Researchers from the University of California San Diego have found that Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) can help rewire the brain’s response to natural healthy pleasure, leading to improved mood, greater attention to positive experiences and reduced opioid cravings. The findings, published on April 30, 2025 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), suggest that this evidence-based therapy may be a promising tool in the fight against opioid use disorder (OUD).
Opioid addiction can develop when individuals misuse opioids originally prescribed for chronic pain, a condition affecting 50 million Americans each year, according to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As people become increasingly dependent on opioids, they begin to lose the ability to feel joy and…