Mindfulness for Recovery

by Joe Gilmore

While it can be cathartic, substance abuse treatment and therapy can be a difficult thing to confront. It is something that requires a long, honest look at yourself and your situation which can be a lot for some people to come to terms with.

This is where mindfulness and meditation can come into play.

Mindfulness practices, such as guided meditation, are one of the key tools used during addiction recovery treatment to help patients overcome negative thoughts contributing to, or causing, their substance abuse problems.

Meditation and mindfulness are powerful and can help a patient both physically and mentally. Let’s take a closer look at specific ways that meditation can improve life for those in addiction recovery.

5 Ways Mindfulness Can Help

Improved Physical Health

Addiction to drugs and alcohol leads to numerous short- and long-term physical health problems. Some of these long-term issues include liver and heart damage, potential kidney failure, increased chance of cancer, and more.

However, practicing meditation and mindfulness exercises can help with this and provide a number of benefits to overall physical health. For example, it can:

Reduce the perception of physical pain
Improve immune functioning
Encourage better eating habits
Reduce chronic disease symptom severity
Improve quality of sleep and reduce insomnia

While sobriety will work to reverse the physical health problems that began from using, meditation will assist your body in these efforts and work in tandem with your sobriety.

Enhanced Social Functioning

Addiction can strain the relationships between family and friends as many people with substance abuse will fall into financial or legal trouble due to their habits.

While sobriety will work to mend these relationships, meditation can add another layer of support for improving social relationships and overall day-to-day social functioning.

Specific social benefits include:

Decreased social reactiveness and improved self-regulation
Increased empathy
Enhanced communication with friends and family
Lower levels of emotional stress
Improved aspects of interpersonal relationships
Improved Emotional State

Along with fixing social relationships with others, meditation allows you to look deeper and regulate your own emotional state.

Using drugs and alcohol to excess can lead to deep emotional problems like self-hatred, depressive symptoms, and more, all of which can lead to self-injurous behavior and suicide attempts.

While sobriety can help to curb these dangerous thought processes, meditation and mindfulness can help you overcome them.

However, if you or someone you love is dealing with thoughts of self injury or suicide, seek professional help immediately.

Increased Cognitive Ability

Abusing drugs and alcohol can lead to negative neurological changes that impedes the ability to think clearly. While this will take time to remedy, sobriety can reverse these problems.

Along with sobriety, meditative practices have also been shown to help improve cognitive ability and performance.

Meditation has been shown to:

Improve attention and working memory
Increase learning behaviors
Enhance problem-solving and decision-making
Increase emotional regulation, improving thought clarity

Improving cognitive abilities will help patients think more clearly when it comes to their sobriety and the negative effects substances can have on their lives – a skill that can help with relapse prevention.

Improved Mental Health

Along with improving cognition, mindfulness can help with mental health in general. Some common mental health problems that people with substance abuse deal with include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder.

When these issues occur alongside substance abuse, it is referred to as a dual diagnosis. In order to treat either problem, you must treat both.

For serious issues like this, it is always best to seek the help of an addiction professional or substance abuse treatment center with a dual diagnosis program, but there are still things that you can implement in your life to help curb these problems, like meditation.

Meditation has been shown to help with mental illness in the following ways:

Improving symptoms of anxiety and depression
Lowering stress hormones, increasing relaxation
Reducing feelings of loneliness
Reducing self-criticism and self-hatred

While solving clinical mental health problems will likely require more work and professional help, meditation can be a complimentary exercise.

Along with these 5 key benefits, meditation and mindfulness practices have also been shown to help patients commit to their sobriety and aid people in long-term recovery.

Real-World Example of Mindfulness

Drug and alcohol treatment centres around the globe are putting meditation and mindfulness to use every day to help patients achieve their goal of sobriety.

Recently an addiction rehab in Arizona, The Hope House, partnered with Arizona State University to bring additional mindfulness and exercise routines to their patients.

While the patients at The Hope House are working to overcome alcohol and opioid addiction, professionals will guide them through mindfulness exercises to better their mental and physical health.

While meditation can help virtually anyone, it can be especially important for those in addiction recovery to learn how to induce mindfulness, as it will lead to a longer and healthier life, free from substance

Joe Gilmore works for The Hope House, a luxury drug and alcohol rehab in Scottsdale committed to providing patients with the highest quality of care possible as we treat their addiction and any underlying problems.