Addicts Overcome Holiday Stress with Meditation

Dec. 23, 2010— -- It's going to be a difficult holiday season for a man named Demitrius, who didn't want to use his full name to protect his privacy.

Demitrius, now 28, won't be able to open gifts or ring in the new year with his family. Instead, he'll spend the holidays and the next several months serving out a court-mandated sentence at New York's Phoenix House, a residential and outpatient drug rehabilitation center. After he was arrested for selling drugs this past spring, his punishment was set at 15 months in residential treatment.

He's coping with his sadness in a way he never dreamed he would growing up in the tough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn: through meditation.

"I was skeptical. I never thought I would do it. Where I'm from, people don't do a lot of meditation classes," said Demitrius.

Now, he can't imagine making it through rehab -- and the stress of the holiday season -- without it.

"I can cope better with the fact that I'll be away from my family," he said. "I kind of use the exercises, like the simple breathing exercises, and it relaxes me and makes me more peaceful, and things don't bother me as much."

Mental health experts say meditation is a great tool for helping people overcome their addictions, and there's a growing body of research that backs up that assertion. It's quickly becoming another treatment tool clinicians can use to help people like Demitrius win their personal wars against addiction.

"Many of the triggers of addiction are somewhat stress-related, so in that sense, anything that's going to reduce stress is going to improve the behavior associated with addiction," said Dr. Vatsal Thakkar, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York.

The relaxed state brought on by meditation lowers the levels of stress hormones in the body.

"You learn to relax and learn to concentrate, which puts the brain in a state where it instinctively perceives the world as being less threatening," said Dr. Charles Raison, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behaviorial Science at Emory University School of Medicine at Atlanta. "When the brain is in that state, it signals the body that it doesn't have to release all those stress hormones."