By Lesley Logan

Many people in early and continuing recovery from addiction must learn how to deal with triggers, cravings, and uncomfortable feelings of anxiety that can often cause relapse. After decades of disasters and lizard-brain single-mindedness before finally waving the flag of surrender, they come to realize that change is imperative if they want to live a happy and joyous life, free from the burden of addiction. But addicts can be highly resistant to – and terrified of – change. And changing one’s daily habits, even for the non-addicted, is difficult and potentially stressful.

WHAT, ME CHANGE?
“I didn’t even like the amped up feeling I got from smoking crack,” says a former addict. “Every night, grinding my teeth and my heart pumping out of my chest, I’d swear ‘I am done,’ but I’d be on the pipe the next day. I felt like I was using against my will.”

Heroin addicts, pill-abusers, alcoholics, sex addicts, gamblers: they too realize that their disease has its own insidious agenda:  to demolish the addicts’ best intentions, completely control their daily choices, and kill them in the process.

Addiction researchers have followed the lives of separated twins, adopted children whose biological parents were drinkers and drug-abusers, and family systems with the disease, and while the genes are an important predictor of abuse, scientists have come to believe that addiction is a combination of genes and environment. Childhood bereavement, sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome, physical pain, and untreated mental disorders can induce addiction and extreme self-medication in a person who doesn’t have a known family history of drink and drug abuse.

All of which is to say that the disease is just as powerful, cunning and baffling as Alcoholics Anonymous characterizes it in the Big Book, written in 1939. It takes powerful medicine to combat. The ever-expanding understanding of how the brain and body work has shed light on what drugs and alcohol actually do in the brain and nervous system, what happens when the abuser stops using, and what new daily habits can heal the mind, body and spirit. As Nadine, clean for over 30 years, used to (arguably) say, “Good habits are as hard to break as bad habits.”

BRAIN OF AN ADDICT
According to an article published in a peer-reviewed journal, written by then-Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry Dr. Maria Sullivan and Dr. David Mysels, who was a Research Fellow in the Division on Substance Abuse while on staff at the Columbia Center for Addictions, there is scientific proof that active addicts and alcoholics have basically short-circuited their natural production of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin in the body and in the brain.

“The brain’s ‘feel-good’ chemistry will shut down when a drug or drink is introduced; the drug blasts the brain with dopamine (an ‘excitatory’ brain chemical that promotes energy and pleasure),” explain Drs. Sullivan and Mysels. “Since our brain likes to stay in calm balance, it will shut down its own natural dopamine production, and the brain receptors become ‘deaf’ to dopamine, so it takes a lot more of this good brain chemical to make an addict feel happy than it should.

“This is one reason that a sense of well-being is never part of the addict’s mind-set. In addition, when the brain is bombarded with chronic drug use, even though the bursts of feel-good dopamine are short, their intensity is disturbing to the brain, which makes an effort to stay in balance by producing more dynorphin, a ‘downer’ brain chemical that causes sadness and slowing of motor activity. So, when we’re in the throes of addiction, our brain actually tries to oppose our quest for self-destruction by counteracting the drug effects in order to stay self-regulated.”  This neurobiological trickery fools the user into thinking he or she has a handle on any underlying dysfunctions.

This and many other studies have shown that when the drug of choice is out of the system, the immediate withdrawal period is commonly marked by discomfort, anxiety, depression, or manic energy – such as when adrenaline production, after being shut down by opiates of abuse, suddenly goes into high gear.

According to the study, “Afterwards, there’s also a longer period in which the brain is still flooded with dynorphin, the depressant brain chemical it had previously needed to oppose the drug of abuse; this is the ‘dry drunk’ state of mind. Eventually, the brain starts to turn down production of this ‘downer’ and the endorphins, dopamine and serotonin kick in again.” But this takes time, as does any healing.

For many newly recovering people, the implacable fact of extreme clinical depression, bipolarity, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), or paralyzing anxiety – usually the very disorders that the user sought to relieve by self-medication – may require pharmacological and/or therapeutic treatment by professionals. Not everyone experiences the famous “pink cloud” spoken of in early recovery. “I knew I had depression from an early age, but it wasn’t until I got clean and sober that I had to face anxiety and panic,” says a recovering woman who eschewed antidepressants and other medications, and who worked long and hard in therapy to battle these monsters that kept her drinking for decades.

THE HEALING POWER OF SITTING STILL
However, there is also ample evidence that a daily meditation practice can relieve the same symptoms and in a deeper, more organic way – and without the exorbitant costs of psychiatrists and medication. It is a narrower path perhaps, requiring effort and patience, but the payoffs are huge. Studies that monitor practiced meditators’ electrical brain activity through EEGs, such as the well-known experiments done at Massachusetts General Hospital, have proven that the brain’s activity is measured in the movement of waves, from slow to fast: delta, theta, alpha and beta. Beta is the state of the busy brain, the monkey mind, leaping from thought to memory to emotion. Theta is the state of deep relaxation, but due to alpha waves in the back of the brain, the relaxation of the experienced meditator is not a narcoleptic state, but rather a calm awareness of one’s surroundings, and increasing emotional detachment from the passing clouds of thought and judgment.

The ultimate results of meditation can increase attention span, reduce pain perception, and enhance performance. Until we experience meditation’s effects, we are only dimly aware of how exhausting our normal beta state is, and how much we invest meaning to the inner chatter. Even a new meditator will soon find in everyday life that they can access the deeper consciousness and awareness that becomes possible in theta states of meditation. Imaging has also shown that the amygdala, where stress and upset occur, often develops a thicker wall through meditation, and becomes less active. (Prior to imaging technology, autopsies of chronic drinkers and long-time drug abusers were found to have smaller and more damaged amygdalae than in non-abusers).

Other benefits of meditation are impressive:

1. Lowers the consumption of oxygen.
2. Reduces anxiety or panic attacks.
3. Increases mental focus.
4. Increases blood flow and slows the heart rate.
5. Helps maintain a more constant and deeper level of relaxation.
6. Slows respiratory rate.
7. Increases cardio exercise tolerance in heart patients.
8. Can reduce high blood pressure.
9. Builds confidence and produces creative thinking.
10. Reduces Pre-Menstrual Syndrome.
11. Helps to relieve mental and emotional stress.

Meditation’s healing power has become accepted as a potent psychological as well as spiritual tool, especially for the antsy, uncomfortable, racing minds of the newly clean and sober. It’s interesting that, in the America of the 1930s, Bill Wilson recommended meditation in the Eleventh Step of AA, although he would likely have had a more traditional Judeo-Christian kind of meditation in mind; not necessarily sitting on a cushion in a zendo or ashram.

BELIEVE YOUR EYES
There is something slightly absurd about “proving” scientifically the benefits of meditation and yoga practice, which have existed for thousands of years in ancient cultures throughout the world. We in the modernized west like proof obtained in laboratory studies, but if in your travels you have ever come across a true yogi, bodhisattva, sunnyasin or Buddhist monk with decades of daily practice, you know you are in the presence of someone extraordinary, even holy, who exudes light, calm, humor and grace.

So, as the saying goes in meditation circles: don’t just do something, sit there.

Lesley Logan has worked for many years in book and magazine publishing in all capacities. She is also the author of many guide books.