My colleagues and I had a new paper published in the top scientific journal Nature Mental Health showing that Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) led to clinically significant reductions in post-traumatic stress symptoms in 59% of patients with comorbid PTSD, chronic pain, and opioid misuse. In this NIH-funded study involving 241 patients, MORE significantly reduced PTSD symptoms by increasing the capacity to regulate negative emotions through reappraisal. In turn, the effects of MORE on reducing opioid misuse were statistically mediated by decreases in PTSD symptoms. This study is important because PTSD is highly prevalent among people with chronic pain and addiction, yet there are no evidence-based treatments for this complex comorbidity. These data suggest that MORE is a highly effective therapy that can simultaneously treat traumatic stress, chronic pain, and addictive behavior.
Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) reduced PTSD symptoms to a significantly greater extent than supportive group (SG) psychotherapy.
Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement Amplified Frontal Midline Theta EEG Power During Meditation
The study, published in the top journal Science Advances, provides new insight into the neurobiological mechanisms by which mindfulness treats addiction. Study findings provide a promising, safe and accessible treatment option for the more than 9 million Americans misusing opioids. Eric Garland is the lead author on the paper and is a distinguished professor, and associate dean for research at the University of Utah College of Social Work. He also directs the University of Utah’s Center on Mindfulness and Integrative Health Intervention Development.
Garland’s study builds on previous research measuring the positive effects of theta waves in the human brain. Researchers have found that individuals with low theta waves tend to experience a wandering mind, trouble concentrating or they ruminate on thoughts about themselves. Theta waves can best be viewed on electroencephalogram, or EEG scans of the frontal midline regions of their brains. Low theta waves result in a loss of self-control as the brain slips into its default mode of automatic habits. In contrast, when a person is focused, present and fully absorbed in a task, EEG scans will show increased frontal midline theta wave activity.
“With high theta activity, your mind becomes very quiet, you focus less on yourself and become so deeply absorbed in what you are doing that the boundary between yourself and the thing you are focusing on starts to fade away. You lose yourself in what you are doing,” said Garland.
Garland’s new study showed it is in this mindful, theta wave state that people begin to experience feelings of self-transcendence and bliss, and the brain changes in ways that actually reduce one’s addictive behaviors.
ABOUT THE STUDY
Garland’s research team recruited 165 adults with long-term opioid use for study. Participants were randomly placed into either the control group that participated in supportive group psychotherapy, or the experimental group taught to incorporate Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) into their daily lives. Before and after the eight weeks of study treatment, all participants were brought into the research lab and had their brain waves measured with EEG while they were asked to try to practice mindfulness meditation. Participants were assessed for opioid misuse for nine months after the treatment ended.
Study participants in the MORE group learned to practice mindfulness meditation by focusing their attention on their breath or body sensations for sustained periods of time, and to refocus their attention when their minds began to wander into obsessive thinking about drugs or life stressors.
STUDY FINDINGS
Participants showed more than twice as much frontal midline theta brain activity following treatment with MORE, whereas those in supportive therapy showed no increase in theta. Participants in MORE who showed the biggest increases in theta waves reported more intense experiences of self-transcendence during meditation, including the sense of one’s ego fading away, a sense of oneness with the universe or feelings of blissful energy and love.
Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement Significantly Increased Self-Transcendent ExperiencesThe Effect of MORE on Reducing Opioid Misuse was Mediated by Increased Frontal Midline Theta
MORE also led to significant decreases in opioid misuse through the nine-month follow-up. These reductions in opioid misuse were caused in part by the increases in frontal midline theta brain waves. Garland explained that by achieving “tastes of self-transcendence” through meditation, the mindfulness therapy boosted theta waves in the frontal lobes of the brain to help participants gain self-control over their addictive behaviors.
“Mindfulness can create a pathway for us to transcend our limited sense of self,” said Garland. “Civilizations have known for thousands of years that self-transcendence, the experience of being connected to something greater than ourselves, has powerful therapeutic benefits.”
This, he explained, is a part of why some cultures engage in spiritual practices, practice deep meditation or use psychedelic substances like psilocybin mushrooms. Even in the popular 12-step addiction treatment program, the 11th step—seeking conscious contact with a higher power through prayer or meditation—taps into this same mechanism to promote recovery from addiction.
The state of transcendence can be like a blissful, natural high. Garland stated, “Rather than seeking a high from something outside of yourself like a drug, meditation can help you to find an even greater sense of pleasure, peace and fulfillment from within.”
The largest trial of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) ever conducted “Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement vs Supportive Group Therapy for Co-occurring Opioid Misuse and Chronic Pain in Primary Care: A Randomized Clinical Trial” was just published in JAMA Internal Medicine! The results of this $2.8 million NIH-funded clinical trial (N=250) for people with chronic pain and opioid misuse were outstanding: MORE reduced opioid misuse by 45%, more than doubling the effect of standard supportive therapy.This is one of the strongest effect sizes ever shown for a treatment for opioid misuse among people with chronic pain. MORE also reduced opioid use; 36% of patients treated with MORE were able to reduce their opioid dose in half or greater. At the same time, 50% of patients treated with MORE experienced clinically significant reductions in pain severity. And, although nearly 70% of patients met criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) at the beginning of the trial, the mean depression symptom severity score for patients treated with MORE no longer surpassed the threshold for MDD by the end of the study. These therapeutic effects lasted for 9 months after the end of treatment, demonstrating the sustained efficacy of MORE. We followed patients for almost a year after they enrolled in the study, representing the longest follow-up ever conducted for the MORE intervention.
MORE resulted in long-term reductions in chronic pain and emotional distress.
The timing of this publication is highly serendipitous, given that the opioid pharmaceutical settlements are just now reaching the states. My hope is that governors and legislators will consider using MORE as part of the solution to help stem the tide of the opioid crisis. Please help me get the word out! #MOREworks!
On May 4, I had the honor of giving an invited lecture for the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) of the National Institutes of Health, entitled “Healing the Opioid Crisis with Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement: Clinical Efficacy and Neurophysiological Mechanisms.” The full video of this lecture can be found here. In this lecture, I described my decade-long research program focused on developing and testing MORE as a treatment for chronic pain, opioid misuse, and addiction, and reported results from the largest clinical trial of MORE to date.
Dr. Garland presents his research on Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement to NIH Leadership
I began the talk discussing the destructive processes that unwittingly propel a person suffering from prolonged pain down the path toward an eventual loss of control over opioid use. I have been studying these risk mechanisms undergirding opioid misuse and OUD in people with chronic pain for more than a decade, and the discoveries I have made, along with great science from the field, informed the development of MORE. Then I described the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory, a key theoretical framework underlying MORE, as well as MORE’s treatment components, including mindfulness meditation, reappraisal, and savoring. Finally, I detailed MORE’s clinical outcomes and mechanisms of action across four randomized controlled trials involving nearly 500 patients. MORE works by strengthening self-control, reducing the brain’s reactivity to drug cues, increasing the brain’s response to natural, healthy rewards, enhancing meaning in life, and eliciting experiences of self-transcendence.
Following the lecture, I had a fascinating dialogue with the Director of NCCIH, Dr. Helene Langevin, and the Deputy Director of NCCIH, Dr. David Shurtleff about the emergence of self-transcendence in biological systems and its impact on health, and the use of mindfulness as a prevention and treatment strategy. This dialogue then opened up into a fantastic question and answer period. After the talk, I had the honor of discussing my research with multiple program directors and branch chiefs at NIH. If you didn’t have a chance to listen in, you can still watch the videocast here!
My new theory paper was just published online in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. This paper outlines my recent ideas about how an addictions treatment approach based on mindfulness can enhance healthy pleasure, joy, and meaning in life. Most addictions treatments are focused on decreasing negative psychological experiences (e.g., stress, craving) and unhealthy behaviors. Few have focused on increasing positive psychological experiences as a core treatment approach. This oversight ignores fundamental discoveries from addiction neuroscience that demonstrate the plasticity of the brain reward circuitry underlying addiction. Therapies that use mindfulness techniques to savor natural rewarding objects and events, self-generate internal reward responses, and access self-transcendence may remediate the dysfunction in the reward system and thereby reduce addictive behavior.
The abstract is below:
Chronic drug use is theorized to induce cortico-striatal neuroplasticity, driving an allostatic process marked by increased sensitivity to drug-related cues and decreased sensitivity to natural rewards that results in anhedonia and a dearth of positive affect. As such, positive emotion regulation represents a key mechanistic target for addictions treatment. This paper provides a conceptual model detailing how mindfulness may synergize a range of positive affective mechanisms to reduce addictive behavior, from savoring the hedonic pleasure derived from natural rewards, to self-generating interoceptive reward responses, and ultimately to cultivating self-transcendent meaning. These therapeutic processes may restructure reward processing from overvaluation of drug-related rewards back to valuation of natural rewards, and hypothetically, ‘reset’ the default mode network dysfunction that undergirds addiction.
In December 2020, I gave a lecture on my research entitled “Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement Heals Opioid Misuse and Chronic Pain by Restructuring Reward: From Hedonic Pleasure to Self-Transcendent Meaning” to the Brown University Contemplative Studies Initiative. Following this talk, I enjoyed a fascinating dialogue about the relationship between mindfulness and self-transcendence with a leading scholar of Classical Chinese Philosophy and Taoism, Hal Roth, PhD. The video of my talk is below. Enjoy!
I had a great podcast with Dr. Santosh Rao, Medical Director of the James M Cox Foundation Center for Cancer Prevention and Integrative Oncology at Banner MD Anderson for his Integrative Oncology Talk – a podcast of the Society for Integrative Oncology.
We had a fantastic conversation ranging from how chronic pain and cancer pain are distinct at the neurophysiological and psychological levels, to how mindfulness can be used to modify how pain is experienced in the brain, to the problem of opioid misuse and how it leads to inability to regulate positive and negative emotions, and finally, to how finding meaning in the face of adversity can culminate in the experience of self-transcendence – an crucial pathway to recovery. We focused heavily on my research on Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement as well as my clinical experiences at Huntsman Cancer Institute treating cancer patients with mind-body therapies. Thanks Santosh for an excellent interview!
MORE is an evidence-based, transdiagnostic therapy that unites complementary aspects of mindfulness training, third-wave CBT, and principles from positive psychology into an integrative treatment approach for addiction, stress, and chronic pain. MORE’s therapeutic effects have been demonstrated in ten clinical trials, and the MORE research program is currently supported by more than $25 million in federal research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Rigorous experiments have demonstrated effects of MORE on modifying neurophysiological reactivity to drug cues and natural rewards – indicating that MORE leads to therapeutic changes in the brain.
Participants receive intensive didactic and experiential instruction in implementing specialized mindfulness techniques and other clinical skills integral to Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE). Research evidence on the MORE model will be presented, along with a review of the latest discoveries in neuroscience and basic biobehavioral science about mindfulness, addiction, and chronic pain.
Participants will practice the therapeutic techniques outlined in the MORE treatment manual (Garland, 2013) via clinical role plays. Participants will receive live supervision from Dr. Garland in the delivery of therapeutic techniques via real-time feedback to optimize the delivery of the MORE intervention.
Unique mind-body therapy techniques, advanced cognitive-behavioral skills, and strategies from positive psychology will be presented to address common clinical problems including:
Craving and unhealthy habit behaviors
Physical and emotional pain
Catastrophizing and rumination
Stress reactivity and anhedonia
At the completion of the training workshop, participants will have a basic level of competency to use the MORE treatment manual to implement MORE for persons suffering from addictive behaviors and chronic pain conditions.
Training in MORE is provided at institutions of higher education, government agencies, academic teaching hospitals, and medical centers. To date, Dr. Garland has provided training in MORE to >475 clinicians from a range of settings, including Johns Hopkins Medical School (Maryland), Mt. Sinai Hospital (New York), Essentia Health (Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota), Medical University of South Carolina (South Carolina), Intermountain Healthcare (Utah), Southwest Care Center (New Mexico), New Roads Behavioral Health (Utah), Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center (Pennsylvania), Neuroscience Associates of New York (New York), Triangle Options for Substance Abusers (North Carolina), the University of Zurich (Switzerland), among others.
The cost of the training is $500 for 13 NASW-approved CEUs (with a 20% discount for graduate students). Register here.
Along with my colleagues Drs. Brett Froeliger and Michael Saladin (Medical University of South Carolina), I was recently awarded a 5-year, $2.3 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study the neural mechanisms of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) as a smoking cessation intervention. In this study, 100 smokers will be randomly assigned to receive eight sessions of MORE or eight sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to assist them in quitting smoking. Before and after the eight session intervention, participants will complete a task while their brain activity is being recorded in a fMRI scanner to measure their neural response natural rewards and cigarette cues. According to the allostatic model of addiction, as addiction progresses, the brain becomes hypersensitive to drug-related cues and triggers, and insensitive to natural, healthy rewards and pleasures, resulting in a lack of hedonic pleasure and dysphoria that pushes the individual to take higher and higher doses of the drug just to feel okay. This study is designed to test my restructuring reward hypothesis, which states that mindful savoring can reduce addictive behaviors by causing a shift in brain reward circuitry from valuing of drug-related rewards back to valuing natural rewards – reversing the allostatic process of addiction. This new research grant builds upon our earlier published proof-of-concept study showing that MORE increases savoring-related neural activation in the medial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum – key reward-related brain areas. This increase in brain activity was associated with significant reductions in cigarette smoking. Here we will seek to replicate this finding using a rigorous, randomized clinical trial design. It is my sincere hope that this work will help to free people from smoking – the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.
Results from this study, conducted in 95 people with chronic pain who had been prescribed long-term opioid therapy, demonstrate that MORE significantly decreased chronic pain intensity and significantly decreased the risk of future opioid misuse. Further, MORE boosted a range of positive psychological functions, including positive emotions, savoring, meaning in life, and the sense of self-transcendence. Importantly, the MORE’s effects on reducing pain and opioid misuse were linked with these increases in positive psychological functioning, suggesting that teaching people to “savor the good” and increase the sense of joy, meaningfulness, and natural healthy pleasure in life may be an antidote to the current pain and opioid crises in America – modern epidemics that have been termed “diseases of despair.”
This is the second randomized controlled trial to demonstrate therapeutic effects of MORE on chronic pain symptoms and opioid misuse, providing compelling evidence of MORE’s efficacy as a means of alleviating the suffering caused by the opioid crisis.
NPR recently covered another news story about my research on Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) as a therapy for chronic pain patients who are taking long-term prescription opioids. This story details the experience of a participant in the MORE intervention, and describes how mindfulness can be used to cope with pain and strengthen self-control.
National Public Radio recently covered a story on Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) as an intervention for chronic pain and prescription opioid-related problems. The story details new discoveries about the biobehavioral mechanisms of this novel therapy, as well as how mindfulness can be used to improve well-being in individuals suffering from chronic pain.
2-day MORE Basic Training Workshop July 11-12, 2015
Huntsman Cancer Institute, Wellness and Integrative Health Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Uinta Mountains, 1 hour drive East of Salt Lake City
A 2-day training workshop in Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement will be held July 18-19, 2014, at the Huntsman Cancer Institute Wellness and Integrative Health Center in Salt Lake City, UT. This training is designed for licensed health care professionals (social workers, psychologists, counselors, physicians, nurses, etc.) working with clients suffering from addiction, chronic pain, and stress-related conditions.
During this state-of-the-art two-day basic training workshop, participants will learn to use mindfulness and related therapeutic skills to address substance use disorders, psychological distress, and chronic pain conditions. Dr. Eric Garland, PhD, LCSW, one of the world’s leading experts on mindfulness and the developer of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), will explain the techniques, theory, and science behind this innovative, evidence-based treatment approach which has been tested in clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health. Research evidence on the MORE model will be presented, along with a review of the latest discoveries in neuroscience and basic biobehavioral science about mindfulness, stress, addiction, and chronic pain. Applications to cancer survivorship will also be discussed.
Participants will practice the therapeutic techniques outlined in the MORE treatment manual (Garland, 2013) via clinical role plays. Participants will receive live supervision in delivery of therapeutic techniques by Dr. Garland, who will observe participants and provide continual, real-time feedback to optimize the delivery of therapeutic interventions.
At the completion of this 2-day workshop, participants will have a basic level of competency to use the MORE treatment manual to implement MORE for persons suffering from addictive behaviors, stress-related conditions, and/or chronic pain.
Participants must be graduate-level mental health or health care providers. This training is also open to graduate students in mental health and health care fields.
$500 registration fee includes breakfast and lunch both days, as well as 13 CEUs endorsed by the Utah National Association of Social Workers (NASW). University of Utah employees will receive a 20% discount. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Wellness and Integative Health Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute.
This is one of the strongest effect sizes ever shown for a treatment for opioid misuse among people with chronic pain. MORE also reduced opioid use; 36% of patients treated with MORE were able to reduce their opioid dose in half or greater. At the same time, 50% of patients treated with MORE experienced clinically significant reductions in pain severity. And, although nearly 70% of patients met criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) at the beginning of the trial, the mean depression symptom severity score for patients treated with MORE no longer surpassed the threshold for MDD by the end of the study. These therapeutic effects lasted for 9 months after the end of treatment, demonstrating the sustained efficacy of MORE. We followed patients for almost a year after they enrolled in the study, representing the longest follow-up ever conducted for the MORE intervention.
Michael Saladin (Medical University of South Carolina), I was recently awarded a 5-year, $2.3 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study the neural mechanisms of 
medial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum – key reward-related brain areas