Mindfulness and smoking frequency: An investigation with Australian students

Mindfulness training has been shown to be effective in reducing smoking frequency. However, mindfulness training instructions that are free of mentions about smoking are rare, which makes it difficult to ascertain if it is the temporary state of being mindful or demand effects that reduce smoking frequency. It has also been posited that mindfulness training lowers smoking frequency by helping smokers surf the urge, but this remains untested. Thus, we conducted an experiment to test the likely process. We used a 6-minute audio clip to induce a brief mindfulness state or a mind-wandering state in 91 Australian students; the brief mindfulness exercise was free of any mentions about smoking. We found that exposure to the mindfulness-inducing audio clip helped smokers surf their urge when they were later exposed to cigarette cues and they smoked less over the subsequent 7 days. The current work offers empirical evidence for why mindfulness training can be effective in smoking cessation.