A new method of stress reduction may also help ease addiction to nicotine, a study conducted by professors at the University of Oregon and Texas Tech shows.
The latest in a series of experiments related to stress reduction conducted by Texas Tech professor Yi-Yuan Tang, who once taught at the UO, and current UO professor Michael I. Posner over the last six years has reduced tobacco use by 60 percent within the control group in which the study was conducted.
The method for this reduction in tobacco use is attributed to a method of meditation called integrative body-mind training. The method relaxes the mind and takes the focus off of thought. It is meant to reduce stress, but in the experiment that Tang and Posner conducted at Texas Tech, integrative body-mind training showed that it can reduce nicotine addiction as well.
“It’s a version of mindfulness meditation,” Posner said of the method. “Instead of struggling to try and relax and try and concentrate on one thing, Tang tries to get people to relax into the state. You try to keep your mind focused in the present, but not on any specific thing, and he gets them to do that by concentrating on breath and eventually just concentrating – preventing the mind from wandering from thought to thought as it commonly does.”
Tang and Posner gathered a handful of undergraduate volunteers to conduct an experiment that would potentially reduce stress and improve performance. Of the handful, 27 were smokers who smoked an average of 10 cigarettes per day. The volunteers were unaware that the real reason behind the experiment was to see whether Tang and Posner’s method could lessen addiction to nicotine.
“As far as we knew they didn’t have any intention to quit. Now after the test, we asked them about the intention to quit and we found that it was unrelated to their degree of reduction in smoking. We didn’t find intention being related to the reduction in smoking,” Posner said.
Integrative body-mind training is a form of mindfulness training that was developed in and has long been practiced in China. Tang uses it to provide full body meditation. Tang and Posner used the meditation to target the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate that is related to self-control.
“It’s involved in a lot of different addictions, and many other things, and it has connections to lots of other parts of the brain,” Posner said of the anterior cingulate. “We’ve shown in our previous work that these connections were increased in efficiency with training. This is what kind of led us to the hypothesis that might serve as a way of improving addictions.”
The method increased activity in the anterior cingulate resulting in reduced tobacco use in the subjects. Posner is hopeful that the results of his and Tang’s experiment will catch on and ultimately reduce tobacco addiction.
“You never know what people will pick up on. We hope that people will pursue it and also look at other forms of addiction,” Posner said. “If we’re right, it will give people a whole other way of reducing tobacco addiction.”