10% Happier with Dan Harris The Neuroscience of Reducing Chronic Pain and Everyday Addictions | Eric Garland
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Mar 9, 2026 
Eric Garland, a UCSD professor who created Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE), explains practical mindfulness tools. He covers how MORE targets chronic pain and everyday addictive habits. Short practices like STOP, mindful zooming, savoring, and cognitive reappraisal get attention. The conversation highlights de-automatization, self-transcendent states, and clinical evidence for these methods.
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How Mindfulness Became The Seed For MORE
- Eric Garland discovered mindfulness after a college friend taught him meditation and later integrated it into psychotherapy for complex patients.
- He developed MORE while treating patients with overlapping addiction, chronic pain, and mental health issues, which became his living laboratory.
One Therapy For Addiction Emotion And Pain
- MORE is an integrated therapy that simultaneously targets addictive habits, emotional distress, and physical pain.
- Randomized trials show MORE reduces opioid misuse ~45%, drug relapse ~42%, and cravings ~50%, supporting a unified approach to these co-occurring problems.
Mindfulness Works By Deautomatizing Habit
- Addiction forms by automatization: repeated rewarded behavior becomes an unconscious habit that can run outside intention.
- Mindfulness functions as de-automatization by cultivating meta-awareness to notice mindless actions and bring them back under conscious control.
