Mindfulness can be a powerful tool for changing habits, and for helping to manage craving for cigarettes. Most of what we do is habitual or automatic. Our brains have evolved to make simple rewarding actions unconscious so that we don’t have to spend energy and resources making the same decision over and over. After a behavior is repeated often enough, it becomes triggered by ‘cues’ (environmental or internal) rather than by our intentions.
Unfortunately, our motivations and intentions for doing things like stopping smoking are usually initiated and maintained in the more rational, logical, executive processes of our brain. To think about stopping smoking takes energy. And any actions to change an habitual behavior like smoking also requires energy to resist the impulse to smoke and then decide upon and initiate a new ‘action’.
So where does mindfulness fit in? Mindfulness is being present with whatever we are feeling, seeing, hearing, touching or thinking, with curiosity, and acceptance. Mindfulness can bring awareness to activities that have become automatic and unconscious. Mindfulness can be used to make conscious the urge or accompanying feelings that underlie smoking. This allows a bit of ‘breathing room’ to be aware of the impulse to reach for a cigarette, and then to consciously choose to do something different, something more in line with the values we have for a healthy smoke free life.
Each time a person feels like smoking, and does something different, the new behavior takes one more step toward being the new automatic habit. The automatic and healthy habit of living tobacco free.
Michael V. Burke, Ed.D
Program Director and NDC Counselor/ CTTS
