Combining patience with awareness, mindfulness therapy helps individuals engage with their emotions, thoughts, and impulses without the need to act on them. Learn how mindfulness may help you and your addiction.
What Is Mindfulness?
While there are many reasons a person may turn to addictive substances, one recognized by the American Addiction Centers is to disengage with distressing emotions or situations. In this way, addictive substances are used to cope with the environment that some individuals find harmful.
Mindfulness seeks to build the muscle that allows people to sit with and be aware of distressing situations. By disengaging with the impulse to avoid, individuals may be able to lessen the grip addictive behaviors have on them.
The practice of mindfulness is a way of interacting with the world. Though there are exercises and techniques, it is a therapy that hopes to exist outside of only therapeutic settings.
Why Might Mindfulness Therapy Help with Addiction?
A study published in Addiction Science and Clinical Practice, a journal seeking to examine addiction treatments, proposes that mindfulness therapies can affect behavioral outcomes by altering the brain’s mechanisms.
Consistent mindfulness practice can inhibit the limbic system’s reactivity, improve autonomic regulation, and increase prefrontal activation. These physiological changes can result in significant behavioral ones, such as increasing executive function, managing drug-cue reactivity, and establishing the foundations for meaningful recovery.
Find Addiction Relief at Wasatch Crest in Herber and Park City, UT
Addiction can be difficult to address on your own. Working with the trained professionals found at Wasatch Crest can help. They are proud to offer a variety of treatments to help those suffering from addiction find relief. Not only do they help administer mindfulness therapy, but they also offer other modalities. Experienced with gender-specific care and different levels of treatment, Wasatch Crest would be happy to help.
To learn more about what Wasatch Crest can offer and how they can help, please call 800-385-3507 or message online.
