Therapy and consistency are important to maintain sobriety – but having a handy list of personal tips and tricks can really help you flesh out your sober life and ensure that you have ways to deal with anything life throws at you. That means building habits that keep you healthy, sane, and happy.
Binging on TV shows, spending half a day playing video games or locking yourself in your room to go through an entire book series isn’t a constructive way to cut addiction from your life. However, that doesn’t mean you should stop consuming entertainment, or stop indulging in distractions from time to time.
Distractions have their place in recovery. But most of your habits should help you shape a better life. The best coping mechanisms for any of life troubles are the ones that help make you a stronger, better person – they help you build your focus, improve a talent, or make you happy.
Taking an hour or two out of your day to live in the pages of a book or play some video games can be an enriching experience and will in fact help you work off some emotional stress. But there’s a line between an effective way to deal with stress, and turning your new coping mechanism into a destructive behavior – which is exactly what addiction is to begin with.
Look for habits that pull you away from your cravings in a healthy manner as you maintain sobriety.
Achieve Accountability And Maintain Sobriety
Being accountable to others is an incredibly powerful motivator in life. People have turned their entire lives around and completely shifted their world views simply because of the birth of their child, or because they’ve fallen in love. Beyond immediate family, we can be accountable towards others who have certain expectations of us, and are supportive of our attempts to be better. Our coaches, mentors and friends, for example.
When you’re having a terrible day and you’re lacking the motivation to go through with your routine, then looking onto others as a source of inspiration is crucial. Through accountability, we remind ourselves that it’s our duty to maintain sobriety, and live up to our goals – no matter how hard things might be. Not out of a sense of compulsion or guilt, but out of a sense that this is important to who we want to be as people.
Be accountable to your friends, your family, and those who believe the most in your ability to achieve your goals – whether they’re in art, fitness, music, or in an industry.
Work Out (Often)
Building up a sweat on a regular basis is more than just a tool for losing weight or building muscle. It can be an indispensable tool for vastly improving your mood, and dealing with stress. If it’s within your ability, then exercise should be a part of your life – regardless of whether you’re struggling with addiction, mental illness, or just the day-to-day difficulties of living. Exercise is a boon to all, and it’s especially useful if you experience frequent depressive and destructive thoughts.
This is because exercise helps people tackle these issues in two major ways: through the release of endorphins, which act as natural anti-depressants and immediately shift your mood, and through the gradual improvement of your overall fitness and appearance, which can have a dramatic effect on your self-esteem and help you stave off irrational, self-deprecative and negative thoughts.
The key to maintaining a proper level of exercise is to do something you enjoy. Don’t force yourself to attend spin classes or go jogging in the early morning if you loathe both activities. Instead, try alternative ways to get your daily sweat on – like calisthenics, CrossFit, or weight lifting. Give everything a trial period – it’s normal for a completely sedentary person to dislike exercising regularly just because of the physical shock of going through a proper workout without prior experience. But if you still hate jogging after a few weeks, then it’s probably not your thing.
Don’t just restrict yourself to fitness. Look at other sports and activities like Latin dancing, martial arts/self-defense classes, basketball, or swimming. Having sometihng like working out to take up your time helps you maintain sobriety in the long run.
Read Up On Addiction & Mental Health
They say knowledge is power – and when it comes to trying to maintain sobriety, you will probably welcome all the help you can get. Addiction is not a completely understood condition – we’re still figuring out how best to help people treat themselves, and both the biology and psychology of addiction is being studied to come up with better treatment, and create a much wider understanding of the disease so that every case can get the help it needs.
That’s why it’s important to stay up-to-date on the science and the psychology on addiction. New drug treatments are constantly in development, alternatives to addictive painkillers are an extremely hot topic, and the scientific community is still working on ways to create treatments that help everybody in all stages of addiction.
Keep A Journal
Finally, a great tip for maintaining your sobriety is by recording your progress. Keep a journal – written, narrated or in video form – and update it regularly, or whenever you feel like you need to get something off your chest. You could publish it in a blog form, use it as reference some day in the future when producing a creative piece of work, or simply keep it close to you and in private, to look back on and see how far you’ve come since.
Recovery is a journey that lasts a lifetime – but that just means living life to the fullest, and doing your best every day to stay away from the darker days as you maintain sobriety.