The brain disease model of addiction has also fostered the development of behavioral interventions to help restore balance in brain circuitry that has been affected by drugs.52 For example, strategies to enhance the salience of natural, healthy rewards such as social contact or exercise could enable those rewards to compete with the direct and acquired motivating properties of drugs. Strategies to mitigate a person’s stress reactivity and negative emotional states could help to manage the strong urges they engender, and strategies to improve executive function and self-regulation could help recovering patients plan ahead in order to avoid situations in which they are particularly vulnerable to taking drugs. Finally, strategies to help patients recovering from addiction to change their circle of friends and to avoid drug-associated environmental cues can reduce the likelihood that conditioned craving will lead to relapse.
