Researchers have found that a mindfulness-based therapy, including savoring natural rewards, can help patients with chronic pain and opioid addiction.
Garland’s study focused on 250 adults who had received opioid therapy for chronic pain for 90 days or longer, randomly assigning them to eight weeks of either a standard psychotherapy support group or Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) therapy, which combines mindfulness training, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and positive psychology. Nine months after getting these treatments in primary care settings, 45 percent of patients in the MORE group were no longer misusing opioids, compared to 24 percent of those in group therapy. In fact, about a third of the patients in the MORE group were able to cut their opioid dose in half or reduce it even further.
Patients treated with MORE also experienced more significant pain relief than those in support groups, according to Garland. Conventional approaches to treating opioid addiction include 12-step programs and medically-assisted treatment using drugs like methadone and Suboxone, sometimes coupled with support groups. But patients with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) – the official diagnosis for opioid addiction – have high relapse rates following treatment, especially if they have chronic pain.
While medically-assisted treatments help to control drug cravings, they do nothing to control chronic pain, which is where psychological therapies like MORE come in.
“For patients suffering from moderate pain and OUD, the relapse rate is three times higher than in patients without chronic pain; for those with severe chronic pain, the relapse rate is five times higher,” says Amy Wachholtz, PhD, Director of Clinical Health Psychology and associate professor at University of Colorado in Denver. “So if we don’t treat the chronic pain along with the OUD addiction simultaneously, we are setting patients up for failure.”
Unfortunately, notes Garland, the standard of care for patients with chronic pain who are misusing their prescribed painkillers is “woefully inadequate.” Many patients don’t meet the criteria for OUD, he says, but instead fall into a gray zone somewhere between legitimate opioid use and full-blown addiction. And while medically-assisted treatments help to control drug cravings, they do nothing to control chronic pain, which is where psychological therapies like MORE come in. But behavioral therapies are often not available in primary care settings, and even when clinicians do refer patients to behavioral health providers, they often prescribe CBT. A large scale study last year showed that CBT – without the added components of mindfulness training and positive psychology – reduced pain but not opioid misuse.
Psychotherapist Eric Garland teaches mindfulness.
University of Utah
Reward Circuitry Rewired
Opioids are highly physiologically addictive. Repeated and high-dose drug use causes the brain to become hypersensitive to stress, pain, and drug-related cues, such as the sight of one’s pill bottle, says Garland, while at the same time becoming increasingly insensitive to natural pleasures. “As an individual becomes more and more dependent on the opioids just to feel okay, they feel less able to extract a healthy sense of joy, pleasure and meaning out of everyday life,” he explains. “This drives them to take higher and higher doses of the opioid to maintain a dwindling sense of well-being.”
The changes are not just psychological: Chronic opioid use actually causes changes in the brain’s reward circuitry. “You can see on brain imaging,” says Garland. “The brain’s reward circuitry becomes more responsive when a person is viewing opioid related images than when they are viewing images of smiling babies, lovers holding hands, or sunsets over the beach.” MORE, he says, teaches “savoring” – a tenet of positive psychology – as a means of restructuring the reward processes in the brain so the patient becomes sensitive to pleasure from natural, healthy rewards, decreasing cravings for drug-related rewards.
Mindfulness and Addiction
Mindfulness, a form of meditation that teaches people to observe their feelings and sensations without judgement, has been increasingly applied to the treatment of addiction. By observing their pain and cravings objectively, for example, patients gain increased awareness of their responses to pain and their habits of opioid use. “They learn how to be with discomfort, whether emotional or physical, in a more compassionate way,” says Sarah Bowen, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Pacific University in Oregon. “And if your mind gives you a message like ‘Oh, I can’t handle that,’ to recognize that that’s a thought that might not be true.”
Bowen’s research is focused on Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention, which addresses the cravings associated with addiction. She has patients practice what she calls “urge surfing”: riding out a craving or urge rather than relying on a substance for immediate relief. “Craving will happen, so rather than fighting it, we look at understanding it better,” she says.
MORE differs from other forms of mindfulness-based therapy in that it integrates reappraisal and savoring training. Reappraisal is a technique often used in CBT in which patients learn to change negative thought patterns in order to reduce their emotional impact, while savoring helps to restructure the reward processes in the brain.
Mindfulness training not only helps patients to understand and gain control over their behavior in response to cravings and triggers like pain, says Garland, but also provides a means of pain relief. “We use mindfulness to zoom into pain and break it down into its subcomponents – feelings of heat or tightness or tingling – which reduces the impact that negative emotions have on pain processing in the brain.”
Eric Garland examines brain waves.
University of Utah
Powerful interventions
As the dangers of opioid addiction have become increasingly evident, some scientists are developing less addictive, non-opioid painkillers, but more trials are needed. Meanwhile, behavioral approaches to chronic pain relief have continued to gain traction, and researchers like Garland are probing the possibilities of integrative treatments to treat the addiction itself. Given that the number of people suffering from chronic pain and OUD have reached new heights during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Wachholtz, new treatment alternatives for patients caught in the relentless cycle of chronic pain and opioid misuse are sorely needed. “We’re trying to refine the techniques,” she says, “but we’re starting to realize just how powerful some of these mind-body interventions can be.”
Sharing land and other resources among farmers isn’t new. But research shows it may be increasingly relevant in a time of climatic upheaval.
Sharing land and other resources among farmers isn’t new. But research shows it may be increasingly relevant in a time of climatic upheaval, potentially influencing “farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices and agricultural innovation,” according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of Economic Surveys. Farmers might share knowledge about reducing pesticide use, says Heather Frambach, a supply chain consultant who works with farmers in California and elsewhere. As a group they may better qualify for grants to monitor soil and water quality.
Most research around such practices applies to cooperatives, whose owner-members equally share governance and profits. But a collective like Carman Ranch’s — spearheaded by fourth-generation rancher Cory Carman, who purchases beef from eight other ranchers to sell under one “regeneratively” certified brand — shows when producers band together, they can achieve eco-benefits that would be elusive if they worked alone.
Vitamins and minerals in soil pass into plants through their roots, then into cattle as they graze, then back around as the cows walk around pooping.
Carman knows from experience. Taking over her family's land in 2003, she started selling grass-fed beef “because I really wanted to figure out how to not participate in the feedlot world, to have a healthier product. I didn't know how we were going to survive,” she says. Part of her land sits on a degraded portion of Zumwalt Prairie replete with invasive grasses; working to restore it, she thought, “What good does it do to kill myself trying to make this ranch more functional? If you want to make a difference, change has to be more than single entrepreneurs on single pieces of land. It has to happen at a community level.” The seeds of her collective were sown.
Raising 100 percent grass-fed beef requires land that’s got something for cows to graze in every season — which most collective members can’t access individually. So, they move cattle around their various parcels. It’s practical, but it also restores nutrient flows “to the way they used to move, from lowlands and canyons during the winter to higher-up places as the weather gets hot,” Carman says. Meaning, vitamins and minerals in soil pass into plants through their roots, then into cattle as they graze, then back around as the cows walk around pooping.
Cory Carman sells grass-fed beef, which requires land that’s got something for cows to graze in every season.
Courtesy Cory Carman
Each collective member has individual ecological goals: Carman brought in pigs to root out invasive grasses and help natives flourish. Probert also heads a more conventional grain-finished beef collective with 100 members, and their combined 6.5 million ranchland acres were eligible for a grant supporting climate-friendly practices, which compels them to improve soil and water health and biodiversity and make their product “as environmentally friendly as possible,” Probert says. The Washington veg farmer reduced tilling and pesticide use thanks to the ecoservices of visiting cows. Similarly, a conventional hay farmer near Carman has reduced his reliance on fertilizer by letting cattle graze the cover crops he plants on 80 acres.
Additionally, the collective must meet the regenerative standards promised on their label — another way in which they work together to achieve ecological goals. Says David LeZaks, formerly a senior fellow at finance-focused ecology nonprofit Croatan Institute, it’s hard for individual farmers to access monetary assistance. “But it's easier to get financing flowing when you increase the scale with cooperatives or collectives,” he says. “This supports producers in ways that can lead to better outcomes on the landscape.”
New, smaller scale farmers might gain the most from collective and cooperative models.
For example, it can help them minimize waste by using more of an animal, something our frugal ancestors excelled at. Small-scale beef producers normally throw out hides; Thousand Hills’ 50 regenerative beef producers together have enough to sell to Timberland to make carbon-neutral leather. In another example, working collectively resulted in the support of more diverse farms: Meadowlark Community Mill in Wisconsin went from working with one wheat grower, to sourcing from several organic wheat growers marketing flour under one premium brand.
Another example shows how these collaborations can foster greater equity, among other benefits: The Federation of Southern Cooperatives has a mission to support Black farmers as they build community health. It owns several hundred forest acres in Alabama, where it teaches members to steward their own forest land and use it to grow food — one member coop raises goats to graze forest debris and produce milk. Adding the combined acres of member forest land to the Federation’s, the group qualified for a federal conservation grant that will keep this resource available for food production, and community environmental and mental health benefits. “That's the value-add of the collective land-owner structure,” says Dãnia Davy, director of land retention and advocacy.
New, smaller scale farmers might gain the most from collective and cooperative models, says Jordan Treakle, national program coordinator of the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC). Many of them enter farming specifically to raise healthy food in healthy ways — with organic production, or livestock for soil fertility. With land, equipment and labor prohibitively expensive, farming collectively allows shared costs and risk that buy farmers the time necessary to “build soil fertility and become competitive” in the marketplace, Treakle says. Just keeping them in business is an eco-win; when small farms fail, they tend to get sold for development or absorbed into less-diversified operations, so the effects of their success can “reverberate through the entire local economy.”
Frambach, the supply chain consultant, has been experimenting with what she calls “collaborative crop planning,” where she helps farmers strategize what they’ll plant as a group. “A lot of them grow based on what they hear their neighbor is going to do, and that causes really poor outcomes,” she says. “Nobody replanted cauliflower after the [atmospheric rivers in California] this year and now there's a huge shortage of cauliflower.” A group plan can avoid the under-planting that causes farmers to lose out on revenue.
It helps avoid overplanted crops, too, which small farmers might have to plow under or compost. Larger farmers, conversely, can sell surplus produce into the upcycling market — to Matriark Foods, for example, which turns it into value-add products like pasta sauce for companies like Sysco that supply institutional kitchens at colleges and hospitals. Frambach and Anna Hammond, Matriark’s CEO, want to collectivize smaller farmers so that they can sell to the likes of Matriark and “not lose an incredible amount of income,” Hammond says.
Ultimately, farming is fraught with challenges and even collectivizing doesn’t guarantee that farms will stay in business. But with agriculture accounting for almost 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally, there's an “urgent” need to shift farming practices to more environmentally sustainable models, as well as a “demand in the marketplace for it,” says NFFC’s Treakle. “The growth of cooperative and collective farming can be a huge, huge boon for the ecological integrity of the system.”