An article written by my colleagues Charlotte Boettiger, Susan Gaylord, Vicki West Chanon, and Matthew Howard and I was recently published in the journal Cognitive Therapy and Research. This article describes the relationship between the tendency to be mindful in everyday life and the alcohol attentional bias among people in recovery from alcoholism. As described in the post below, attentional bias is the phenomena in which a person’s attention may be automatically captured by or fixated on an emotionally-significant object or event. Among alcoholics, cues associated with drinking tend to have a strong emotional importance – the sight of a bottle of liquor, an old drinking buddy, or familiar bar can automatically grab their attention and trigger the urge or craving to drink. This alcohol attentional bias can be measured in the laboratory using a dot probe task very similar to the one pictured in the post below, by asking participants to press a button to indicate the location of a target that replaces either an alcohol-related or neutral photo.
In the study described in our paper, we tested 58 people in long-term treatment for alcoholism with a dot probe task to measure their alcohol attentional bias. We also gave them questionnaires assessing their former drinking behavior, their level of craving, and the extent to which they reported to be mindful. These people had never received formal mindfulness training, but instead had received standard substance abuse treatment services. We found that individuals who classified themselves as having higher mindfulness actually had less attentional bias towards alcohol cues than people who classified themselves as being less mindful, regardless of how much they drank in the past or how much they craved alcohol.
Why is this important? The trait of mindfulness, that is, the tendency to be mindful in everyday life, is thought to involve being less reactive to difficult thoughts and feelings, less judgmental of yourself and others, more in touch with your emotions, more observant of sensory experiences (like the feeling of the wind in your hair or the sun on your face), and being aware of when you are acting out of habit or on “auto-pilot.” What makes the study findings so compelling is that the recovering alcoholics who thought they were more mindful (i.e., more aware of their habitual responses and less reactive to strong emotions) were the ones who were best able to shift their attention away from alcohol cues. In other words, they were better able to “disengage” their attention from addictive temptations and refocus on other things.
If people in recovery who are more mindful are less perturbed by addictive triggers, would explicit mindfulness training help them to overcome addiction? It’s not a wild stretch of the imagination to make this supposition. Indeed, my research on Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement shows that mindfulness has great promise as a treatment for alcoholism and other forms of addiction. But more research is needed!
I personally am very anti-smoking but I think the effects alcohol causes such as car crashes and poisoning matches
if not is more than what tobacco causes. So I think either allow both or ban both from being shown
on t.v..