoking rate and smoking relapse rates, there is reason to expect that mindfulness training might lower these two measures.
Mindfulness training has also been shown to decrease negative affect, which is a potent stimulus for drug-seeking behavior and smoking relapse. So, again, such training can reasonably be expected to have positive effects.
Some initial research studies have utilized mindfulness meditation in helping people stop smoking. In one of these studies, 56% of the subjects showed biologically-confirmed smoking abstinence six weeks after quitting. It was also found that "compliance with meditation was positively associated with smoking abstinence and with decreases in stress and affective distress."
These early results, then, along with the strong theoretical basis for the probable benefit of mindfulness training in smoking cessation, supports its inclusion in an effective stop-smoking strategy. This is especially true in view of its many other positive benefits
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