Mindfulness Alcohol Treatment – Unfold A New Chapter in Your Life with This Innovative Headway

Mindfulness is characterized by "a non-judgmental way of paying attention to emotions in the present moment." With mindfulness you need to focus your attention in the present moment.

If your mind keeps wandering in the past and the future or when strong emotions and cravings originate, mindfulness refocuses the mind to the present moment iteratively.

In the battle against addiction, the concept of mindfulness was introduced by American psychologist Alan Marlatt in the 1980s. The professor used the ancient Vipassana mindfulness technique over a group of prison inmates to help them overcome their alcohol and drug addiction and recover successfully.

Since then, mindfulness has been integrated into various western addiction treatments. These include:

• Mindfulness based Stress Reduction
• Mindfulness based Cognitive Therapy
• Mindfulness based Relapse Prevention
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
• Dialectical Behavioural Therapy
• Functional Analytical Psychotherapy
• Cognitive Behavioural Analysis System of Psychotherapy

The goals of mindfulness in alcohol addiction treatment

• The key objectives of mindfulness in curbing addiction include:
• To increase the consciousness of triggers or cues of alcohol addiction.
• To interrupt habitual reactive responses.
• To shift the patient’s thought process from an “automatic pilot” zone to a “mindful observer” area.
• To increase the patient’s tolerance level of discomfort.
• To decrease the urge to alleviate painful emotions with alcohol.
• To acknowledge the “present-day moment” instead of concentrating on the past/future “fixation”.

How to implement mindfulness in alcohol treatment?

In order to incorporate mindfulness based treatment at your alcohol abuse rehab, you need to embrace the person-centric approach. This indicates the acceptance and espousal of a non-judgmental viewpoint that enables you to fabricate an attachment with your addicted patient and create an ecosystem of “unequivocal forbearance”.

Once you’ve built this environment, you’ll need to have various meditation techniques implemented. Amid the meditation process, the patient is required to focus intensely on an object. 

It’s generally the exhalation of air through the nose. This is called mindfulness of breathing. As the mind wanders the patient must try to realign on the object and feel the breath of exhaled air while it’s leaving the nose and touching the lips.

You can implement the following commonly practised meditation techniques.

• Body scanning methodology
• Sedentary and sitting meditation (focused breathing that intensifies awareness, emotions and thoughts all through the body)
• Mountain meditation
• Walking meditation

These meditation techniques are typically carried out in sundry group sessions. You’ll need to instruct your patients about the process and they’ll perform these actions on their own.

You should also include “urge surfing” in this specialized treatment. Urges are considered to be distressful feelings sparked off by a cortisol build-up. 

The concept teaches the patient to only observe their urges and cravings as waves that ebb and rise. They shouldn’t put efforts in combatting or controlling the urge. 

Thus the patient learns how not to react to their cravings which eventually weaken in intensity and disappear altogether if performed correctly and consistently.

• Benefits of mindfulness in alcohol addiction treatment
• The immediate advantages of mindfulness in preventing alcohol dependence are as follows:
• Normalization of heartbeat rate
• Normalization of blood pressure
• Stimulation of a calming and relaxing response
• Settling of stress-provoking responses
• Rousing of sensory awareness 
• Activation of enhanced control towards distraction from alcohol attention

The long-term advantages of mindfulness are the following:

• Dampening of reactivity to stressful situations
• Generation of increased positive emotions
• Formation of increase self-awareness and insight