Less than one in ten adults who smoke cigarettes successfully quit each year, despite a 2022 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicating that nearly 68% of adult smokers desire to quit, with over half attempting to do so in the past year.
New research led by UC Irvine has uncovered a technique that shows promise in reducing the sensation of cigarette cravings and the brain activity linked to them. The findings from this research were published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
Golnaz Tabibnia, a UC Irvine assistant research psychologist and the lead author of the study, described the technique as helping to "calm cravings" by putting what one craves into words. This approach, termed "cue labeling," stems from the long-understood principle that verbalizing feelings can help regulate emotions.
Tabibnia, a neuroscientist within the Department of Psychology in the School of Social Ecology, conducts research focused on emotions and their regulation from a neurological perspective. Her work aims to leverage insights from brain science to refine or create mental strategies for emotion management. Her interest in this area grew from observations that emotions and cravings, along with their regulation, share common brain mechanisms. This led her to explore whether an established emotion regulation technique could be adapted for craving control.
The foundation of cue labeling is an emotion regulation technique known as "affect labeling." This involves the act of naming a feeling or identifying what triggers it. Neuroscientific evidence suggests that the brain's language centers may interact with and influence the amygdala, a region primarily associated with emotions like fear. Multiple studies have shown that verbalizing feelings activates specific areas of the prefrontal cortex, which in turn reduces emotional responses. This reduction has been observed through measures such as amygdala activity, self-reported feelings, and physiological indicators like skin conductance. Tabibnia’s earlier work explored the clinical implications of this language-emotion interaction, demonstrating how incorporating language into behavior-based therapies for anxiety, such as exposure therapy, could enhance treatment outcomes. Affect labeling has since been recommended by anxiety experts as a supplementary technique to maximize therapy effectiveness.
From a neuroscience standpoint, the difficulty people face in quitting smoking is attributed to nicotine and other addictive substances hijacking the brain's reward circuits. These circuits are designed to compel individuals towards actions essential for survival, such as seeking food or water, by releasing dopamine. Dopamine neurons in these reward pathways become particularly active during surprisingly positive experiences or in anticipation of pleasant ones. This neurochemical is also crucial for initiating movement. Thus, the desire for something previously found pleasurable and the action of moving towards it are intertwined. The brain’s natural system, while brilliant for encouraging survival-critical actions, is activated much more intensely by nicotine and other addictive substances than by everyday survival cues, leading to extremely strong desires. However, human brains also possess the capacity to override these non-adaptive desires, though this may sometimes require assistance and training.
Prior to the development of cue labeling, traditional mental strategies for managing cravings included mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal. Mindfulness-based techniques involve observing the sensation of craving without judgment, allowing it to ebb and flow like a wave. Cognitive reappraisal involves reframing perceptions of the desired object to make it less appealing, perhaps by focusing on harmful outcomes rather than immediate pleasure. Both methods typically require practice.
The UC Irvine study was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The introduction of cue labeling offers a new, science-backed mental strategy in the ongoing effort to help individuals overcome the powerful hold of cigarette cravings.
