Meditation for smoking cessation and its use in people with depression

Meditation is well known for its ability to help us relax and calm our minds, and in recent years, studies are showing that training our attention can also help us curb addiction-related anxiety.

Meditation and smoking

In a study on the effects of meditation practice on smoking cessation, a group of smokers was trained in meditation for 10 days. The results of the study show that after the training, smokers who practiced meditation were 60% less likely to smoke than members of another group of smokers who were simply taught to relax different parts of their bodies. Although the group of smokers who practiced meditation did not participate in the study with the idea of ​​quitting, they found that, without realizing it, they were smoking less than before starting the training.

Before continuing with the article I would like you to see this video titled «How to meditate in a minute»:

These studies suggest that meditation somehow weakens the connection between craving for smoking and the act of smoking.

The need to react to a thought or emotion, to a person or situation, or to the immediate desire to smoke seems to diminish after meditation practice, as if meditation weakens the connection between impulse and response.

Studies seem to suggest that the practice of Meditation can influence our control of impulses or cravings.

For this reason, more and more, meditation training is seen as an especially useful method in the treatment of addictions, since while other forms of treatment tend to focus on controlling the habit or addiction, meditation is based on observing how desire is triggered and how the mind and body react to that desire, not repressing it and allowing the body to self-regulate itself against impulses and emotions.

This suggests that therapy based on the suppression of desires may be less effective than that based on the observation of these, since the latter allows the self-regulation of these desires.

Meditation and depression

At first, meditation is not recommended for people with mental illnesses or in psychiatric treatment, but more and more this training is being used as a complement to therapies for the management of anxiety and depression.

Among them is the "Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy", aimed at patients with depression. It has been proven that with the help of this therapy the level of relapse prevention is very high, but it is very important that people with this type of disorder receive their meditation training with specialized personnel.

Sometimes trying to focus with meditation techniques it can be counterproductive for people who at a certain moment are not able to handle thoughts and emotions that may emerge during practice. These people, before starting the practice of meditation, need to learn what to do when these thoughts and emotions emerge.

Just like someone with a serious physical injury doesn't go outside to train for a marathon, but instead consults their doctor on how to get started a person with a serious mental disorder should receive help from specialists before starting to practice meditation on their own.

Article written by Álvaro Gómez. More information about Álvaro here