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Healing Pain and the Opioid Crisis with Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement

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!

drericgarland Uncategorized

Mindful positive emotion regulation as a treatment for addiction: from hedonic pleasure to self-transcendent meaning

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.

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New Interview on Working with Addiction and Pain for the Mind & Life Podcast

I’m excited to share my recent interview with my good colleague Wendy Hasenkamp on the Mind & Life podcast!

We cover some fascinating topics including:

  • how my clinical psychotherapy practice informed my scientific research;
  • the power of mindfulness meditation to heal and restore well-being;
  • self-transcendence and non-dual states of consciousness;
  • how addiction changes reward processing and attention in the brain;
  • Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), and its application to treating addiction and chronic pain;
  • how reappraisal can help in difficult situations;
  • the role of savoring and reconnecting with natural rewards;
  • deconstructing pain;
  • the effects of mindfulness meditation on brain function;
  • and exciting results from a large clinical trial showing how effective MORE is, and how it might work.
Eric Garland – Working with Addiction & Pain

Click here to listen now: https://podcast.mindandlife.org/eric-garland/ or you can subscribe to the show on Spotify or other preferred players. I hope you enjoy it!

 

drericgarland Research

Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement as a Treatment for Pain and Addiction: From Hedonic Pleasure to Self-Transcendent Meaning

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!

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New Podcast Interview on Mindfulness, Pain, and Addiction

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!

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Learn to Use Mindfulness to Treat Addiction, Stress, and Pain: Next MORE Training October 15-16

The next Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) training will be held online via Zoom on October 15-16, 2021.

A registration link can be found here.

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 >200 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.

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New Science Advances Publication on the Neuroscience of MORE Covered by News Outlets

Effect of MORE on Neural Indices of Opioid Cue-Reactivity Revealed by EEG

My new paper published in the prestigious journal Science Advances reporting effects of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement on brain reward responses among chronic opioid users has been covered by multiple news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the Durham Herald-Sun, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, Science Daily, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others. The paper can be downloaded for free here.

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New Research Funding: Understanding the Neural Mechanisms of MORE as a Treatment for Smoking Cessation

Along with my colleagues Drs. Brett Froeliger and nidaMichael 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 MORE-fMRI-SBmedial 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.

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Research on MORE and Mindfulness Covered in the News

Results from a new Stage 2 randomized controlled trial of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), to be published later this summer in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, have been covered in a news story that also details findings from a recently published study of the effects of mindfulness on deautomatization of habit behaviors. A second news story also did a really nice job describing results from this study.

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.