I have seen some amazing things and even treated conditions you would never dream of calling a chiropractor for. Mindfulness plays a key role in my overall approach to care. Chiropractic and mindfulness are both holistic, whole-being approaches to better health.
Recently, esteemed Harvard psychologist and mindfulness expert Dr. Ellen Langer joined me on my podcast, Adjusted Reality. Dr. Langer is an expert on the mind’s influence on health. She speaks about what she calls “attention to symptom variability,” a systematic method for noticing changes in chronic condition symptoms and using that insight to identify and address possible triggers.
I discuss the mind’s influence with my patients at length. It was one reason so many of them came to me, searching for relief from chronic pain. Maybe it was pain from some unknown cause. Maybe they wanted alternatives to opioids because a physician prescribed them for an injury—and now they’re addicted.
For some addictions, it’s not just the drug that’s the problem. Sensory, behavioral, and psychosocial components get bundled in, creating a knot that can be hard to untie. Vaping, for instance, involves nicotine, which is extremely addictive, but there can also be pleasurable sensations from breathing in the vapor or sucking on the vape pen.
When something triggers a craving and the person vapes to relieve that craving, the cycle is fed, and the addiction drags on.
The Attention to Symptom Variability Approach
Attention to symptom variability can work well for treating addiction. When people with addictions pay attention to their symptoms—for instance, the urge to vape—they often see patterns over time.
Dr. Langer recommends tracking these by journaling. When someone realizes that hanging around with a certain friend is one of their addiction triggers, that’s huge progress!
Now, it’s possible to examine that friendship to see how healthy it is for the addicted person. Becoming mindful of triggers helps people with addictions avoid vulnerable situations and replace their addiction with something healthier. Using nicotine patches to decrease the chemical need combined with a mindfulness approach to meet behavioral and emotional needs is one example.
Noticing change can help us break free from fixed beliefs, including thoughts such as, “There’s no real reason I drink too much, eat too much, or smoke too much. It’s just how I am, and I can’t do anything about it.”
Other areas in life where we get “stuck” to unhealthy behaviors can be helped by mindfulness, too. It’s all too common to amble through the day without thinking, and it can become a default state where we’re prone to making poor choices.
When we are mindful, however, we are empowered with greater control and can make better choices. All of these healthy changes open up still more possibilities! We become less rigid in our daily lives and more willing to explore, taking the long way home from work.
When we’re mindful, we may ask different questions. If those questions are about our health, we may decide that the “conventional drug therapy approach,” the “easy,” drug-laden way, is not helping and opt for a whole-being approach such as chiropractic. Choices that favor thriving over surviving become more frequent.
My interview with Dr. Langer served me well when, a short time later, I found myself deep in conversation with a young man who had opened up to me about his vaping addiction.
“You know,” I said, “It’s probably not all about vaping.” His response to this was to acknowledge his nicotine addiction.
I explained that there was likely more to it than that, and he said, “Well, tell me how that works.”
When we finished talking, we agreed that for the next six weeks, he would document his cravings, asking himself why he wanted to vape. Had he just had a stressful conversation? Was he overtired? Did he need to unwind? Whatever it was, he would write it down, look for connections to other needs and triggers, and we would talk about it when the six weeks were up.
So, did the young man notice any patterns or connect any dots? I don’t know because the six weeks aren’t up. But I look forward to that conversation and am hopeful he finds space for something in his life that’s better for him than vaping. And I’m confident that he can do it.
I hope you’ll read more about mindfulness and the power of mindsets in treating chronic illness and chronic pain.
