Why Mindfulness is a Better Recovery Tool than Distraction

The Precious Ones Who Fall into Addiction

My low tolerance for discomfort has meant I’ve spent most of my life trying to distract myself. When I worked as a nurse, we would jokingly refer to the particularly sensitive patients, the ones who had low tolerance for discomfort, as ‘a bit precious’ – I now can see that I’ve always been a bit precious.

We humans differ greatly in how we respond to mental and physical discomfort – this difference exists because we all interpret discomfort differently. Those of us who are more accepting of our discomfort, will end up suffering much less because of it.

One of the most dangerous ideas in the modern world is that our normal state should be happiness. If we buy into this myth (it seems most of us do at least partially) we will start to view any discomfort in our life as abnormal – something that needs to be avoided or fixed.

Physical and mental discomfort is a part of life, and there is no getting away from it. There are things we can do avoid unnecessary pain, but it is not going to be possible to be constantly happy. It is the idea that we should be trying to avoid or fix all of our discomfort that gets us into trouble.

The 3:00 A.M. obsessing over the state of our lives . . . the self-criticism for our “weakness” when we feel ourselves slipping into sadness … the desperate attempts to talk our hearts and bodies out of feeling…the way they do-all are mental gyrations that lead nowhere but farther down.
Mark Williams The Mindful Way Through Depression

What if most (all) of us who fall into addiction are just a bit precious? What if it is our low tolerance for discomfort that is driving us to choose extreme cures? What if we could learn to treat our moods and discomforts like the weather, would we still need to waste so much time trying to distract ourselves?

Why is Mindfulness Superior to Distraction?

One of my clients has been struggling to understand why mindfulness might be better than distraction for dealing with drug cravings. Keeping his mind off things has worked for him in the past, so why would want to try something different?

I agreed with him that distraction could be an effective short-term strategy for cravings, but what if it was this strategy that drove us into addiction in the first place? The problem with always trying to run away from things is it only strengthens our fear of these threats – perhaps by choosing distraction, we are reinforcing the idea ‘I can’t handle this, and I need something to fix me’.

The thing that makes alcohol or drug cravings so hard to deal with is the though ‘I shouldn’t be feeling this way’. I know from the past that if I just sit with a craving without resistance, it will always pass without half-an-hour – usually a lot less than this.

I’ve also found that every time I’m mindful of a craving, it becomes weaker until it stops visiting altogether. I haven’t had a single alcohol craving since I quit in 2006. I doubt this disappearance of cravings would have happened if I had just relied on distraction – I know this because I stopped drinking for 2 years during the nineties, and the cravings never really went away (check out my post on mindfully dealing with addiction cravings).

I can’t think of a single scenario where distraction would be a superior solution to mindfulness (please leave a comment in you can think of one). This is not to say that I’m always able to choose mindfulness when the shit hits the fan, but I know that the more I make this practice a part of my life, the bigger the challenges I can apply mindfulness to.

I’m no longer as ‘precious’ as I used to be, and my increased hardiness is thanks to mindfulness. I suggest that if you try replacing distraction with mindfulness, you will become hardier too. Perhaps you’ll start to see that it isn’t our discomfort that is the enemy but our desire to always escape it.