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.