Meditate Out of Addiction: Study Further Proves Meditation Helps Recovery
December 30th, 2013
A paper by computer scientist Dr. Yariv Levy and colleagues published in Frontiers in Psychiatry suggests that aggregating meditation to traditional therapies can significantly increase acquisition and maintenance of sobriety for those struggling with addiction.
“Our higher-level conclusion is that a treatment based on meditation-like techniques can be helpful as a supplement to help someone get out of addiction,” Levy says in an article in Psych Today. “We give scientific and mathematical arguments for this.”
What makes Levy’s study different is his use of computer-simulation research, specifically what he calls a knowledge repository (KR) model. In using this computational model, Levy takes his statistics from other peoples’ theories and studies before performing his own experiments on actual human or animal subjects.
“I am a theoretician, so I use other peoples’ studies and try to see how they work together and how experiments fit in,” Levy said.
To come up with the evidence to back meditation incorporation to addiction treatment, Levy observed three virtual case studies, each of which represented a “different trajectory of allostatic state during escalation of cigarette smoking.”
Levy’s final recommendation from his findings?
“This investigation provides formal arguments encouraging current rehabilitation therapies to include meditation-like practices along with pharmaceutical drugs and behavioral counseling.”
-Sharon Frajilich, Editor
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