Limitations and future directions
impairment in executive functions, impulsivity
Despite the positive sides, the highly controlled environment, a characteristic of the Therapeutic Community, is also a limitation of the study since the attended patients used to live alone or as homeless people, facing violence and financial/food deprivation daily. This fact has two possible important implications: patients were not exposed to triggering circumstances, unlike previous studies that reported effects on impulsivity in different settings [The main limitation in consequence of the chosen setting is that a clinical trial running inside a closed environment has a higher contamination risk. In an attempt to minimize this bias, we establish a confidentiality agreement before the beginning of the intervention. Also, participants were not allowed by the service to receive devices to use audio, eliminating the chance of exchanging recorded meditation inside the community. Howsoever, we have no guarantee that the MBRP participants did not communicate with control ones about the intervention concepts since they were in daily, close contact.On the other hand, another limitation was the lack of access to the audio for the meditation practices throughout the week. They received a booklet with the basic concepts and names of the practices and were asked to practice daily. The use of guided meditation is a way to facilitate the practice outside sessions and can be a strategy for learning the myriad of meditations taught in the program. One has to consider that harm or side effects interfere in their adherence to practice and we did not actively question it.A third limitation, the periodic external appointments (justice, social assistance, or medical), prevented some participants from attending all sessions while others were discharged, which eventually impacted our dropout rate. Besides this, we did not evaluate the comorbidities of these patients. It could represent a possible direction for future studies, since this group seems to have an impairment in executive functions both because of substance use itself and because of comorbidities [Finally, the lack of information on years of substance use or severity of dependence can constitute a limitation as this may impact their impulsivity profile. one may consider the age range of our sample as a limitation that reduces comparability to most of RCTs on mindfulness, impulsivity, and addiction, carried out predominantly among younger adults. Future possible directions for studies are to investigate the effects of MBRP on impulsivity dimensions [Considering the findings of our study, future perspectives emerge about the importance of a greater number of meditation sessions in this setting and age group while considering a multifaceted approach to impulsiveness. It is believed that the number of sessions and hours of meditation can improve impulsivity since patients who were offered more than 12 [