Delay discounting and the use of mindful attention versus distraction in the treatment of drug addiction: a conceptual review.
Match fast-discounting clients to distraction and slow-discounting clients to mindfulness for better drug-abstinence outcomes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ohan et al. (2015) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.
They asked: why does mindfulness help some people stay clean while distraction helps others?
They used delay discounting—how fast you devalue future rewards—to link the two strategies.
What they found
The paper says mindfulness and distraction work through different discounting paths.
Mindfulness fits clients who can wait; distraction fits clients who need the urge gone now.
No numbers—just a map for picking one or the other.
How this fits with other research
van den Bos et al. (2013) had already said the old hyperbolic curve is too simple.
Ohan et al. (2015) run with that idea and apply it to clinic choices.
Dodd (1984) showed that food more than an hour away does not move the needle—timing matters, just like L et al. say.
Cao et al. (2026) later split persistence into five parts; L et al. give you one part—discount rate—to watch first.
Why it matters
You can test a client’s discounting with a quick $10 now vs $50 next week quiz.
Fast discounters get distraction plans: remove cues, give immediate substitutes. Slow discounters get mindfulness plans: sit with the urge, log it, let it pass. Match the tool to the curve and you skip weeks of trial and error.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In recent decades, researchers have integrated measurements of delay discounting, how the subjective valuation of a reward changes as a function of time, into their study of addiction. Research has begun to explore the idea that delay discounting may serve as both a marker for the effectiveness of existing treatments for addiction and a potential target for novel intervention strategies. As this work is in its infancy, many potentially significant connections between the construct of delay discounting and the treatment of addiction have yet to be explored. Here, we present a conceptual review highlighting novel points of intersection between delay discounting and two approaches to treating addiction that have become increasingly popular in recent years: those that focus on the development of mindfulness skills and those that emphasize the use of distraction techniques. Viewing these two techniques through the lens of delay discounting is particularly intriguing because of the very different way that they address the experience of drug cravings in the present moment (nonjudgmentally attending to vs. shifting attention away from subjective cravings, respectively). We propose that these opposing strategies for dealing with cravings may interact with delay discounting in ways that have important implications for treatment effectiveness.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2015 · doi:10.1080/08897070903250019