Mindfulness Addiction Therapy
Seeking therapy for an addiction can be a good way to set yourself free from a behavior that you don’t want to have any more. Some therapy treatments focus only on one particular addiction.
Mindfulness addiction therapy can be used to successfully treat any addiction. Because mindfulness helps people to focus and be aware of the present, this can help them to learn how to react when their body starts sending out signals for the substance.
There are many triggers that cause the body to react with a signal for a substance and one of these is stress. When you feel stressed, the emotions that go along with stress can trigger whatever addiction you may have.
Mindfulness addiction therapy teaches people ways to deal with addiction and how to bring them under control by changing the way that they respond to the emotions and desire for a craving.
When you practice mindfulness, it can center your focus on your breathing and help you to learn how to be more conscious of your thoughts and actions. Because of this, it can help you when the addiction cravings begin.
You’ll gain a better sense of control as well as being more mindful of making better choices for yourself and what’s healthier for you. One of the things that can cause an addiction to hold people in its grip is the cycle of a habit.
Negative emotions can trigger a negative response, which then causes a reaction in you that’s negative but you might have set up as positive. For example, the addiction smoking is often triggered by stress or negative emotions in relation to negative situations.
The negative response is that you then choose to smoke. When you smoke, the nicotine release causes you to feel relief from the stress, so you see that as a positive.
This reinforces the effect of smoking. Mindfulness can break the habit by allowing you to deal with the nicotine craving. Practicing mindfulness will show you that a craving is simply a feeling that you can focus on rather than run from.
It teaches you to find the connection between the craving and what’s going on internally. It’s the same concept with having a food addiction. People who have a food addiction will turn to food to deal with emotion.
Plus, certain foods do have an addictive quality to them. When you eat food, it makes your emotions feel better for a while. These emotions, such as happiness, then reinforce that the habit is good.
Mindfulness can help you break the food addiction by showing you how that food is neither good nor bad and by being aware of the sensations within your body, you can control the cravings.
Taking drugs is something that people often do in order to escape from the pressures of their life. By taking the drugs, they gain the escape which also reinforces the addiction.
Mindfulness can help to take away the control that a drug has over a person’s actions. An alcohol addiction can also benefit from practicing mindfulness. Learning mindfulness can make you understand the feelings that you’re experiencing that are causing you to have the alcohol addiction.
You’ll learn not to judge yourself for the feelings that cause you to crave the alcohol and you’ll also learn to accept yourself with positive reinforcement rather than giving place to negative self-talk. Mindfulness can set you free from situations that may cause you to want to give in to the addiction.
