How the Buddha helps you quit smoking

2500 years ago a man named Gotama walked the earth in northern India. We know him as the Buddha. After trying the customary techniques of meditation and the more radical approach of mortification of the flesch by extreme fasting and self neglect and failing to gain the insight he was seeking, he sat down under a Bodhi in mindfulness meditation and vowed not to move until he had the answer to what was at the root of human suffering. When the morning star rose-so the story goes-he understood how the human condition has suffering built into its DNA and what can be done about it.

He came up with an astonishing insight: everything happens in the mind and in consciouness-and this allowed him to jettison all transcendental notions and memes that were viral at that time in India: ideas such as the Brahma, the world soul etc.

His technique was simple (but not at all easy). Here is was he told his disciples:

"The four foundations of mindfulness"

"What are the four? Here, bhikkhus, in regard to the body a bhikkhu abides contemplating the body, ardent, clearly knowing, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world. In regard to feelings he abides contemplating feelings, ardent, clearly knowing, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world. In regard to the mind he abides contemplating the mind, ardent, clearly knowing, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world. In regard to dhammas he abides contemplating dhammas, ardent, clearly knowing, and mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world."

Satipa??hāna Sutta number 10: ?ā?amoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses, and Bhikkhu Anālayo, Satipa??hāna: The Direct Path to Realization (Cambridge, UK: Windhorse Publications, 2003), 3–4.

Today we call this mindfulness meditation.

The simple (though not necessarily easy) step of standing back and mindfully attending to one’s experience rather than being uncritically overwhelmed with the imperatives of habitual thoughts and emotions can allow a glimpse of an inner freedom not to react to what one’s mind is insisting that one do. The experience of such inner freedom, I would argue, is a taste of nirvana itself.

Batchelor, Stephen. Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World (p. 77). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. 

The Buddha made a prediction: if you pay close mindful attention to your troubling feelings and investigate them non-judgmentally, they will attenuate. He identified the experience of craving as a principle driver of unhappiness. This prompted another prediction: mindful investigation of craving would reveal that this sensation like all other perception is fleeting and impernanent and will extinguish if paid close attention to.

Neuroscience has matured and is now able to test the predictions made by the Buddha. If the Buddha was born today he likely-I think- would work in a neuroscience lab.

Craving is at the core of addictions and -the Buddha would say-of many of our behaviors that will make us unhappy. Evolution-being solely "interested" in getting genes into the next generations-did not "design" our mind/brains to be happy but to do those behaviors that serve the genetic mandate: survive and propagate. For that you need an engine of craving: dopamine.

Nicotine excites DA neurons, directly although probably for a short duration at somatodendritic b subunit-containing nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR), and probably via more sustained excitation due to activation of a-7 receptors (nAChR) on glutamatergic presynaptic terminals on axons that innervate DA neurons. These excitatory projections may include inputs from the peduncular pontine tegmentum (PPT), laterodorsal tegmentum (LDT), subthalamic nucleus (STN), prefrontal cortex (PFC), and additional nuclei.

All addictive drugs lead to the common final pathway: the bursting activity of dopamine neurons. Drugs, sex and rock'n roll are dopaminergic. This is the evolutionary hook to get us out of bed, compete, mate and always crave for more.What good would it do (for evolution) if you were satisfied after a single experience of pleasurable dopamine bursting. The effect rapidly attenuates and you have to do it all over again (good for evolution) -you are now on the hedonic treadmill and you will never really get off-unless you to something revolutionary.

Participants were taught an informal mindfulness practice to work mindfully with cravings: Recognize, Accept, Investigate, and Note (“ RAIN” ) what cravings feel like as they arise and pass away. RAIN is accessible from the home page of the app so that participants may use it any time they have a craving to smoke by choosing the “ Want-O-Meter.” They are directed to identify their smoking trigger, rate their craving, and choose between using RAIN to ride out their craving, or completing an audio-guided exercise to ‘ smoke mindfully’ by paying attention to the moment-to-moment experience and bodily sensation of smoking.

Here are the results:

The mindfulness based method (MT) dissociates craving from smoking behavior.

How does this work?

Peak activations and deactivations associated with focused attention meditation in the (a) dorsal anterior/mid cingulate cortex and the (d) posterior cingulate cortex (PCC).

Recent work suggests that PCC activity may represent a sub-component cognitive process of self-reference – “getting caught up in” one’s experience. For example, getting cought up in a drug craving.

Garrison, K.A., J. Santoyo, J.H. Davis, et al. 2013. Effortless awareness: using real-time of posterior cingulate cortex activity in meditators’ self-report. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7: 440

The references for this paper are available at

Here is our video detailing these findings

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