A very bright college freshman spent much time telling me about the benefits of his marijuana use, mostly emphasizing how this helped him to relax and also increased his perception of things and made him feel closer to solutions. Similarly, anyone who has enjoyed a glass of wine or a timely martini also knows how de-stressing this can be and how the unburdening effect of alcohol flowing to your brain can be so relieving of your daily stress. Meditators too, extol the benefits of the "meditational state" in similar ways, pointing to a unique state of relaxation and progressively improved attention and decreased stress. Are these mechanisms of stress reduction interchangeable or are their differences enough to make us choose one over the other? Does it matter?
Firstly, if we examine drugs, alcohol and meditation, it is obvious that they all have a phase during which one is unburdened of conscious thought and it's energy expending pathways. They all share an ability to relieve stress for at least a certain period. In fact, their stress relief effects are so obvious, that medicine has opened its doors to medical uses of marijuana, and the benefits of limited alcohol use and meditation on heart health. One mechanism underlying these benefits appears to be the stress relief, taking the obsessed conscious mind off of its focus of attention on the day's happenings and incomplete tasks and allowing the person to exist through the brilliance of unconscious thought.
However, too much drugs and alcohol can lead to a dominance of unconscious thought and a vicious resurgence of conscious thought the next day. As the withdrawal or hangover starts to kick in, the conscious brain makes a comeback with attention being forced to hang onto the headache, trembling or other uncomfortable sensations the next day. Meditation, however, does not appear to have the same payback. Instead, one has to pay upfront for its benefits by committing one's self to grappling with the noise of the mind and sitting still. For many people, this is neither desirable nor possible. Yet, once one has tasted the spontaneous benefits of meditation (which often takes six months of more of regular meditating), meditation becomes a worthwhile competitor with drugs and alcohol for stress relief.
One difference that I believe happens with meditation, is that during the period of relief of conscious, energy sapping thoughts, the conscious thoughts have not disappeared, but allowed to come to mind. Thus, we have not knocked out consciousness but instead, allowed it to exist while training our minds to focus on something else. As a result, consciousness does not fight back in the same way the next day. The fight of the conscious mind with meditation happens before the next period when you are destined to sit still. Then, the mind rejects being ignored and employs distraction to prevent you from meditating. Still, this fight of the conscious mind does not create the same psychological and physical discomfort of withdrawal or a hangover.
Since drugs and alcohol literally knock the socks off your conscious thinking brain over time, they offer limited benefit. While they do offer the possibility of "special perceptions", this is short lived and difficult to access. Meditation, on the other hand, has not extinguished the conscious brain during its suppression of conscious thought, so the conscious brain can rejoin the freer unconscious shortly after the meditation session. Those "special insights" that occur during drug expeditions can also be obtained with meditation but with the latter, they are actually retrieved.
A recent article in Psychological Science (Zhong et al, 2008) showed that a brief respite in unconscious thinking has interesting effects on task performance. When the task is easy, having the time to spend in an unconscious state of mind can increase access to information but does not lead to more correct answers compared to conscious thinking. When the task is difficult, people still gain access to information but more answers are incorrect. My opinion is that unconscious thinking increases accessibility to insight but optimally, this access should be communicated to the conscious mind to be converted into a useful action.
I think that certain drugs and alcohol in limited quantities provide relief and health benefits. However, there are numerous legal problems that can increase a state of anxiety even while using them, even if a person does not care. And the initial effects appear to be so promising that it inspires continued use. However continued use knocks out vital parts of your brain (the conscious parts) that you need in order to act on the insights gained during this period of stress relief.
Eventually, in choosing ways to relieve stress, one must then make the decision of time of payback. Immediate gratification makes us want to pay later. But as we learn the harsh lessons of hangover and withdrawal, upfront payment by learning the habit of setting aside time for meditation can lead to longer term benefits without compromising the conscious brain. The immediate gratification of drugs and alcohol makes them recreational. But the eventual benefits of meditation can make it more fun in the long haul. And we can avoid taking pot shots at our conscious brain for riddling us with anxious worries and stressful thoughts.
Bright people often feel that they have plenty of "brain" to spare and knocking out a few cortical neurons is probably okay. What if they preserved those neurons? Would their impact on the world be any different? I propose a mindfulness about these differences in impact on conscious and unconscious thought as we evolve through our lives making choices for stress relief. Dealing with the conflicts of the human need for instant gratification and the need for more stress relief would benefit from including the rewards of meditation in our thinking.