Mindfulness is an approach to living with greater conscious attention, intention, and skill based on specific practices that facilitate this experience. These practices help people cultivate present-centered awareness of their internal and external experience—whether painful or pleasurable—with acceptance, and without judgment.

Mindfulness practices have been shown to reduce anxiety, depression, chronic pain intensity, trauma symptoms, and emotional reactivity, as well as to promote enhanced psychological flexibility, the ability to direct and maintain attention, and resilience.[1] By helping to regulate emotions, mindfulness practice reduces the impact of negative thoughts and thought patterns, leading to decreased stress and anxiety levels.

The wide range of practices that nurture mindfulness includes yoga, tai chi, and qi gong, but the most well-known is meditation. Meditation refers to various Self-awareness practices that focus on training our attention to bring unconscious autopilot processes under greater voluntary control and thereby develop greater mental and Emotional balance and well-being, along with specific capacities such as calmness, clarity, and concentration.[2]

Other specific benefits of mindfulness include:

• Improving emotional regulation. By learning to observe and accept thoughts and emotions without judgment, people can more intentionally manage their emotional responses and reduce reactivity.
• Mindfulness cultivates a more conscious connection with one’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations, leading to greater Self-awareness and Self-compassion.
• Mindfulness can help quiet racing thoughts, reduce rumination, and promote relaxation, leading to better quality and quantity of sleep.
• By shifting the relationship people have with pain and discomfort, mindfulness can help individuals better cope with chronic pain by reducing the subjective suffering associated with it.

In addition to this array of benefits, new research demonstrates that Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) can help rewire the brain’s response to natural, healthy pleasure, leading to reduced opioid cravings—perhaps related to improvements in mood and greater attention to positive experiences. The findings were published in April 2025 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).[3]

MORE combines mindfulness training, cognitive behavioral therapy, and elements of positive psychology to address addiction, emotional distress, and chronic pain concurrently. Mindfulness skills are utilized to help regulate cravings/urges to use, decrease pain, and regain the ability to enjoy natural, healthy pleasures, and experience greater joy and meaning in life.

All too frequently, opioid use disorder (OUD) develops through the use of opioids prescribed for chronic pain, a condition that affects approximately 50 million people in the U.S.[4] Due to the unavoidable physiological effects of opioids, even when taken as prescribed, over time, the brain and body become increasingly used to, tolerant of, and dependent on them. Consequently, past a certain point, people need to take opioids simply to feel “normal.” The need to recreate the pain relief that opioids provide and avoid the deep dysphoria of withdrawal drives people to continue to use them, often seeking higher doses to experience a fleeting sense of well-being—a cycle that can, and often does, lead to opioid addiction.

Within this deviation-amplifying dynamic, people progressively lose the ability to experience pleasure in previously enjoyed activities. With continued opioid use, the capacity to find pleasure in naturally rewarding experiences such as eating, sex, and being with friends and family increasingly diminishes.

The recent study by researchers at the University of California at San Diego included 160 individuals with chronic pain—both with and without OUD—recruited from primary care and pain clinics. Participants completed a positive emotion regulation (ER) task and questionnaires. A subsample of participants at risk for opioid misuse was randomly selected for one of three different courses of treatment: one-on-one counseling, eight weeks of MORE, or supportive group therapy, and then completed the same ER task at post-treatment and questionnaires through a three-month follow-up.

Participants with OUD showed difficulty evidencing positive emotions, as seen in weakened brain responses when they tried to savor images representing naturally rewarding objects and experiences, such as smiling babies, puppies, or a beautiful sunset. This blunting of positive emotions was directly linked to higher opioid cravings. However, the MORE therapy helped to heal this inability to savor by increasing brain responses to positive stimuli, which was associated with 50 percent lower opioid craving than supportive group therapy. The results indicate that MORE could play a beneficial role in helping people with OUD reset their emotions, gain control over cravings, and potentially reduce opioid misuse.

The current research is consistent with a 2023 study published in JAMA Psychiatry, which found that adding MORE to standard addictions care via telehealth resulted in a relapse rate of 42 percent less and a treatment dropout rate of 59 percent less when compared to standard addictions care alone.[5]

Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement can help effectively rewire the brain’s response to natural, healthy pleasure, leading to improved Emotional balance and reduced opioid cravings. These findings suggest that this could be an especially promising approach in the treatment of opioid use disorder.

Copyright 2025 Dan Mager, MSW