Contrary to popular misconceptions, addictions are not something ‘out there’ among drug users, gamblers, and alcoholics. Addictions are a spectrum, meaning that most of us have it, some less and others more. We can get addicted to anything – the internet, ideas, people, objects, power, physical appearance, even some illusory moments in the future, such as finding our ideal partner or paying off the mortgage. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a natural way to treat our addictions? Luckily, science has now proved that there is – and comes in the form of meditation. A widely used tool to help anyone struggling with an addiction nowadays is meditation.
Meditation is a natural way to help us treat addiction because it:
- Helps us enjoy the present moment as it is, without needing anything extra to make it better.
- Reprograms the addictive parts of our brain
- Helps us master self-regulation, self-control, and reward processing skills
- Trains us to observe ourselves, our thoughts, emotions, and triggers and work with them in a healthy way
- Teaches us a new loving and compassionate approach towards ourselves, the disowned parts of ourselves, and our addictions.
Addictions – The What and the Why
Addictions revolve around the belief: “Once I get ________(fill in the blank), I will be happy.” Whenever we allocate our much longed-for fulfillment to something outside ourselves, we are forming an addictive relationship towards it. Anything that alienates us from the present moment’s joy and the happiness we get to feel right here and now may breed ground for an addiction or an unhealthy attachment – the line between these two is growing thinner and thinner.
Dr. Gabor Maté, a worldly acclaimed specialist on addictions, mental health issues, and childhood development defined addictions in the following way: “any behavior that a person craves, finds temporary pleasure or relief in, and then suffers long-term negative consequences as the result of, but is incapable of giving up despite those negative consequences. So, the features of addiction are craving, relief, temporary pleasure, negative consequence, inability to give it up. That’s what an addiction is. Any addiction.”
Why the Addiction Is There?
Addictions are bad, we get that. But as Dr, Maté points out, it’s important that we show some compassion for our addictive selves. He suggests nurturing an approach of compassionate curiosity – looking into not what was wrong about the addiction, but what was right about it. What was its value? Perhaps it made you feel more lively, joyous, or it helped you soothe the pain. As Dr. Maté explains, these are all perfectly normal human aspirations. So, it’s important to recognize that the addiction served a purpose.
In pretty much any case of addiction, there is some underlying pain that we need to escape from. And it’s probably no surprise – the pain comes from childhood. It’s either a consequence of direct trauma such as abuse, or developmental trauma. In the case of the latter, the pain is not so much about something bad that happened, but about something good that didn’t happen. Perhaps the child wasn’t seen, received, and held emotionally simply because the parents were too stressed or overwhelmed. And here sensitivity, which is a genetic trait, plays a crucial role. The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to have experienced some kind of pain. And the more trauma you had, the greater the risk of addiction.
The Hungry Ghost Realm
In Buddhism, there is a concept often used to explain our addictions – the Hungry Ghost Realm. The Hungry Ghost has a large mouth, a large belly but a small neck. So, although it is constantly craving something, there is only so much of it it can fit. Anyone struggling with the hungry ghost has symptoms of secret hunger, as if there is something missing and no matter how hard they try, they can’t seem to satiate it. They try food, money, love, sex, but nothing seems to fill it.
“This is the domain of addiction, where we constantly seek for something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable yearning for relief or fulfillment. The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need.” Gabor Maté
Addiction Versus Connection
There is a famous story about the American soldiers who went to Vietnam and got addicted to heroin there. Once the war ended, everybody was concerned because so many addicts were returning home. What happened was that 95% of the veterans stopped using once they came back to their previous lives and their families. It turned out that heroin was something they used to cope with the dreadful conditions they found themselves in. Their addiction was a form of adaptation.
Human beings have an inherent need to bond with others and form connections. And once these connections are missing, we will try to connect with anything we can. And that’s how addictions arise. “So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. (J. Hari)”
In fact, when I distributed my questionnaire on addictions to 24 of my Facebook friends and acquaintances, over 27% answered that they used their addiction to deal with isolation and loneliness. What does this tell you about the state of the human spirit?
As for the Rest of the Questionnaire Respondents:
- 52% said that they were using their addiction to fill a hole inside them, they felt something was missing
- 48% wanted to increase the pleasure of the present moment
- 45% reported using their addiction to deal with unpleasant feelings and emotions
The most common addictions were cigarettes (45%), people/partners (28%), and food (28%) followed by drugs (14%), and sex (14%).
(When it comes to your sex habits, head over to this article to learn how to balance your chakras for a healthy sexuality. And as for partners, see for yourself here how meditation and mindfulness can help you nurture and tend to your relationships with your loved ones.)
On Needing MORE
The misery of always needing something more and something which is not there to be happy creates a vicious cycle. Usually, by the time we get this ‘more’ we wanted, our expectations have far exceeded the real gains. And then we need more-more. More promotion, more money, more friends, more experiences, more, more and more.
I was once addicted to experiences – I craved novelty. First, I wanted the experience of traveling to a new country each month, then of being a digital nomad, then of a writer, a circus trainer, and, finally, a yoga teacher. I had in fact got addicted to discovering myself and everything else I can do and be in my life. In the meantime, a tradeoff was inevitable. I lost some friends, did not get too good at the things I was already doing, and didn’t set myself financially at an age when it was high time to do it.
Many people get addicted to self-development. “I want to be the best that I can” is a common phrase we hear nowadays. Be careful with this one, too. If you have to be improving yourself all the time to feel okay about yourself, doesn’t this mean that something is not right? Consider if perhaps it’s time to settle for the philosophy which Donald Winnicott, a British psychologist, called ‘good enough.’
(We wrote more on the ‘good enough’ approach in our post on the paradox of choice and choice paralysis. It’s great philosophy to go by now in the era of choice paralysis when we tend to have a hard time making decisions – which book to buy, where to go on holidays, etc. All these decisions are taking us a lot more time and energy than they used to when there weren’t so many choices around. For making better decisions, or making decisions easier, check out that post.)
Every time you go for something more, bear in mind that there is something you are losing at the same time. Each yes to something is a no to something else. There’s only so much you can do in one life. You can only be in one place at any given time. And that’s all you really have – this moment right now. No matter how many tabs and articles you just opened, there is only one you could be physically reading right now.
Have Addictions Become Normal?
I saw a funny quote on Facebook some years ago: “If you think you’ve found a person of your dreams, go and spend a week with them somewhere with a bad internet connection.” Most of our addictions we perhaps do not even know we have because they are so much a part of our lives. We tend to take for granted that coffee in the morning.
“Everybody Else Is Doing It Too”
Some years ago, I dated a guy who used drugs. However, since this was in Berlin, and Berlin is pretty liberal about drugs, and everything else, for that matter, it was hard to draw the line between the ‘normal’ and ‘addictive’ use of drugs, since ‘everybody else was doing it too’. Ketamine on a Wednesday, speed on a Thursday to help you finish your work on time, where was the line? It seemed that as long as you were functional, drugs or any other vices were okay.
If you’ve noticed you have any addictions, notice if you’re using the fact that these vices are ‘normal’ in your reality to justify them. As I was reading the results from the questionnaire on addictions, I noticed most of the people were addicted to cigarettes. My first instinct was to discard this as a standard addiction. But is it? How can inhaling stinky poisonous stuff in your body be considered standard? Doesn’t it tell you that something is off?
Substituting One Addiction for Another
If you have an addictive personality, this is a common trap to get into. The same guy I dated, when he decided to stop using, switched over to spirituality and Ayahuasca retreats. Indeed, many people can even use spirituality and meditation as their next high.
If you’re already meditating, observe your relationship with meditation. Are you using it as your salvation, or just as something to complement your state of being, your feeling of you?
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”
This is a great approach to adopt whenever you catch yourself in that storm of needing something badly. It means that you are not too attached to something external, but you would enjoy a healthy amount of pleasure in it. I understood how this approach works during my Vipassana 10 day silent meditation retreat. Back then I had many addictions. Although I didn’t do much meditating there, being closed off from my vices of the time helped me establish a new relationship with them. I remember the last day when we could finally talk, I said to another retreat goer: “I would like a cup of coffee. I’m not craving my coffee, but it would be nice to have one.”
There is a thin line between savoring and craving. Find it. Treat your objects of desire as what Marshall Rosenberg called “flowers for your table, not air for your lungs.”
Mindful Awareness Exercise
Pick your vice, be it social media, your daily workout, sweets, or the fridge. If it’s the fridge, notice how you ‘enter’ it, how badly you need whatever is inside it. Whenever you catch yourself needing something too much, take a step back, take a breath, and ground yourself in your body.
How Meditation Help You With Addiction:
- Meditation helps you deal with stress (and so does Yoga Nidra that is too easy not to give it a try), anxiety (if you are one of many to struggle with it, check this post), depression, or lack of sleep, which many people report having once they stop their addiction. For many, these are the reasons why they relapse.
- Meditation teaches you to observe yourself. You become more aware and in control of your thoughts, emotions, and triggers and learn how to work with them. It helps you discover your blind spots.
- Including meditation in your life invites you to change your mindset from result/award oriented, which is what got you in trouble in the first place, to process-oriented. Once you stop craving a specific result, that next dopamine surge, and start treating life as a process with no end goals in mind, you are able to enjoy the present moment and yourself as you are right now. Meditation helps you realize that there is no some magic goal in life that once you reach, you are free. Instead, you start treating life as a process, with all its ups and downs becoming the normal and manageable part of living.
- Meditation helps you meet your underlying emotional trauma, unmet needs, and wants which are the reasons why the addiction was there in the first place. It helps you understand what hole are you trying to fill in with your addiction. It teaches you to be understanding and accepting of what you feel is missing inside you. By treating those rejected and hidden parts of yourself, you improve as a whole.
- It teaches you patience and perseverance, which anybody who has struggled with an addiction sure needs.
- Meditation is a priceless form of self-care which those with an addiction or any self-destructive habit lack. It helps you be more loving and compassionate towards yourself, and this is necessary as anyone with an addiction is struggling with some sort of lack of self-love.
- Meditation helps you reprogram your brain. Because your addiction has shaped your brain in certain ways, using meditation helps you reshape it in a way that is more conducive to feeling natural pleasures and joys. Science has proved that it can reprogram the parts of the brain in charge of reward processing, self-regulation and self-control, all of which those with an addiction struggle with.
- Meditation helps you understand when you alone can’t cope with your addiction. It helps you observe yourself, how you deal with your addiction and when it’s time to get help. Many addiction treatment centers use meditation as a complementary tool.
- It changes how you view yourself and your addiction so that you develop a more positive and optimistic perspective towards yourself, others, and life in general.
- It helps treat our mental health issues which all too often those with addiction have.
- Meditation techniques such as counting deep breaths and grounding in the body help ride the wave of your next craving.
- Meditation helps you develop the capacity to be in the present moment, which people with addictions are known to be bad at. They are usually ruminating over the past, craving their high, or dreading the future. By learning to be in the present moment, you learn to connect with others and create deep, meaningful, and fulfilling relationships that were often missing when you were just thinking about your drug of choice.
Conclusion
Addiction does not happen in isolation. It is usually a symptom of something missing in your life. In our crazy modern instant gratification world, the question is not whether you have an addiction, but which one is it. Many with addictions use meditation to help them cope. It helps you develop a compassionate and grounded approach towards yourself, your wounds, and your addiction. So, next time you feel you need something outside of yourself a bit too much, consider taking a few deep breaths and grounding yourself in your body and this moment right now. Perhaps it’s not a bad moment at all?
Tatjana Glogovac, Senior Contributor At L’Aquila Active
Learn more about Tatjana by reading her bio below.
Click on link below to meet L’Aquila Active’s entire team of experts, including university degrees, certifications, and credentials on yoga and meditation: