21 Strategies for Staying Sober and the Triggers to Watch after a Successful Recovery
Staying sober is a common challenge people recovering from drug addiction face. Without a strong support network and a deliberate determination to remain sober, recovering drug addicts can easily relapse. Stats indicate that around 20% to 50% of individuals healing from alcohol dependence backslide after some time. Whereas recovering from drug addiction comes with multiple challenges, staying sober continually is the hardest part. With multiple triggers surrounding recovering addicts, one can only succeed in their sobriety mission if they arm themselves with knowledge. This article explores professional tips and ideas that can help you continue staying sober once you’re through with treatment.
Understanding Sobriety and its Benefits
Before diving deep into the strategies you can use to stay sober, it’s essential to understand the meaning of sobriety and its benefits. Sobriety is a deliberate decision and determination to break away from alcohol, or any other drugs one is addicted to. When sober, you can make sound judgments and lead a responsible life. Here are the benefits you enjoy when you stay sober:
· Restoration of spoiled relationships: addiction can take a toll on the excellent relationship you enjoy with your loved ones. Getting rid of the drug that caused this damage provides a chance to restore excellent connections. Although some people might still want the ties with you to remain cut, staying sober can heal multiple relationships you had.
· Physical and emotional healing: Addiction causes immense physical and emotional damage. Although the process of healing starts when you detoxify, staying sober ensures that the healing process continues.
· Take control of your life: when you get addicted to drugs and alcohol, the substances take control of your life. This means that everything you do revolves around substance abuse. Living sober means getting hold of your life and determining how you want to live. For example, you can decide to marry or live independently.
· Repair of mental abilities: substance abuse causes huge damage to your mental faculties. Addicts find it challenging to focus and remember past occurrences. The thinking process and clarity of thought are also challenges that drug abusers face.
· Take charge of your finances: Addicts spend money on substances. The constant cravings for drugs disrupt your savings and other financial plans. When you stay sober, you can control your finances and determine the investments to make.
Which Strategies Can You Apply for Sober Living?
Becoming sober is daunting for most individuals recovering from substance abuse. Once you become sober, it’s your wish to continue maintaining that state. However, living sober is challenging as one is faced with the problem of relapsing. A central strategy to use in maintaining your sobriety is to equip yourself with knowledge. Here are the professional tips to help you retain your sobriety status:
1. Start Small
Recovering addicts will encounter challenges at the beginning of their sobriety journey. During that time, some challenges you’ll face include withdrawal symptoms and breaking loose from old habits. Faced with these challenges, articulating short-term and attainable goals is the best strategy. Although these goals might not lead to significant accomplishments, they’ll keep you on course to retaining your sobriety. For example, you can create a plan for talking during a support group meeting. You can also explore new hobbies like drawing and painting. In summary, you need to have short-term goals when starting your sobriety journey.
2. Seek Medical Attention
Once you undergo a detoxification procedure, you’ll likely experience post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS) issues. So, prepare to face challenges like anxiety, melancholy, and insomnia. Because PAWS problems can predispose you to a relapse, seeking medical attention is critical. An experienced medical practitioner can provide the professional support that you require to avoid backsliding.
3. Get Rid of Former Routines
The chances of relapsing are high without breaking loose from the old habits. For example, to remain sober, you must avoid the company of individuals whom you used to abuse drugs with. Also, avoiding specific routes that can remind you of drug abuse and stimulate the craving is essential.
4. Learn to Identify the Danger Signals of Relapsing
Recovering addicts should learn to identify the signs of a relapse. If you know the symbols to watch, you can easily avoid them when they sneak in. There are multiple relapse signals, such as:
· Decreasing contacts with a mentor: sponsors or mentors support you when recovering from drug abuse. A clear indication of a staggering recovery process is when you lessen your contacts with a sponsor.
· Avoiding recovery routines: you can only maintain sobriety when you observe specific practices. For example, you must attend support group meetings and avoid buddies who engage in drug abuse. So, you’re about to relapse if you find yourself avoiding support group meetings and hanging out with drug abusers.
· Elevated signals of stress and dejection: worsening mental well-being can trigger a relapse. Some signs of a troubled mind include mood changes, depression, and entertaining suicidal feelings. These signals can quickly start a relapse.
· Longing for the past drinking experiences: individuals who are about to relapse find themselves romanticizing their past drinking habits. You might lack room to think about the positives of sobriety when your mind is occupied with the thoughts of drinking.
· Avoiding close contact with friends and family: you elevate your chances of relapse when isolating yourself from essential people. Besides helping you through your recovery journey, close friends and family members hold you accountable for your actions.
5. Nurture Valuable Connections:
A vital step to take when you’ve regained sobriety is cultivating valuable relationships. Remember, during your addiction period, you used to hang around with toxic friends and drug dealers. If you keep close contact with these unhealthy relationships, you might relapse. So, to keep remaining sober, it’s crucial to cultivate and foster healthy relationships.
6. Leverage the Support of Professionals and Loved Ones
When you encounter challenges in making valuable relationships, you should take advantage of support groups and family. You must participate in family matters and learn to engage in healthy conversations.
Seeking professional assistance can also help you maintain your sobriety. An experienced therapist can teach you how to develop skills to help you remain sober.
7. Create a Well-planned Routine
A chaotic schedule can lead to confusion, driving you to a relapse. So, ensure you have a well-organized daily, weekly, and monthly program you must observe. Besides contributing to your sobriety, a structured routine can boost your productivity and help you to meet other essential goals.
8. Focus on Your Physical and Emotional Well-being
Abusing drugs for a long time damages your mental and physical well-being. Once you decide to detoxify and start the recovery process, you should prioritize your physical and psychological health. Here are the best health practices to observe:
· Regular physical exercises
· Fixing time for hobbies
· Taking well-balanced diet
· Getting enough sleep
Physical exercises are critical to recovering from addiction because they trigger specific chemicals in your brain that make you happy. Participating in good causes, like visiting an orphanage and senior homes, can distract you from negative thoughts. Also, these moves can help you make new friends you can exchange ideas with.
9. Reorganize Your Finances
Addiction harms your work-related life. Besides fracturing your relationships with colleagues, addiction may take a toll on your productivity. If your progress worsens, you might be fired. When you start your recovery journey and become sober, you should prioritize reorganizing your finances.
Although it might seem difficult to start again, it’s possible if you apply the right strategies. For example, if you lost your job, you should start by creating a professional resume that you can use to apply for available opportunities.
10. Learn How to Handle Anger
Managing anger is one of the challenges that many drug addicts face. You can easily ruin your sober living if you fail to control your anger. Besides, anger has adverse effects on your general well-being. So, learning how to manage this feeling from a professional therapist is critical. The professional can educate you on managing your anger without impacting your sobriety and general health.
11. Confront Your Previous Flaws
Many people who detoxify and start their recovery process experience much pain and feelings of regret. During their active addiction period, their acts and behaviors were shameful and might have annoyed people close to them. While recovering, these feelings of guilt and shame can recur and start tormenting you. If these negative thoughts overwhelm you, you can return to substance abuse. So, you need to find the best way to deal with your previous flaws while maintaining sobriety. If the feelings are overwhelming, you must talk to your therapist or seek support from your group.
12. Rejoice When You Meet Your Set Goals
Achieving specific milestones is an essential aspect for people recovering from addiction. For example, if you’re participating in a 10-step program, there are ten milestones to achieve. However, these milestones can take time to attain for many. So, when you meet a milestone, it’s important to celebrate your achievement. Remember, you get motivated when you acknowledge and rejoice in your sobriety achievement.
13. Discover and Fine-tune Your Drives
Learning your association with drugs is critical to help you stay sober. You need to know what attracts you to substance abuse. For example, you might be hooked up to drug abuse to deal with a specific problem, such as nervousness or dejection. Yet, others indulge in drug abuse to boost their self-assurance when facing particular circumstances.
While some individuals can discover their drives to drugs and make adjustments, others require help from professionals. Professionals like therapists can help you identify your motivation for drug abuse and help you to make changes.
14. Build a Backup Group
Having a solid support group is essential for staying sober. The individuals you include in your network should be committed to helping you overcome your addictive behavior and live sober. For example, your network should comprise family, friends, and people who are determined to see you succeed in your recovery mission. The support network provides a venue to vent your challenges and share triumphs.
Besides the general support networks, it’s advisable to have a specialized network comprising counselors, psychiatrists, and sober instructors. The professional networks help you when facing various issues in your recovery and sobriety journeys.
15. Learn How to Overcome Your Urges
Occasionally, urges can sneak in and last for 15–30 minutes. When they come, you can replace them via various techniques, such as taking a walk or listening to your favorite song. Because these urges come when you’re idle, ensuring you’re always busy is essential.
You can also keep a journal where you record the things that motivate you and those that discourage you. You can read your journal during challenging times to encourage you to stay sober.
16. Know How to Handle Anxiety
As you continue with your recovery process, you might encounter a situation that might stress you. For example, you might get fired or miss a job interview. These occurrences can cause anxiety that can easily lead to a relapse. So, whenever you encounter these situations, you must share your feelings with a sober support network or family. You should always ensure that you’ve sufficient time on your schedule to talk to these support groups, especially when you encounter challenges.
17. Understand How to Calm Down
Stress is one of the conditions that people recovering from substance use disorder face, which can trigger the cravings for substance use. So, understanding how to manage your stress through relaxation is crucial. In short, relaxation is a vital aspect of your self-care as it can shield you from other health risks like obesity and sleep disorders. Here are some relaxation techniques that you can incorporate into your daily routine:
· Meditation: meditation is a popular technique that helps you to relax your mind and body. So, you need to understand the strategies to calm an anxious mind and body. A trendy meditation method is mindfulness, which allows you to slow down your sprinting feelings and eliminate negative thoughts.
· Deep breathing: Although meditation is one of the best ways of calming down, it requires much time and practice. Deep breathing is a simple technique to achieve relaxation within the shortest time. The method works quickly to start your vagus nerve, stimulating your rest.
· Reading: reading your best books can calm down your mind. Furthermore, reading is good for mental well-being because you feed your mind with positive ideas. Individuals recovering from substance use disorder can read books from people who have already recovered. Such books can be tonic and foster a newfound optimism as you’re likely to relate with the writer.
18. Understand How to Handle Bodily Pain
Some prescription medications can trigger your relapse. So, if you become sick while recovering from substance abuse, you must inform the physician about your situation. The doctor will determine the best drugs that might not trigger a relapse. You can also ask your doctor whether there are other methods you can use to manage your condition besides drugs. For example, there are conditions that you can manage through reflexology and aromatherapy.
19. Snub Social Revelry
Social parties are likely to involve drinking as part of the merriment. So, avoiding such parties is crucial when recovering from addiction, as they can trigger a relapse.
20. Avoid Surrendering
Recovering from drug addiction is a journey replete with multiple ups and downs. You can quickly give up if you’re weak. Celebrating some achievements can provide the motivation and afterburners you require.
Remember, despite the challenges on your way, it’s essential to be determined to remain sober. Sometimes you might feel so low and almost reach a point of surrendering. And that’s where the support network becomes critical. Multiple resources exist that you can leverage to support you on your way. So, avoid battling alone and seek help from your network.
21. Embrace Forgiveness
You might have hurt many people and yourself when you were hooked on drug abuse. So, while healing, the feeling of regret might quickly engulf you and trigger a relapse. To overcome the shameful past, you need to forgive yourself. Also, you must start repairing relationships with your loved ones and friends.
Triggers to Watch when Recovering from Substance Use Disorder
Triggers are a common challenge that individuals recovering from drug addiction face. Triggers remind you of your previous substance abuse. If you fail to handle triggers properly, you might plunge into drug abuse again. So, when recovering from substance use disorder, it’s essential to understand what triggers are and how to overcome them when they occur.
Types of Triggers
At some point, individuals recuperating from drug abuse might experience the urge to relapse. Statistics show that 40–60% of individuals regress after detoxification. Knowing what causes these triggers and articulating a strategy to counteract them when they occur is an essential step in staying sober. Here are the main types of triggers:
1. Anxiety
Anxiety is a common trigger that people recovering from substance use disorder encounter. You might resort to drug abuse as an option to manage your anxiety. To handle stress, it’s essential to list the situations that cause it and work towards avoiding them. For example, you might want to prevent toxic individuals, situations, and places that might cause stress.
2. Individuals and Places
Individuals who contribute to your drug abuse behavior can trigger a relapse. These individuals might be family members, some friends, colleagues, and drug vendors. Furthermore, specific places can provide reminders of your previous addictive habit. Examples of areas that can remind you of the time you were involved in drug abuse include schools, restaurants, bars, and former drug dens.
3. Negative Feelings
Individuals recuperating from substance abuse experience disturbing emotions. These feelings can trigger a relapse if you leave them to control you. You might want to engage in drug abuse as a way of coping with these overwhelming emotions. Some emotions that might cause a trigger includes depression, shame, anger, and fear.
4. Specific Things and Reminders
Certain things you see, or sense can trigger a relapse and disrupt your recovery efforts. For example, the aroma of marijuana smoke or watching a specific movie can serve as triggers, exposing you to a deterioration.
5. Parties
Celebrations are part of life; you wish to join family and friends at social parties. While these celebrations are cheerful, some events there can trigger a relapse in you. For example, at the party’s climax, people might resort to drinking, and you might feel odd if you avoid drinking. So, the urge to drink comes because you want to fit into the company of your friends.
Why Trigger Identification is Important in Your Addiction Recovery Process
Knowing your triggers is a crucial step that can help you manage your cravings. The knowledge assists you in understanding the things, emotions, situations, and people who can trigger a relapse and how to deal with them. Here are the strategies that can help you discover addiction triggers:
· Keeping a record: journaling is an important way of discovering and handling addiction triggers. When you jot down your past experiences with cravings, you can articulate a vibrant strategy for managing triggers in the future.
· Single out dangerous situations: when you list high-risk places and individuals, it becomes easy for you to put in place trigger preventive measures. For example, if specific celebrations start a relapse, avoiding them in the future is critical.
· Evaluation by an addiction counselor: a specialist evaluation by a therapist can help you uncover the addiction triggers you face. The professional can equip you with knowledge and tools for handling triggers and preventing a relapse. A specialist evaluation has multiple components, such as emotional examination, medical assessment, and personal history. The in-depth review helps the therapist to discover the primary triggers of substance abuse. They can then articulate a customized plan that enables you to navigate through the underlying causes.
Approaches to Help You Overcome Addiction Triggers
A crucial technique of knowing and overcoming triggers is by learning. Multiple sources of information are available to help you know more about triggers. For example, you can read an educational blog post or a book handling the subject. Here are more techniques to use to battle addiction triggers:
1. Build a Stay Sober Strategy
You can easily lose a battle if you go to fight without a plan. A sober living strategy is a detailed strategy that helps you know how to overcome triggers when recovering from addiction. It would help if you had this plan before leaving your rehab center. Here are the critical components of a sober living strategy:
· A support network
· Your schedule
· Crisis management plan
2. Self-care
Self-care comprises the physical and emotional strategies you use in combating addiction triggers. Some self-care tactics include meditation & mindfulness, good sleep, and deep inhalation.
Meditation is a practical technique for handling addiction triggers. Through meditation, you focus on relaxing your mind for more clarity and internal peace.
Meditation works well with mindfulness, which motivates you to concentrate on the present moment. Regular mindfulness can help you minimize anxiety, enhance focus, and improve the control of your feelings.
3. Physical Exercises
Regular physical activities and exercises can help you effectively address addiction triggers. While exercising, your body releases endorphins, chemicals that stimulate happiness. Also, exercises benefit your mental well-being as they boost your confidence and counteract stress.
4. Have a Solid Social Support System
Social support plays a vital role in the lives of people recovering from drug addiction. Linking with a network that knows your struggles with addiction provides the necessary support you can use when triggers occur. Furthermore, professional networks have multiple tools and resources to leverage to overcome addiction cravings.
5. Discover Innovative Techniques for Handling Anxiety
Stress is a crucial trigger for drug abuse. Thus, finding creative ways of dealing with the menace is critical for keeping sobriety. Techniques for handling anxiety vary from individual to individual, but practical approaches include discovering good pastimes and activities. Some individuals can manage anxiety by vaping CBD.
6. Find Help
The addiction recovery road is awash with multiple obstacles and triggers. It can be challenging to walk alone without a strong support system. Your support network comprises of family, groups, and professionals who are ready to hold your hand whenever you feel low. So, when you encounter a trigger, it’s advisable to get in touch with helpful individuals and institutions.
Conclusion
Once you detoxify, staying sober is a big challenge you’ll encounter. With numerous addiction triggers surrounding you, you can easily backslide if your willpower is low or you lack a robust support system. Against this backdrop, the strategies and tips shared here can help you continue living a sober life. Also, the information shared here can help you understand how to identify triggers and navigate through them without giving up. In a nutshell, staying sober is a process that requires professional support.
References
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/opioids-post-acute-withdrawal-syndrome
https://www.verywellmind.com/why-did-i-relapse-21900
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/tips-stay-sober
