Eric Garland, thank you so much for joining us here on the science of psychotherapy. I'm so glad to meet you.

Pleasure to meet you too.

Yeah, and Richard here, really good. I've known about your work for a long time and fantastic to actually see you in the flesh and talk to you. And what is interesting is about the work you do is very interesting, but the fact you put the yards beneath it, you do a lot of research. So there's a few things we want to talk about. I mean, we're very excited about you being at the summit because of all the backgrounds you've got. But you've got this more program, M-O-R-E program, which is fantastic. And then you got into all this research and dealing about that. Could you fill a similar little bit? Maybe give us a little background to you. But what's the story? How did this become so intriguing and so entrenching for your thinking and your ongoing practice?

Well, you know, it's a long story, but I think to summarize, I had a personal mindfulness meditation practice for many years, and it was really a key approach, not only for my well-being, but also for the spiritual dimension of my life to tell you the truth. And so that really was the central core that all this work emanated from studying a hefty dose of Indian and Chinese religion and philosophy, philosophy of mind. And that really informed my work as a psychotherapist. When I started doing this work, I was initially was not a researcher. I was a psychotherapist. And I was working in my private practice figuring out how to weave in meditation into the practices psychotherapy. And this was several decades ago when it wasn't anything like it is today where mindfulness is such a key part of modern psychotherapy. At this time, there really weren't very many prominent models out there describing how this could be done effectively. So I just started to try to figure it out on my own. Then when I began to become a scientist and I started to learn about the neuroscience of addiction, I started to realize that there were key approaches that were missing from the way that most addictions treatment was being conducted in the world. And that we could actually learn from the neuroscience to modify our approach to start targeting what I really believe is the primary causative factor in the development and the maintenance of addiction, which is the dysregulation of reward processes in the brain. And so that really encouraged me to start integrating other techniques into this work, namely techniques that came out of positive psychology with this emphasis on savoring, savoring natural healthy pleasure and the meaning that flows out of that. So that's really where this work came from, a personal practice of mindfulness as a spiritual approach and then melding that with the discoveries from affective neuroscience about what's happening in the brain during the process of addiction and what that has to tell us about healing from addiction.

Yeah, fantastic. Now, you mentioned savoring and I'm wondering if we're able to maybe dive in a little bit to the more model and just just take us through that bit of a workflow of the therapy that you've developed. I'm very succinctly, I might say, it's very easy to understand followers. People will discover. So, Yeah.

Just a quick, just a quick comment before you go in, because I know you're going there just adding because that savoring of life, that disconnection we have from the enjoyment of being a human being, which mindfulness brings it in. I just want to highlight, you know, just my thought quickly there on that. But please, please, now, this, this fabulous process more will let you expand the acronym for us.

Yes, so more stands for mindfulness oriented recovery enhancement and more is really grounded upon the foundations of three great therapeutic traditions within psychotherapy. The first is mindfulness training. The second is cognitive behavioral therapy and the third is positive psychology. And so from these traditions, we, we derive the pillar, the therapeutic pillars of more mindfulness reappraisal and savoring. And these components are really intended to address the deficits that that people with addiction are struggling with that continue to propel and maintain the addiction. So, for example, one of the things that that maintains addiction is habit related processes people develop automatized behavioral reactions to drug cues. Which, which elicit this automatic drug seeking behavior and craving. And so addiction in effect becomes an automatic habit. Well, mindfulness is the perfect antidote to automatic habits because it involves conscious self regulation, conscious self control and awareness of automatic patterns and then the capacity to shift them. The second piece of more is reappraisal. So this is the process of reframing

life

adversity, essentially, re re perceiving shifting one's view of a stressful or adverse life event in such a way as to see that event as a source of meaning or source of personal growth or strength. So, so and more we take this approach to challenge helping patients to challenge negative automatic thoughts to reduce their negative emotions and to prevent them from slipping back into drug use. And then the third piece is this savoring component, which, as you described Richard, it really involves focusing mindfulness on what is pleasant, beautiful and good in life. And then appreciating and amplifying any positive emotions or pleasurable body sensations that arise during the savoring practice. And this technique is really intended on helping people to make themselves feel good naturally in order to to to find that inner well spring spring of of contentment and well being so that they don't have to seek it outside of themselves through a drug. And so these three these three foundational components of more lead to this fourth what I call an emergent property. And that is self transcendence, which is this sense of being connected to something greater than the self, which which is obviously alluded to in 12 step approaches talking about treating addiction by connecting to a higher power. So, and more we're actually giving people techniques and practical guidance to actually accessing that type of experience.

Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a beautiful segue to what I was just thinking because I was a pleased in our other chat just beforehand that you know my mentor and and and colleague Ernest Rossi. And what we used to use as that that that other sense that greater thing really was was auto back in the 20s. We talked about it in spirituality, but this word new monosome, the magnificent, the marvelous, the expansive, the extraordinary. And, you know, I think there are many who feel this very strongly by having religious beliefs and spiritual spiritual beliefs, but we really can get it. This is a natural part of us. One of the things I was talking about is I wouldn't be surprised if mindfulness evolutionarily placed itself within us just because of sunset, which is this great and human is new man is placed so it's a very natural process. Mindfulness within us as a human being, but we have lost it. We've had to, you know, prescriptively return to it. What sort of thoughts do you have about there about, you know, why it's so loseable. But then it's regainable.

Yeah, I mean, that's a that's a great question. And I think I agree with you that it is a basic human capacity. I think it's actually a basic dimension of human consciousness. You know, we practice mindfulness meditation. We practice mindfulness techniques, but these techniques are really just activating this basic property of the mind that exists within us. That is really the nature of consciousness itself. So, so we all have it within us. So why do we lose it? I think a lifetime of trauma, a lifetime of ego centrism, a lifetime of getting lost in linguistic distinctions between self and other and some sort of idealized reality versus what we're actually experiencing in the present moment.

Life just

beats it out of us to tell you the truth. And so I think we have to learn how to reclaim that. That sense that is our natural inheritance, our evolutionarily granted inheritance to build on what you're saying. It is the basic nature of mind and we can find it when we peel back all of the stuff that's laid on top of it.