As Step Eleven of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous implies, meditation can help us to be sober from, and otherwise have a healthy relationship with, addictive behavior. Meditation is, in its essence, a spiritual activity, and true spirituality and addictiveness are mutually-exclusive opposites.
One way that meditation and mindfulness can be helpful with taming addictions is similar to the ways in which we focus the mind in meditation, continually bringing it back when it wanders away. Similarly, we can stay mindfully grounded in the moment without being hijacked by our addictive urges.
Compelling addictive and compulsive temptations tell us, “this impulse to act is my true and best self”, but, really, they are just passing whims. We can start to untangle those urges, becoming aware of the internal mental talk and images about what how important it is to act on the urge and how happy we will be if we do, without believing them. We can tune into euphoric memory recall sensations in the body that come up with craving, and just enjoy their pleasure, just as one might simply enjoy a movie preview without needing to see the whole movie (i.e. without having to have the entire addictive episode).
Since all addictions involve both running towards a pleasure and running away from discomfort, we can make space for and fully experience and grow to tolerate uncomfortable impulsive “driver urges” in the body without letting them grab control and drive us to action. We can sit and watch the wave of impulse and desire wash through – slowing down, watching it come and go, arising and passing – without climbing on.
And if it’s too late, and we are already caught up in an addictive episode, mindfulness can help here too. Instead of spacing out and getting indulgently lost in pleasure, we can pay close in-the-moment attention to our lived experience of an addictive episode – for example, how our body feels and what thoughts are going through our mind. If we are unable to stop or change the habit, we can at least do it with a more full awareness. I’ve heard this called, “Staying upright when we fall down”.
One other helpful tool is self-friendliness, aka “lovingkindness”, practice. Bringing some softness and warm-hearted and patient acceptance instead of self-condemnation and panic can bring all sorts of benefits – helping us to resist new addictive urges, bringing an episode to a stop once we are in it, and forgiving ourself once an episode is over. The latter can make future episodes less likely – studies have found that people who work on loving their bodies just the way they are succeed at diets more often.
In general, the more we work any sort of meditation and mindfulness into our days, the fewer addictive urges we will have, and the more ability we will have to be larger and stronger than them.