Sober Life Archives - Page 6 of 8

How to Form Good Habits In Recovery And Beyond

Posted on September 19, 2017September 19, 2017 by JohnAdmin

It does not matter what habits you form if they’re ultimately constructive rather than destructive. People encounter a lot of stress over the course of their lives – naturally, like any other being on planet Earth, we must deal with the unpredictability and inherent risks of living. That, and we each deal with our fair share of responsibilities. this is why forming good habits in recovery is especially important for hose recovering from addiction.

At some point, things just get too much. How we cope with the mountain of pressure depends from person to person. Some people drink – that is a maladaptive coping mechanism. Other people paint – that is an adaptive coping mechanism. Addiction itself can sometimes be the result of a bad habit – a maladaptive coping mechanism. We begin to rely on addiction to more easily ignore our problems rather than help solve them.

Drinking exacerbates your problems. It does not make them go away, it simply incapacitates you from finding a solution towards them. Painting is an effective way to build off stress, express your creativity and avoid letting emotions cloud your judgment – it allows you to take a moment away from the situation to better compose yourself and deal with your problems in the future.

Good habits in recovery are adaptive. They help you grow as a person to deal with your problems, rather than gloss over them with distractions. And they’re extremely important both during early recovery, and in general throughout life. Here are a few ways to build good habits in recovery to help in managing long-term sobriety.

Start The Day Right

The first thing you should do when you wake up is make your bed. It may seem rudimentary, but if you aren’t doing that already, then it will have a significant impact on your mental state. Chores are not just about keeping clean – they’re about discipline, consistency, and creating a mindset that involves caring about yourself and your environment.

The simple act of shaking out your sheets and making your bed takes all of thirty seconds, and leaves you with the feeling that you’ve already accomplished something. It encourages you to accomplish more things throughout the day. And, if you do end up having a miserable day, then you’ll have a made bed to look forward to.

Create A Schedule

Next, create a schedule – one you can stick to. Remain flexible here and there to account for instabilities and avoid putting you in the stressful situation where you end up running around to get everything on your schedule done with minimal delay.

Be sure to make a small list of the things that are most important to you daily, and a weekly basis, and create a schedule for an entire week that involves your at-home and working responsibilities, your recovery responsibilities, and the good habits in recovery that you plan to build.

Don’t Do It Alone

One of the most important pieces of advice is not to pursue creating good habits in recovery alone. Some people have the inherent willpower and discipline to work on themselves for months and years at a time, and develop new skins and healthy habits. Others falter with time, losing interest or becoming distracted.

If you’re doing this to help improve your drug recovery and transform into a more consistent (and consistently sober) person, then consider asking your friends to join you in keeping a few good habits together. Get a workout partner, join a book club, learn a language with your spouse. There are countless ways to improve yourself alongside others. A sober living community is also a great option to find a community of like minded individuals looking to form good habits in recovery as well.

Exercise Regularly

Even if exercise is not part of your list of good habits in recovery to form, it should be. Half an hour of intense exercise thrice a week is enough to keep you in a healthy condition, and gain all the benefits of exercising – including the benefits people in recovery get to look forward to.

Exercise flushes your body with endorphins, curbs the withdrawal effects of drug use, acts as an amazingly effective stress reliever, and it makes you feel a lot better about yourself.

Set Monthly Goals

Weekly goals will simply fatigue you. Annual goals are often too long-term, and it’s far too easy to lose motivation over the course of twelve months. However, setting monthly goals will give you the opportunity to have something to look forward to every four weeks, while keeping the drive to stay productive without pushing yourself into the boundaries of a burnout (and beyond).

If you enjoy lifting weights, ask around for appropriate and realistic goals within your stage of training (beginner, novice, intermediate etc.), and aim to reach those goals or even exceed them slightly. If you’re dedicated to a language, aim for a specific monthly quota of conversations with natives over the Internet, or if you’re just beginning, aim for a specific monthly quota of new additions to your vocabulary. If you’re reading, aim to finish a set number of books per month.

Monthly goals are not meant to be a lifelong habit. Instead, they’re a tried-and-true method towards developing good habits in recovery that later become a part of your daily or weekly routine. Learning a new instrument, tackling a new language or culture, or practicing for a specific sport (or even just training to condition yourself) – these are all endeavors that aim for self-improvement, require little investment aside from time, and deliver tremendous results over the course of months and years.

It’s okay to fail to meet your own expectations sometimes. Life can get in the way of our plans, and there will be months when we miss our goals. But it’s not about sacrificing everything to make sure you cram in those last few words or skim through the final pages of a book you could have otherwise enjoyed, a language you lose passion for because learning it becomes a chore.

The passion matters. The love for what you’re doing matters. Discipline is important, but it’s quite easy to take things too far and turn what you love into something you dread and shy away from. Find the balance, and you’ll live a much happier and more fulfilling life.

Sober Friends – The Guide To Making Friends After Recovery

Posted on September 8, 2017September 15, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Sometimes, you must take a risk to gain something worthwhile. Sometimes, that risk may be embarrassment or rejection. Yet when you stand to gain a friendship lasting a lifetime, the risk is always worth it. Having “sober friends” after recovery can be a big help to keeping you on your new life path. These kinds of friends are the people you can spend time with while sober and not feel pressured to drink or use.

Sobriety without friends is harsh, grueling, and one of the most difficult things to go through. You’re training your brain to deal with stress, anger, and sorrow without its favorite coping mechanism, all while fighting the instinct to go back to your old habits and live inside them in comfort. Few people can go through sobriety and loneliness at the same time.

But having friends is about more than just making your recovery easier. It’s about having sober friends – it’s about having people you can rely on, trust on, listen to, be heard by, and more. Sober friends are there for you, they’re the family you choose, and they can help you out of a pinch and provide you with more happiness and joy than a million shots of vodka. However, finding new sober friends to have fun with and live life with while staying sober can be a little challenging.

If you’re open to being open, to taking a few risks and to accepting the possibility of some awkward beginnings in exchange for two or three of the best platonic relationships in your lifetime, then take on this guide to making friends in sobriety, and begin your journey towards having a lot more fun in life.

Find Sober Friends And Hobbies

Step number one is to find things to do that don’t involve alcohol. Preferably, do things that you enjoy. This may be painting, or swimming, or playing video games, or reading books, or any other hobby among millions of choices.

Then, have a look around to see who else shares these hobbies. As we live in the age of the Internet, a quick search online will give you an idea of where to start locally in your search for some new sober friends. Don’t go into step one thinking of picking up new contacts – instead, think of pursuing your hobby even further, and just start a few casual conversations.

Share Experiences Through Group Support

Aside from finding people unrelated to your sobriety, one way to both find a way to vent about your own sobriety and hear what others must say in the struggle through their recovery process, is through your support group. Find a local support group or start one, encouraging those in recovery to come forward and meet up on a regular basis to give updates, check up on each other, and talk about emotions, struggles, pitfalls and speed bumps.

Hearing others talk about their own perspective on sobriety can help you adjust and improve yours, and find a way to better deal with the effects of recovery and regain control over yourself. It can also be a great way to meet like minded people that make good sober friends.

Go To Events And Workshops

Once you’ve chosen a hobby you are really interested in, take it to the next level by going to events and workshops to both become better, and meet others with the same level of passion and commitment. Fitness expos, yoga training camps, art and writing workshops – there are countless places, events and organized meetups out there for you to explore and potentially find new people.

It’s alright to be shy at first – especially if you’re self-conscious. Overcoming that feeling is part of the recovery process, as is gaining a stronger self-esteem and becoming more confident in yourself – and taking the first steps to make new friends helps with that tremendously.

Write About Yourself

Writing an anonymous journal or starting a blog with a pseudonym is one thing – and it’s most definitely a healthy thing, if any of the copious literature on blogging and journaling has anything to say about it – but if you’re looking to make sober friends and find new people to talk to and share life experiences with, then consider putting yourself out there through blogging and social media.

Blogging is a fantastic way to meet other people in the scene, both new and old. Sober living blogs have been around for about if blogging became a thing on the Internet, and many of the most popular blogs continue to be written by single individuals sharing their life experiences on the path to recovery, including their experiences with new people and fresh faces.

You don’t have to be active on Facebook, write daily tweets, post a daily Instagram picture and become glued to your Snapchat account all while juggling a blog – choose one or two things to use for finding new people, and have fun. Instagram is an effortless way to find likeminded individuals, as it lets you easily sort through pictures by interest with the use of hashtags like #soberliving.

If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of using your real name and finding real people in your area to talk to, then consider joining chatrooms instead. There are plenty of online chatrooms dedicated to sobriety, alcoholism, drug use and mental health issues – but if you want to expand into territories that have less to do with your sobriety and more to do with your interests, feel free to search to your hearts content – with Discord, Slack, and a slew of IRC channels, you’re bound to find a chatroom somewhere on the Internet where several people from across the world are talking about the same thing.

The world is smaller than ever thanks to the instant communication afforded by the Internet – and that is something that should empower you, rather than scare you. Overcoming your addiction will take time, but time spent having fun goes by twice as fast, and if you make new sober friends, you’ll find yourself out of your first year of recovery in absolutely no time. It’s natural to be anxious at first – and you’re bound to run into some bad apples eventually. But you’ll find out that with practice, meeting new people becomes easier and easier – and with a little time, you’ll have your social anxieties under control enough to make new friends to share your time with.

Staying Sober – Running Against Addiction

Posted on August 22, 2017 by JohnAdmin

It’s been done before – replacing one high through another, far healthier kind. Running to cope with addiction isn’t just a matter of getting away from your problems – it’s about chasing new goals, achieving dreams, and, as science may tell you, it’s about staying sober and teaching your brain to associate new things with pleasure.

For many, exercise has become the key to defeating addiction. But it’s not quite as simple as turning one obsession into another, or simply taking the drive of addiction and turning it into the tenacity to run a marathon.

Staying Sober Through Exercise

Running and exercise have a track record of being proven ways to deal with addiction, but their success depends entirely on you and your passion to get moving. While general exercise to bolster your physical health, and maintain a strong body is recommended in any case, coping with the day-to-day stresses of addiction recovery through sports and training is different from simply exercising enough to take care of your health. The clear differences are:

Exercise with a goal: Exercise, or physical activity, is healthy and necessary. The human body isn’t designed for an entirely sedentary lifestyle – even if you end up spending most of your day in a chair staring at a screen or working a counter, you need to spend some time moving every day. This can be as little as turning some of your commute into walking/cycling rather than riding, and taking a few minutes every few hours to stretch a little.

But to train is different – training means having a goal in mind, something to work up to. It means losing weight, or gaining it, or reaching a personal record, or improving your technique for a sport. It’s not just about maintaining physical health, but about achieving something for yourself, entirely through your own efforts and thanks to the support of those around you – a perfect outlet for staying sober.

Training to make sense of life: When you discover a passion for exercise, you discover what it means to work on something you love. That means not just working towards a certain goal for the sake of the goal itself, but because you actively love putting in the hard work and the effort to reach that goal.

Directing passion in life will help you better understand yourself. Many people struggle with addiction because they lack the support in life to do what they want to do, and to chase after the dreams they have. They also struggle because they find themselves put down, either by others or by themselves, and the pressure of feeling worthless has them paralyzed.

Getting off an addiction and working through the emotions of early recovery while chasing after goals and self-improvement is a magical combination – it allows you to, perhaps for the first time ever, truly get to know yourself. Your boundaries, your personality, your shortcomings and, most importantly, your strengths and best qualities.

Translating passion into results: Addiction eats away at a person’s self-esteem, often either feeding off depressive thinking, or becoming a factor in the emergence of depressive symptoms. Exercise, and any constructive passion or healthy coping mechanism, will help you make a clear change in life. Aside from helping you define yourself, it also helps you discover your true potential and learn to trust in your ability to achieve your own goals, and empower your efforts in staying sober.

Cope: Addiction is a coping mechanism, in one way or another. When an addiction develops, this is because the brain has made a powerful association between certain substances/actions, and immense amounts of pleasure or relief. Depressants like alcohol, stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, and opioids like heroin all share the quality of addictiveness due to how our brains seek out pleasure as a sign of being “on the right track” of something in our best interest. When things get bad – when we lose a job, when a relationship breaks down, when the stress mounts and piles up and we find ourselves buried under worries – then addiction becomes a prime coping mechanism.

Going on recovery eliminates addiction, and that leaves a gaping hole. Depending on how long you’ve been addicted, it can take a while before you cut the association between pleasure and relief, and drugs. Using training as an alternative to help you keep your mind off the stress or channel your frustrations is far more constructive and beneficial in the long-term and helps in staying sober after the recovery process as well.

Your Brain on Training

Perhaps the biggest benefit of physical activity as a new coping mechanism in your fight against addiction is that it speeds up the mental recovery from drug abuse. It can even be preventative towards the development of an addiction. Certain substances, especially very harmful ones like cheap methamphetamine, can cause serious damage to the brain.

Research has shown that aside from affecting the brain and making new connections between exercise and pleasure, training affects the speed at which the mind repairs itself, partially reversing the effects of methamphetamine use.

Staying Sober In Your Own Way

In the end, running – and exercise in general – is part of a large collection of possible paths for healing. But that means understanding the context of what you’re doing, and having a healthy attitude towards it. Look at it this way – if what you truly enjoy doing is cooking, and it’s something that lets you shut out the worries of the world and actively focus on the art of your craft, then that is a great way to deal with addiction by giving you an outlet to unleash your stress and your emotions and develop your creativity, putting your brain to the test.

However, if you end up going to the kitchen every time you get depressed to make yourself a plate of cookies or a delicious, yet high-calorie soufflé, then you’ll quickly turn one problem into another.

Practicing responsibility and understanding the difference between what makes a coping mechanism positive, and what makes it negative, is critical to establishing a lifestyle that allows you to heal and move past the consequences of your addiction, regardless of how you choose to go about that lifestyle. Is painting your thing? Meeting new people in book clubs? Limiting yourself to a small circle of friends while focusing on a large writing project? Visiting local gyms and competing in sports or martial arts?

Whatever your passion is, using it as a major outlet against the potential stress of recovery to help reshape your life while staying sober and make a major change in who you are as a person is important. It’s not just about making a distinction between your old days and the new you – it’s also about crafting your own identity through positive accomplishments and associations, rather than feelings of shame or another kind of negativity. It’s also about challenging yourself, pushing yourself to find new limits and rediscover the boundaries of what you used to think you could do while practicing sober living.

Keeping Your Sobriety From Being The Thing That Defines You

Posted on July 13, 2017July 17, 2017 by JohnAdmin

The journey to sobriety – that is, long-term sobriety – can most definitely be a character sculpting experience. When someone struggles with the fight against addiction and then overcomes that challenge, they only do so by coming out the other end as an entirely different version of themselves. It’s not so much a total personality transformation as much as it simply is a journey to figuring out what you’re all about – what motivates you, what keeps you alive, what keeps you waking up each day to stay focused on life and find innovative ways to enjoy yourself without ever having to go back to those darker days.

Sobriety isn’t a singular goal, it’s a state that has be achieved and maintained. Staying clean – not taking anything that could intoxicate you, from anesthetics and heroin to alcohol and cigarettes – is a huge challenge at first, and will remain a commitment for the rest of your life. But staying sober – retaining the mental clarity to combat addiction and the chances of relapse – is challenging work, especially in the first few months. Many fail a few times until they achieve that final streak of sobriety, and relapses are more common that most would think.

Yet despite the challenge, it’s not meant to define you. Addiction can tear a person apart and destroy their life – but the fight against addiction isn’t meant to consume you in much the same way. It’s mean to free you, to give you the freedom and the opportunity to choose your way through life, forge your own fate, and finally decide for yourself what you want to do and know why you want to do it, without feeling overburdened under the yoke of addiction, without the power to go up against your problems with confidence. Making that distinction, and ensuring that your road to sobriety becomes the final arc of a chapter rather than the defining challenge of your entire life, is ironically important for you to maintain that sobriety.

Recovery & Sobriety

Recovery from addiction isn’t easy. An estimated ten percent of people who either are struggling or have struggled with addiction consider themselves free from it. However, that must be coupled with the fact that most Americans who consider themselves to struggle with addiction fail to seek treatment for it, for a variety of reasons.

It’s very much possible to recover from an addiction, and anyone can do it if they have a reason to. All it takes is the right approach, and a reason important enough to keep them sober. Some addictions are far harder to beat than others – but all journeys to recovery begin with the will, and a reason. That’s where accountability and responsibility play a part in recreating someone after addiction has run through them.

However, to convince someone of the importance of taking that responsibility, you must convince them that they have the power and the ability to see it through. Confidence, self-esteem, and the security of knowing you can be someone others rely on – these feelings of basic belonging and social significance are central to recovery, because they help you restore yourself into a circle of friends, a family, and society itself. Through a job, through hobbies, and through the passion that you love the most, a proper journey of recovery will teach you exactly how strong you are, and exactly why you never again need to turn towards the empty promises and useless pleasures of addiction.

Sobriety be a state of clarity achieved by realizing that drugs, and addiction, are ultimately meaningless in the face of how beautiful life can be, how great it feels to achieve the goals you’ve always set out to achieve, and how rewarding it is to spend your time and energy on the things that interest you and matter to you, rather than wasting life.

But that’s the thing. While sobriety helps you forge a stronger you, you must find ways to define yourself without the context of addiction – live a conscious, mindful life and maintain your sobriety alongside it.

There’s More to Life

Too many people begin their journey to recovery with the goal of conquering their addiction, and then they never really get past that. They’re too stubborn to relapse, but they don’t see past the early phase of recovery and don’t figure out what it is that would challenge them, make them happy, spurn them on to pursue something with gusto.

Dry drunks, as they’re called, lack that. They’re sober, but they’re still abusive, unhappy, unresolved. They carry a host of issues that need to be addressed, problems they harbor against themselves, against the world, and against life. These problems need to come out and breathe in some much-needed air if they’re ever going to see closure, either through self-help or therapy.

Once you make it past the idea that just being sober is your primary goal, you can begin to live your life again, and make more out of it than it ever was.

Staying Sober

That’s the simple necessary ingredient to staying sober – realizing that life is about finding new goals, rather than dwelling on them. You don’t just tell yourself that you’re going to go to the gym for a month, and then drop it. You set new goals, raise the bar, up the stakes, and figure out new challenges. You improve your performance at work, finish your education or specialize in a new industry, nail a new job, and blast past every obstacle with solutions instead of excuses and problems.

If you let the failure eat away at you, you’ll never actually taste the success, and achieve that blissful happiness everyone loves talking about. Sobriety begins to crumble in the face of doubt and insecurity, fear and worry, and the anxieties of cascading failure. Stay optimistic, stay hungry, and set new goals for yourself until you feel that joy to live again – and if you chase it, with the help of those around you, you’ll never need your old habits and their destructive ways.

Yes, Addiction Recovery Is Frustrating (But Worth It)

Posted on July 10, 2017July 13, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Drug addiction is a two-fold monster. It takes control of your body and your mind – but separately, and in different ways. Addiction can be both physical and emotional, and the repercussions of this disease mean that it is not just an enemy to combat, but it is a friend, someone who stands by your side and whispers sweet lies to you, comforting and distracting you from the ongoing struggles you continue to face because of your friendship.

Breaking the addiction is hard. It’s very hard. That much is blatantly obvious simply by the number of people who struggle with addiction.

However, no one ever said this would be easy. Recovery from addiction is hard, but it’s meant to be. An addiction is something that changes you, and it can go deep, repressing emotions and hindering your own personal growth (and cognitive function) as a negative coping mechanism. Tearing yourself away from that and into the total opposite is like forcing all that missed growth onto yourself, withstanding it, and coming out the other end a changed person.

Why Addiction Keeps Coming Back

When some people hear that addiction is a disease, it sparks in them an irrational anger – “addiction is a matter of responsibility”, they might say. “Addiction is a matter of weakness, and insecurity.” The country’s official stance is that addiction is a matter of mental illness and neurobiology – your brain chemistry changes immensely under the recurring influence of drugs, to the point where your concept of pleasure is skewed and distorted. Fixing that takes time, not just time for your body to detox every trace of a drug, but time for you to emotionally and neurologically recover and develop in another direction.

However, there is a kernel of truth to the ramblings of those who say that willpower lies at the center of addiction prevention: willpower lies at the center of recovery. You must genuinely want to get better to even start getting better.

That won’t guarantee that you won’t relapse, though. Relapse rates are high early on in recovery, especially for substances with an immensely high addictiveness, such as heroin and other opiates. The fact that many people relapse on these drugs doesn’t mean most people are spineless and incapable of controlling themselves – it’s a testament to the sheer power of drugs. It’s also proof that recovery is something you cannot give up on.

That much needs to be repeated – you cannot give up. In many cases, an addiction can resurface or constantly fight to get back into your life, and you need to show equal tenacity in your fight to stay clean, sober, and find a way to live without drugs.

A lot of that is about self-empowerment and finding ways to make yourself accountable towards others – but a lot of it is also about learning to forgive yourself for a relapse, forgive yourself for intrusive thinking, and learn to start being grateful of the progress you’ve made rather than being angry at your own missteps.

Long-Term Sobriety Requires Transformation

You can’t break an addiction without change, that much is obvious. But long-term sobriety – being both emotionally and physically sober and maintaining abstinence – that requires a transformation.

Addiction is part of a greater problem, sometimes either because of the addiction itself, or as a problem that existed before the addiction began. When someone struggling with addiction falls deeper and deeper into their habit, they’ll continuously find themselves in situations where their habit makes things worse. What might have started as a stigmatized pastime could turn into broken relationships, a lost career, the loss of friends and the destruction between an addict and their bonds towards family.

Before you know it, addiction can have destroyed your life. Some people hit rock bottom and bounce back, taking the revelation as an opportunity to get their life together. Others find that moment to change earlier. Yet in many cases, addicts begin to develop symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other mental conditions as part of a continued state of hopelessness.

On the other side of the coin, there are many who turn to addiction to cope with existing issues. Common factors for addiction include cases of depressive thinking, as well as childhood trauma and other examples of abuse. When certain mental scars become too painful to bear, an addiction can develop as part of an attempt to self-medicate the pain with certain substances – including actual painkillers. It’s not a given, but it’s common enough to make self-medication a troubling cause for long-term drug addiction.

Treating an addiction is then about more than just learning to live without a certain substance – it’s about completely altering the way you think, treating a person’s perspective on life and themselves, tackling the way they confront personal issues and helping them establish a more concrete, positive concept of the self. Someone struggling with addiction doesn’t just need a detox and month-long rehab, but full-blown therapy to help them understand their condition and take control of their life again.

You Don’t Need to Be Alone

Your recovery from addiction is a personal matter, and it’s a journey only you will be able to undertake. However, while it’s your responsibility to get better, and up to you to make the choices you need to make to fortify yourself against the dangers of an addiction in the future, it’s never ever wrong to ask for help.

It’s possible to tackle recovery alone, but so few manage to because it’s also very challenging. You need encouragement, and sometimes you need reassurance, either through the inspirational stories of others in recovery, or through the motivation that a dedicated support group can offer you.

You don’t just have to distance yourself from the people and places of your past when confronting addiction – you’ll have to find new people, new places, and come to terms with the old through reconciliation and earnest forgiveness. And yes, it’ll all be frustrating, with its share of setbacks and missteps. But the key to long-term sobriety isn’t just being sober – it’s continuously being sober, no matter what.

A Spiritual Journey To Sobriety

Posted on July 5, 2017July 6, 2017 by JohnAdmin

The ideological pillar supporting the movement of sobriety within circles like the 12-step program, is one of spiritual awakening and a surrender to God. Similarly, religion, spirituality and recovery have often been entwined, with the concept of a higher power being used as a compelling motivator for those who struggle with drugs.

Spirituality and religion aren’t one and the same – the latter is an extension of the former. Going to church or praying by your bedside is one expression of spirituality, if done in earnest. But simply painting to your heart’s content can be a spiritual practice. It’s about expression, and about achieving a specific kind of feeling.

Some people manage to defeat addiction alone, whether through an emotional severance or through strict and painful abstinence and slow recovery – but for many others, support is necessary. It takes months, sometimes years, and many who struggle with addiction say that for most the time, it doesn’t matter what you do – you won’t be able to end the chronic cycle until all the right conditions have been met.

And the right conditions include a combination of psychological and physical fitness – getting clean, then finding the emotional support and help needed to sever the tie between pleasure and addiction, and slowly relearn what it means to be legitimately happy without the interference of substance. It takes time, help, and peace. That last bit is, in most cases, essential – not to the initial abstinence, but to the long-term recovery process and the longevity of a person’s new sober life. And that is where spirituality often comes in.

What Is Spirituality?

Spirituality is an individual expression – unfortunately, there’s no quantifiable scientific way to describe it as anything other than what your own experiences make it out to be. We all develop spirituality as a complementary set of beliefs, emotions and explanations to every mystery and element of the unknown in our life. Spirituality can be expressed through religion, but it doesn’t have to be. Many secular individuals still indulge in their spirituality, whether through practices like meditation, or through art.

In a way, spirituality is a catch-all. We just aren’t sure yet what else to call it. Some people feel the same “transcendence” when in the groove of writing a long-form poem, as others do when they deeply engage in prayer.

The connection between spirituality and sobriety is that it fosters an inner peace of mind. Addiction is, in one way or another, connected to deep and suppressed suffering. Regardless of whether these emotions arose as part of the experience of addiction – the shame and guilt developed through realizing the severity of an addiction and one’s inability to end it – or if they were there before, keeping them locked away causes the mind to develop ticks and negative habits to act out and protect itself from the emotional scars it bears.

Beating an addiction means eliminating an extremely potent coping mechanism and often unleashing a slew of emotional and psychological repercussions. This is mixed with the euphoria and optimism of having finally overcome an addiction, only to bear the brunt of an emotional torrent afterwards.

Spirituality, in a way, captures the essence of what is needed to survive this. To be at peace with yourself and find a way to seek emotional sobriety, and then emotional health, without breaking down into boiling anger, overwhelming fear, or deep sadness. Now, the reason this is intentionally vague is because it’s not meant to be a limiting process defined solely through one perspective.

Every individual must find their own way to peace. The only constant is that everything must be resolved. You can’t defeat addiction if the guilt, the pain, and any other strong emotion from those days lingers. If you can’t forgive yourself, or come to terms with how things went down, then you’ll be stuck in a continuous cycle. How you decide to resolve your bottled-up emotions and experiences is up to you – and your own definition of spirituality.

Spirituality & Emotional Sobriety

Emotional sobriety is a point in recovery where you’re no longer caught up in a maelstrom of highs and lows, and psychological turmoil. It’s the ability to make decisions about how you feel and act based on a realistic, positive perspective, unmarred by the fears of anxiety and insecurity, and the deep, unfounded and self-destructive pessimism created by feelings of depression. It’s not that you’ll never feel those feelings again – they’re a natural part of life, in many occasions, and you absolutely need to be able to feel them – but it’s that you won’t let them affect your perspective on life, no matter how hard they hit.

It’s not about being joyous with every aspect of life. It’s not about forcefully radiating like a human sun. It’s about being healthy in the way you look at life, and about being hopeful. It’s about tolerating negative emotions and working through them with healthy coping mechanisms. It’s about tackling every problem with an attitude that looks for solutions, rather than crying about impossibilities. It’s about stepping up towards opportunities rather than shying away from them in fear of changing the way you live your life.

Some people believe that sobriety is the route to happiness, but it’s only really one aspect – and happiness isn’t a constant thing, anyway. You won’t find yourself in an emotional heaven after giving up an addiction – and believing that will only hurt you. Strive for emotional sobriety – for feeling sane. And it’s a tricky thing to achieve for most people, let alone those who have gone through the emotional turmoil of addiction and recovery. But it’s also one of the best ways to fortify yourself against the reoccurrence of an addiction.

Spirituality plays a role in this in that some people use it to bypass this part of the recovery process and instead speed towards a dogmatic, rigid path of some sort to distract from real, deep-seated emotions. Remember – a healthy recovery requires closure. It requires that you step up your emotional issues and end their hold on you. Spirituality isn’t meant to help you run away from problems, but instead face and dismantle them in a way addiction never could.

Spirituality and emotional sobriety go hand in hand, but they can also work in opposite interests. Regardless of what path you choose to stay sober, the important thing is finding a healthy way to deal with life and everything it makes you go through.

Sober Is The New Black

Posted on June 26, 2017June 28, 2017 by JohnAdmin

In an unexpected twist, the economic uncertainty and rise in psychological know-how within the current generation of young adults has produced something no winery or brewery could’ve guessed – a downturn in alcoholism and social drinking. While the world still has its fair share of young binge drinkers and partygoers, it turns out that for a large section of millennials and others, drinking is falling by the wayside in favor of a new culture of mindfulness, and clearheaded sobriety.

Indeed, it seems it’s hip to be sober, now more than ever. It’s a growing trend and one that isn’t developing in a vacuum – sobriety has become a big facet of an ongoing movement to promote less as more, pushing off against the effects of gluttony, materialism and consumerism, the adversaries of the straight-edged punk. Yet today’s sobriety isn’t about radical political action, and counterculture as it was in the 80s; it’s about individual enlightenment, and the joys of a sharp mind, clearer thinking.

Sobriety in a Millennial Age

It would be foolish to generalize the actions of one subculture to an entire generation, but as youngsters go, millennials are surprisingly booze-free. Out with the 2 a.m. bar crawls and late-night raves, in come juice-crawls and early morning dance parties.

Yet any surprise flies out the window with a little more research – as technology makes it ever easier to order booze and sex with a click of a button or a swipe on a screen, the counter-movement to modern-day excessiveness is to be a restrained and efficient consumer. Yet it’s not just about the morality of asceticism – it’s about the economics. Millennials have access to more information and communication than ever, but are short on cash. In turn, they seem to spend more wisely.

The current generation eats healthier, does more exercise, and drinks less than previous generations. Veganism is on the rise, along with yoga, weightlifting, sobriety, and a slew of self-improvement movements that are more easily accessible than ever. Young people are having less sex than ever, teen pregnancies are down, and contraceptive use has shot up – not out of a culture of prudishness or celibacy, but perhaps as a result of greater respect between genders, or a lack of free time.

As part of an ongoing new-age drive towards individual entrepreneurialism, social networks like Snapchat and Instagram help today’s generation promote themselves and gain celebrity-like status through the lens of a smartphone – yet in an age where money is tighter than ever, most of these personal brands aren’t promoting their newest yacht or latest vacation home, but are instead marketing health fads and lifestyle products through their chiseled physiques and glowing skin. People write about sobriety, mindfulness, meditation, wellness retreats, and the tenets of Zen Buddhism as applied in the modern-day workforce.

However, today’s sobriety has little to do with the counterculture of the 80s. There’s no politicizing, no collectivism, no stand against the evils of capitalism or imperialism – in fact, millennials tend to lean fiscally to the right: politicians are out of touch, politics are outdated, the state won’t help anyone. As a show of apathy and distrust, voter turnouts are lower than ever. To many, life is about personal journeys and finding your best self, representing the values of taking an entrepreneurial approach to life instead of relying on the man.

Of course, sobriety isn’t something millennials invented. The culture of addiction recovery, abstinence and sobriety is as ancient as alcohol itself, and the West’s most popular method for beating alcoholism originated in the same decade as instant coffee, the first electric guitar, and the Second World War. And indeed, sobriety is on the rise across all ages. Yet for the first time in ages, it seems that being sober is hip.

Sober Partying & Clean Living

Over 10,000 bars have shut down in the past decade, and in their stead, there has been a massive rise in sober entertainment. From sober raves to juice crawls, people are stepping away from the need for social drinking and are instead realizing how productive and empowering it can be to relieve yourself of the pressure to get drunk before having fun with others. Peer pressure is a major factor in drug use, and addiction – yet the trend may be going in the opposite direction.

With the omnipresence of social media and its growing influence in job availability and career options, most people today must be more self-conscious of their actions and their future, cutting down on the booze to avoid the horrid surprise of waking up to a Facebook album filled with unflattering portraits of the night before, all linked to a name that must compete in the online competitive market.

It’s not just about pressure, of course. The idea that you can choose – choose what you want to do with your time in a day and age where we can get a concise list of every shindig and interesting event around us within a few seconds – can be paralyzing to many, and empowering to others. Instead of boozing it up, people choose to stay sober. Instead of the usual fast food option, people are choosing to pick up new ways to make an easy and healthier alternative, or check out the newest food trend in downtown. Realizing that life won’t be easy, young professionals today choose to make the most of their time.

That’s not true for everyone, obviously. Anxiety and depression are on a rise in younger people, and the two are doubtlessly related to growing fears among today’s younger generations regarding the future. Getting a degree no longer guarantees you any job, let alone a decent one, and even if people do manage to land a position that might result in a career, the idea of a safe retirement for most is slipping away rapidly. Staying positive in a climate like that can be hard.

On top of that, not everyone thinks living sober is best. And plenty of people are still enjoying the booze to a tremendous degree. But the trend is obvious – the risk of getting smashed on a Friday night outweigh the benefits for many, and they’d rather just stay home and flick through Netflix, squeeze an hour of gym-time into their day; or, apparently, hit a sober party.

Recovery Is About Confronting Yourself

Posted on May 22, 2017May 24, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Addiction is a challenge. It can be a scourge, a disease, a wound – but to the individual struggling with it, it is also an opportunity for immense personal growth. If you can beat a drug addiction, then you’ve come a long way, experienced a great deal of emotions and troubles, and most likely forged a connection with yourself that tells you about who you are, what you can do, and how far you’ll go to change.

You can’t really overcome the challenges of recovery without confronting yourself. Addiction itself is a lie. It’s mirrored subterfuge, playing tricks on yourself to avoid the real issues, to mask the pain and the shame and push away the harshness of life. Even in the cases where an addiction develops completely without emotional vulnerability, due to other environmental factors, a fully-fledged addiction can wreak havoc on a person’s life and leave them struggling with a dire outcome, broken relationships, a busted career and a life in tatters.

Where addiction isn’t born from sadness, it brings it along for the ride. And in doing so, it creates a need for it – the uglier reality gets, the more comforting the lie.

But every addict reaches a point where they either defeat and destroy their addiction, or die. There is no alternative. You either spend the rest of your life enthralled, or your grasp freedom. And of course, neither option is easy. But only one involves being entirely honest with yourself, and opening yourself up to the opportunity of exploring the full potential of your life and what you can achieve with it.

When you’ve decided it’s time to cast aside the lie and confront yourself honestly – and in turn, confront life – the road to recovery begins, and never ends.

The Time to Find Yourself

You don’t have to go on a spiritual journey to find yourself. You don’t need religion, or a sudden epiphany, or a series of travels around the world to exotic locations. All you need is to take the time to spend on yourself and with yourself. Addiction can feel like an endless cycle of running between states of hopelessness and fake, crystalline bliss, chasing high after high. To break that cycle, you have to undoubtedly create a reason to avoid that chase. That doesn’t just involve replacing the high. It also involves removing the hopelessness, and replacing that with another kind of life.

We all aspire to a “life worth living”, but we each have our own definitions for what that might be. Your idea of a good life will be different from that of your friends, your family, or the guy across the street from you. But early recovery is a good time to consider what you want, and where you went wrong.

It’s easy to start off your road to recovery feeling guilty and judgmental of yourself. You might think back and remember what went wrong, and start building up a cache of regret and self-loathing. You might feel resentment, and think twice about your decision to improve yourself. You might ask yourself if you’re worth it.

You are. There’s limitless potential within you – every opportunity exists out there, at every moment. Countless potential new connections with other people, countless opportunities to find new ideas and explore new places, countless moments to be thankful for the fact that you stopped early enough to still enjoy a sober life, rather than suffer the fatal consequences of an untimely overdose.

At any given moment, you are part of an unknown future, a future where anything could happen. Opening yourself up to the idea that things can always get better no matter how bad they get starts with realizing that you yourself can get better, especially now that you’ve reached your rock bottom. It only goes up from here – and the way up is through honesty.

Reflection Not Distraction

Beating addiction in the long-term isn’t done by distracting yourself with new hobbies and obsessions, or vapid timewasters. It’s by digging deep within yourself and unleashing your repressed thoughts and emotions, confronting them, and moving past them. You don’t beat a depression by forcing yourself to be happy. You beat it by working through it, by finding a reason not to be depressed, and by clinging onto that reason, getting a little better day by day.

Much the same with addiction, your path towards recovery means reflecting on how you feel without your addiction, and what you still need to do to feel better. Now that you’re free from the shackles of addiction, use the time to explore new passions. Devote yourself to your new accountability. Find an interesting line of work. Spend your free time going out to local sports clubs or hobby groups. Discover the painter within yourself, or the writer, or the dancer, or the musician. Find a new form of beauty through which to appreciate living again, so much so that you would never want that newfound beauty to be muddled and lost by an addiction.

A great way to do this if you’re struggling on your own is through a sober living community. If you can’t stick to your goals early on, then living among others struggling with sobriety can give you the perspective and the motivation to keep going, and to keep improving.

No One to Compare To

Even in a group, your addiction and your path to recovery is your own. From the early moments of detoxification and withdrawal to the first total year of sobriety to the moment you’ve decided that your addiction is a done and closed chapter in your life, every step is your own, built by you circumstances before and after the addiction, and by every little bit of chance and coincidence along the way. Perhaps your reflection led you to God, or to your own form of Zen, or simply to a peace of mind and a love for art. So long as you find a way to live in the moment, in honesty, and on the run from your past.

Fear Of Relapse Builds Roadblocks, Not Bridges

Posted on May 11, 2017May 12, 2017 by JohnAdmin

Recovery isn’t a very linear process. Like life itself, there are going to be several ups and downs, times when you feel better and when you feel worse. There’s a saying that there are days like rocks and days like diamonds. And no matter what you do, the nature of addiction is that often enough we’re either left with emotional burdens that plague us for months and years after the fact, or they were with us all along, masked by the artificial highs.

On our best of days, we don’t even think about the times when feeling better meant clinging to a form of addiction. Perhaps it’s because of a good day at work, or time spent with family, or a new personal goal. But on the worst of days, fear is the best descriptor for what is dominating your brain. The fear of relapse. The fear that you’re not strong enough to withstand the temptation. The fear that you can’t handle life without the courage that your former addiction gives you. Fear that you’re inadequate, that you’re not deserving of all the good you’ve been getting, that you’re damned to some karmic fate of negativity and that you’re going to pay horribly for every ounce of enjoyment and positivity since rehab.

A big part of overcoming the need to go back to drugs isn’t just fighting the changes addiction perpetrates in the brain, but tackling the fact that for many addiction is a way to escape emotional pain and self-judgment. Yet addiction provably furthers a person’s emotional issues. It’s a short-term solution – like shooting yourself in the foot to overcome the pain of a headache. With time, you’ll have a brand new and bigger issue to worry about.

The fear of relapse is ultimately rooted in the fact that you feel there is still a need for drugs in your life. Beyond the grasp that addiction has on you physically – a grasp that is largely addressed by detoxification and post-detox rehabilitation – it’s the emotional and psychological with which so many struggle. To improve your chances of avoiding relapse, you’ll have to rob your addiction of its ability to help you in any way. Here’s where the fight against fear becomes real.

Address Your Emotional Needs Immediately

Rehabilitation will typically help you struggle through the first immediate hurdle in addressing addiction – the physical and emotional pain of withdrawal and detoxification. After that, rehab centers often work to provide you with the tools needed to continue your recovery far past your rehab experience. But many struggle to do so.

After rehab, everything will be different. If you had severe drug problems, then you’ll find yourself struggling with work, with maintaining a clean home, with finding new friends, with dealing with everyday tasks all while having to deal with the fact that every instance of emotional pain or discomfort reminds you of how much easier everything would be and how much better you’d feel if you decided to break sobriety. Just once more, for old times’ sake.

It’s a difficult learning curve, and the initial growing pains of getting out of the sheltered and healing environment of rehab and being thrust back into the real world with total sobriety can be, well. A massive challenge. Therefore, your priority needs to be to learn to deal with your feelings without invoking your addiction. Some people succeed best at this by learning with others, in a sober living environment, group therapy program, or within a community of recovering individuals. Others need a powerful motivator that forces them to reject any form of non-sobriety, and learn the hard way. It’s not on anybody to tell you how to best deal with this – but tools like meditation, exercise, comedy and creative expression are all provably helpful.

Learning How to Manage Your Fear

Stress management is a huge part of overcoming addiction, and mental illness as well. And because issues like anxiety and depression so often tie into examples of addiction, stress management and the therapeutic tools used by both patients and professionals can be a huge boon to struggling addicts looking to improve their chances at long-term recovery.

Fear is a form of anxiety. Many fear-based mental illnesses are on the spectrum of anxiety disorders. Now, that doesn’t mean fear is unnatural – it’s integral, even. Fear is a motivator. But the point of fear is also to eliminate the need for it. The longer you disprove your fear, the more it realizes it doesn’t have to exist, because the danger isn’t there. In other words, the best way to fight your fear of relapse is to spend your time eliminating the chances of relapse.

The Fight Goes On

They say that addiction is a long-term battle – but it would be more accurate to describe recovery as a long-term goal. You won’t ever just completely get rid of your chance to relapse. For some, struggling with addiction may be easier than for others. Now and again, there are success stories about people getting their life back in shape with few hurdles along the way, and then there are stories about people struggling with addiction for the rest of their lives. Whether you need group therapy, medication, meditation or half a dozen other treatment options is entirely individual, and some work better for you than they might for others.

But a universal part for all recovering addicts is that sobriety is something you must work to maintain. There simply is not a point in life where you become immune to addiction – rather, you can work towards increasingly improving your ability to process emotions, temper your feelings, and react measuredly to all situations. Some might say it is our obligation as people to continuously improve deep into our twilight years. We only have so much time, why not make the best of it?

For Sobriety, Lifestyle Matters More Than You Think

Posted on April 14, 2017April 11, 2017 by JohnAdmin

The ultimate goal for any addict, regardless of what kind of substance they used to abuse, is permanent sobriety. It’s to be able to look back, never forget what happened and yet still enjoy life with a cleared conscience, a crisp mind and a circle of friends and family.

Achieving that state of sobriety is what drug addiction treatment is for. From detox and rehab to group therapy, medication and self-disciplined recovery guides, there are countless ways to combat addiction depending on what you’re addicted to, what stage of recovery you’re in, and how well you’re reacting to a given treatment option.

One factor that gets overlooked when discussing recovery is the sheer power of proper lifestyle changes. Through some much-needed tweaks to the way you live, you can entirely supplant the craving for drugs with different mental stimuli, and rewire your brain to forget the drugs, and instead rely on other stimuli.

You’ll never quite forget what it was like to be high, and you’ll never quite forget the darker days. But you can teach your brain to return to the way it was before the addiction kicked in, and you can live a sober life free from relapses. And here’s why lifestyle changes are so integral for that.

Good Habits Can Replace Drug Use

It’s really as simple as that – drug use often (not always) abuses brain plasticity and makes significant physical changes in the way your brain works while you’re on drugs. At first, the drug is a voluntary choice. With time, addiction can feel like a trap.

Getting out of it requires you to not only be motivated enough to renounce your addiction, but also replace drug use with something else. Drug use is often a maladaptive behavior – it can be a coping mechanism for stress, trauma, abuse, or peer pressure.

The tough but highly rewarding challenge is to replace it with a set of adaptive coping mechanisms, including good sleep, better food, and exercise, going out with friends who care about you and meeting new people, and becoming part of a family, community or company that includes you and gives you a sense of purpose.

While maladaptive coping behaviors are always rewarding in the short-term – like drug use – they only cause more issues in the long-term. Adaptive behaviors on the other hand require a bit more of an investment to get into in the short-term, but keeping them up over the course of months and years produces changes both physically and mentally that help you deal with your emotional issues, see things rationally, and achieve an objectively healthier form of happiness.

Healthy Eating Can Help Your Mind

Research shows that food has a relationship with mental illness. Eating the right foods can help you combat depression, anxiety, and even addiction. Of course, the food alone won’t do it – a quality diet is great, but it isn’t a panacea. Understanding the impact of something as simple as a diet change on physical health, emotional health and your self-esteem, however, is a great primer on why lifestyle changes should be pursued.

And the benefits don’t stop after long-term sobriety. You continue to benefit from a good diet through longevity, better physical condition, and of course, potentially lower healthcare costs.

Exercise Is a Perfect Recovery Tool

Addiction is powerful because it hijacks the part of the brain dedicated to regulating pleasure. Exercise can help you restore that part back to normal. It’s been common knowledge for a while now that physical health and mental health heavily correlate, and that one can help prevent issues with the other.

Many people, however, lack the motivation or conviction to follow through with regular exercise. Struggling with drug addiction can give you the motivation to kick your addiction to the curb and hit the gym instead.

Fitness as the Key

However, if you have the aptitude for it, then you can turn exercise into a goal – a new healthy obsession. Note, that the term obsession here doesn’t refer to an actual obsession. There’s a thin line between obsession and passion, and having a healthy passion for fitness (one that won’t cost your health) can be a good way to keep sober, and it’s not just for the fact that exercise is conducive to better mental health.

Having a goal, such as a competition, weight goal, or sports benchmark, gives you something important to strive for while helping you improve yourself, transform yourself, and steal away the power that addiction used to have over you.

Seeking Out a Goal

If you’re not the type to get serious or competitive about physical exercise and fitness – be it training for a specific sport, training for martial arts, training for weightlifting, Crossfit tournaments, or just training for the sake of bodybuilding – then you can adopt a different goal as part of your recovery process.

If you discover a new love for video games, hiking, or Victorian literature, then get serious about it. Turn your hobby into a hobby you can profit from, emotionally and perhaps even financially. Write and talk about what you love. Go to conventions and meet new people. Get into any form of competition if that’s what you’re about.

Once you discover something you can be a fully-fledged enthusiast about and dedicate yourself to it, you create something that a.) will benefit you in the long-term, and b.) give you more reason to remain sober. You make yourself accountable. Why give up what you’ve worked hard to learn and achieve for another hit? Why let go of your newfound long-term happiness and true joy for something as artificial as a drug high?

Changing the way you live and embracing an aspect of life you can be truly passionate about is one of the best ways to apply everything you learned in your first few days of sober living. It’s fulfilling, rewarding, and best of all, you’re doing it for yourself. Working on yourself is a great way to differentiate who you are from what you once were – by undergoing a personal transformation, you can come to closure and officially separate yourself from the past.

It won’t be easy – dedication never is. But it’ll be worth every minute spent and every ounce of sweat lost.