“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.” – Mark Twain
“Tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of death and disease in the United States. Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year, with more than 41,000 of these deaths from exposure to secondhand smoke. In addition, smoking-related illness in the United States costs more than $300 billion a year. In 2013, an estimated 17.8% (42.1 million) U.S. adults were current cigarette smokers.” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known. But, its addictiveness is not just due to its pharmacological properties. Addiction to smoking also involves learned or conditioned factors, genetics, and social and environmental factors. This makes it easy to become addicted and very difficult to stop. To some extent this is why there still are high rates of smoking even though mostly everyone understands that it has very negative effects on health and longevity.
There are a wide variety of methods and strategies to quit smoking which are to some extent effective. According to the National Institutes of Health, about 40% of smokers who want to quit make a serious attempt to do so each year, but fewer than 5% actually succeed. Most people require three or four failed attempts before being successful. One problem is that after quitting if a single cigarette is smoked, going back to regular smoking is almost assured. As John Polito wrote “nicotine dependency recovery is one of the few challenges in life where being 99% successful all but assures 100% defeat.”
So, better methods to quit which can not only promote quitting but also prevent relapse are badly needed. In today’s Research News article “Randomized trial comparing mindfulness training for smokers to a matched control”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4121076/
Davis and colleagues compared the efficacy of a mindfulness training for smokers (MTS) program to the American Lung Association’s Freedom from Smoking (FFS) program. The MTS program included meditation, group support, and instruction on mindful management of smoking triggers, urges, addictive thoughts and emotions. They applied these programs to quitting smoking with low socioeconomic status smokers, a very difficult segment of the population to treat. Both groups used nicotine patches for the first two weeks of treatment.
They found that at four weeks after the end of treatment 35% of the mindfulness training group and 34% of the FFS group were smoking abstinent. But at 24 weeks 25% of the mindfulness group were still abstinent compared to 18% for the FFS group. This suggests that mindfulness may be helpful in maintaining abstinence after successful quitting of smoking. The mindfulness training group not surprisingly had higher mindfulness scores. Importantly, they showed lower urges to smoke after quitting. In addition, the mindfulness training group showed a lower tendency to avoid experiences. It is important to note that mindfulness training had these effects in a low socioeconomic status group which have traditionally been found to be difficult to treat.
These are exciting results and suggest that mindfulness training may be an important addition to programs for smoking cessation. It appears that mindfulness may be effective by reducing urges to smoke. Mindfulness training increases focus of an acceptance of the present moment. After the physiological symptoms of smoking withdrawal are over the most difficult issues that tend to produce relapse are learned environmental and social triggers to smoke. It is possible that mindfulness training allows the individual to be better at understanding and accepting these triggers and not avoid experiences but confront them. This may then decrease the urge to smoke and improve abstinence.
Regardless of the mechanism, mindfulness training appears to be a beneficial addition to smoking cessation programs. Of course, further research is needed.
So, quit smoking mindfully.
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies