Want to break a bad habit? SLEEP Training can Help You do it!

No, really!  You may be able to quit smoking or put an end to other conditions by using the physiology of sleep to train your body against those cravings.  In Anat Arzi and Noam Sobel's article about the effects of sleep on learning and memory, cigarette addiction was studied as the main the dependent variable for the effects of sleep on addictive behaviors (i.e. smoking).

To conduct this study, 76 "healthy" smokers, mostly young to middle-aged adults wishing to quit smoking were included in a study held in a sleep-olfaction (smell) laboratory, where they slept with masks which first delivered bursts of cigarette odor to them (5 seconds in duration), then an unpleasant odor (duration of 3 seconds), each of these scents delivered in a constant clean airflow (6 liters per minute).  Polysomnography including EEG (brain wave activity), EOG (eye movement), and EMG (chin/ motor movement) were employed as measures of TST (total sleep time) and time spent in each sleep stage.  The control group consisted of a wake "treatment," i.e. the pairing of the aversive odor with cigarette smell during wakefulness instead of during sleep.  They were also partially sleep-deprived.  Because these subjects did not wear masks, they were presented the aversive-pairings at a ratio of 2:1 (partial reinforcement), with a similar presentation of 5 seconds of cigarette odor followed by a 3-second presentation of the unpleasant odor.

Within some experimental variation, results showed a significant difference in smoking cravings between the control/ wake group and the "sleep training" group.  The sleep-trained group showed less desire to smoke and decreased cigarette usage.  I found this successful intervention to be quite interesting and indicative of the direction for which future intervention research methods should aim.  The sleep-trained group likely showed improvement because of the memory-consolidation process they were allotted that their sleep-deprived counterparts were not.  Their brains, even though not in conscious awareness, received the aversive stimuli and encoded it as such while sleeping.  The wake/ control group's brains were not allotted this opportunity.  A lot of research has shown the helpful benefits of sleep for memory consolidation and recall in the setting of academic studies, why not use the body's natural sleep processes to treat addiction as in the case of smoking.

I can see, and would like to see, this research continue and grow in the future.  There are still way too many smokers in the United States, and if a fresh treatment approach is all that is needed to change more lives, then it is worth pouring resources into this area of intervention research.  In 2013, the total number of American smokers was 17% but this number can further be decreased.  An intervention method like this one could be the last step to totally obliterate
smoking from American society!