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Largest Neuroscience Study of Mindfulness as a Treatment for Addiction Published in Science Advances

The largest neuroscience study to date of mindfulness as a treatment for addiction shows that Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) can decrease opioid misuse by changing the brain.

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.

MORE is an eight-week, mindfulness-based therapy created by Garland to treat addiction, pain and emotional distress by promoting self-awareness and self-regulation of automatic and addictive habits. In a large clinical trial recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine, MORE was shown to reduce opioid misuse by 45%, more than doubling the effect of standard therapy.

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 Experiences
The 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.”

Credit: https://attheu.utah.edu/research/mindfulness-training-provides-a-natural-high-study-finds/

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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 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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Next MORE Training March 5-6, 2022

The next Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) training will be held online via Zoom on March 5-6, 2022.

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 >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.

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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.

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Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement Covered on NPR

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.

The NPR story can be found here.

 

 

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First fMRI Pilot Study Published on the Effects of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement on Reward Processing in Addiction

IMORE-fMRI-SB‘m pleased to announce that the first fMRI brain imaging study of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) has been published in the open-access journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Froeliger et al., 2017). My colleague Brett Froeliger and I conducted this proof-of-concept pilot study at his TRAIN Lab at the Medical University of South Carolina to examine the effects of MORE on reward processes in the brains of people addicted to cigarettes. A sample of 13 smokers participated in a study testing MORE versus a comparison group. All participants underwent two fMRI scans 8 weeks apart. Between the first and second fMRI scan, participants in the MORE group learned mindfulness and reappraisal skills to decrease addictive reactions to cigarettes and savoring skills to increase responsiveness to natural rewards (e.g., social connection, natural beauty, healthy behaviors). Participants in the comparison group completed research measures but did not receive any treatment. Relative to the comparison group, MORE was associated with significant decreases in smoking (66% decrease) and significant increases in positive emotions. Crucially, MORE participants evidenced significant decreases in neural activity while viewing cigarette images in reward-related brain regions including the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. MORE participants also demonstrated significant increases in neural activity in these same reward-related brain regions while they savored positive, natural-reward related images. Importantly, increases in brain activity during savoring were significantly correlated with smoking reduction and increased positive affect. These pilot findings provide preliminary evidence that MORE may facilitate the restructuring of reward processes and play a role in treating the pathophysiology of nicotine addiction. These findings converge with results from our other psychophysiological studies indicating that MORE may restructure reward processes in prescription opioid misuse (Garland, Froeliger, & Howard, 2014; Garland, Froeliger, & Howard, 2015; Garland, Howard, Zubieta, & Froeliger, 2017). Taken together, these data provide initial support for my restructuring reward hypothesis which asserts that mindfulness training may enhance a domain-general cognitive resource for restructuring reward learning from valuation of drug-related rewards to valuation of natural rewards and thereby reverse the downward spiral of addiction.

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New R01 Grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse: Targeting Chronic Pain and Prescription Opioid Misuse in Primary Care with Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement

nidaRecently, I was awarded a R01 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to conduct a full-scale clinical trial of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) as an intervention to reduce chronic pain and prescription opioid misuse in primary care. This five-year study will compare the efficacy of MORE to supportive therapy for 260 chronic pain patients receiving long-term opioid therapy who are at risk for opioid misuse.

Opioids may be medically necessary for some individuals experiencing prolonged and intractable pain, and most patients take medicine as prescribed. Unfortunately, opioids rarely completely alleviate chronic pain, and when taken in high doses or for long periods of time, can lead to serious side effects, including death by overdose, as well as risk for opioid misuse, which affects about 1 in 4 opioid-treated patients. Misusing opioids by taking higher doses than prescribed or by taking opioids to self-medicate negative emotions can alter the brain’s capacity for hedonic regulation, making it difficult to cope with pain (e.g., causing hyperalgesia – an increased sensitivity of the nervous system to pain) and experience pleasure in life (e.g., reducing sensitivity of the brain to natural reward). As such, non-opioid pain treatments that target hedonic dysregulation may be especially helpful for reducing chronic pain and prevent opioid misuse.

Multiple studies suggest that MORE improves hedonic regulation in the brain, resulting in decreased pain and an increased ability to savor natural, healthy pleasure. People who participate in MORE show heightened brain and body responses to healthy pleasures, and report feeling more positive emotions by using of mindfulness as a tool to enhance savoring. These therapeutic effects of MORE on savoring may be critically important, because findings from several studies show that increasing sensitivity to natural reward through savoring may lead to decreased craving for drugs – a completely novel finding for the field of addiction science (Garland, 2016). Our NIDA-funded R01 will provide a rigorous test of whether MORE improves chronic pain and opioid misuse by targeting hedonic dysregulation.

In our NIDA-funded R01, patients are receiving MORE at community medical clinics throughout Salt Lake City. Providing MORE in the naturalistic setting where most chronic pain patients seek medical care will make the therapy accessible to the people who need it the most. Ultimately, my hope is that this project will advance a new form of integrative healthcare, in which doctors and nurses work alongside social workers and other behavioral health professionals to help patients reclaim a meaningful life from pain.

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New Research Funding: Neuroimaging Research on the Effects of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement on Hedonic Regulation

mindfulness-centered-regulation-in-brainChronic pain is often treated with extended use of opioid analgesics, yet these drugs can alter the brain in ways that may make it difficult to cope with pain and may reduce the experience pleasure in life. Mindfulness-based interventions appear to be a promising means of addressing these issues, but research is needed to understand how such interventions change the brain to reduce suffering.

To that end, in September, 2016, I was recently awarded a five-year phased innovation grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health entitled Effects of Mindfulness-Oriented Intervention on Endogenous Opioid Mechanisms of Hedonic Regulation in Chronic Pain (R61AT009296). The objective of the project is to study the effects of an innovative mindfulness-based intervention on brain mechanisms linked with pain and pleasure.

In the first two-year phase of the study ($800,000), I (Principal Investigator), along with my Co-Principal Investigator Jon-Kar Zubieta (Co-Principal Investigator), chair of the University of Utah’s Department of Psychiatry, will use positron emission tomography (PET) neuroimaging to assess the effects of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) on restoring brain levels of endorphins in patients with chronic back pain who are being treated with prescription opioids.

This study represents the first use of PET in the history of science to quantify the effects of a mindfulness-based therapy on levels of endogenous opioids in the brain.

We will also use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to assess how mindfulness training through MORE may increase people’s capacity to savor natural pleasure from positive and meaningful events in everyday life – a capacity that becomes diminished over time through the deleterious effects of chronic pain and prolonged opioid use on the brain. We will use a fMRI paradigm developed by my Co-Investigator Brett Froeliger, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina.

This study aims to test whether MORE might reverse this insensitivity to natural reward by targeting the endogenous opioid system and brain reward functions.

Following a successful first phase of the project, a three-year second phase ($2.2 million) will investigate whether patients with a particular genetic makeup that affects the expression of opioid receptors in the brain might benefit more from the mindfulness-based treatment. The second phase of the project will also assess the dose of mindfulness skill practice as a predictor of changes in endogenous opioid function and clinical correlates.

Based on the results of previous research, we hypothesize that mindfulness meditation training through MORE will restore proper function to the brain’s opioid receptors.  We will be able to measure how MORE changes the brain’s ability to regulate pain and respond to natural rewards, as well as deepen our understanding of exactly how these changes in neural mechanisms happen.

more-conceptual-framework-opioid

Overall, this project will unite expertise in mindfulness-based interventions with expertise in neurogenetics and the use of PET and fMRI to probe the neurobiological mechanisms of pain and emotional experience. By elucidating a key mechanism of meditation-based therapies, this program of translational research will further the emerging field of social work neuroscience and enable us to rapidly optimize MORE to increase the effectiveness of the intervention as it is rolled out in clinical practice.

 

 

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News: Dr. Garland’s Biobehavioral Research on MORE and Mindful Savoring Highlighted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse

MORE Reward ERPI recently learned that my research on Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) was highlighted on the National Institute on Drug Abuse website. The NIDA news story, entitled “Mindfulness training may reduce deficits in natural reward processing during chronic pain or drug addiction” details a study I conducted with my colleagues Brett Froeliger (Neuroscience, Medical University of South Carolina) and Matthew Howard (Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) that was published in April in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. According to the excellent summary of this research on the NIDA website,

“Drug-dependent people show decreased behavioral and brain reactivity to natural rewards compared to non-drug users. As a result, drug-dependent users increasingly focus their attention on obtaining the drug instead of attending to natural rewards.  Recent research shows that a cognitive-based intervention may help restore natural reward processing in opioid-dependent participants.

In this study, chronic pain patients at risk for opioid misuse were randomized to either eight weeks of a Mindfulness-Oriented tetonsRecovery Enhancement (MORE) intervention or to an eight-week support group (control). Participants in the MORE intervention used mindfulness meditation to focus on all sensory features of a pleasant experience or object (for example, a beautiful nature scene like a sunset), while reflecting on any positive emotions arising in response to the pleasant event. The support group discussed topics and emotions related to chronic pain and opioid use/misuse. Following these interventions, all participants were shown images representing natural rewards (such as endearing animals, appealing foods, landscapes) or neutral images (furniture, neutral facial expressions, or household items). Researchers measured late positive potential (LPP) brain activity, which reflects attention to emotionally salient information, while participants viewed these images. In comparison to the control group, participants completing the MORE intervention showed greater LPP responses to natural reward images relative to neutral images and greater the LPP responses predicted reduced opioid cravings as reported by the participants.”

These results suggest that teaching people who misuse opioids to mindfully attend to positive aspects of their life may increase the perceived value of natural rewards – processes that may be diminished in those facing chronic pain or addiction – which may in turn help them to control opioid cravings.”

It is thrilling to see that this line of research is making a positive impact on the scientific community, and of course, the ultimate aim of this work is to alleviate human suffering.