Shot glasses, beer steins, rolling papers, needles and other items have no place in the home of someone who’s trying to avoid relapse. Staying dedicated to recovery enables you to overcome any obstacles or setbacks that may arise, thus ensuring long-term success and a life free from the grip of addiction. If you are looking for addiction recovery treatment in the California area, check out our website for a full list of recovery services. Knowing that you need to take the time for self-care practices will be very helpful in your recovery. Many addicts have all-or-nothing thinking, meaning that if they are abstaining from drug use, they might also feel that they can’t relax or treat themselves at all. If you are an addict, chances are that your drug of choice is the way you would relax, escape, and unwind.

• If you feel comfortable doing so, share your work in these steps with a friend.
• Strengthen your recovery in a caring, supportive, and structured environment.
• The only way to recover is total and complete abstinence from drugs and alcohol.
• Your environment must be conducive to your recovery in that it makes using drugs or drinking alcohol more difficult.
• When you don’t change your life, environment, or peer groups, the temptation to use substances is still there.

Seek Family Therapy

There are many ways to practice self-care but it is also personal to you. It can mean going to the hair salon, going to the movies, or even sleeping in. Many people in recovery struggle to give up their current lives. They want their current life, except without drugs or alcohol. Sometimes, recovering addicts are overwhelmed and scared of the prospect of a new life. It takes many life changes and a lot of support in order to stay on track with your sobriety.

Preventing Relapse and the Five Rules of Recovery

Understanding each will help you analyze what led to your relapse and how it can be prevented moving forward. Recovery is difficult because you have to change your life, and all change is difficult, even good change. Recovery is rewarding because you get the chance to change your life. They don’t think about who they are or what they want to be, and then one day they wake up and wonder why they aren’t happy. Self-care doesn’t have to be fancy trips or frivolous shopping. Eat a healthier lunch so you’re not as hungry at the end of the day.

The Stages of Relapse

Learn how to relax so that you’re not filled with fears and resentments. You’ve spent so much time learning how to lie that telling the truth, no matter how good it is for you, won’t feel natural. You’ll have to practice telling the truth a few hundred times before it becomes a little easier. In the beginning, you’ll have to stop yourself as you’re telling a story, and say, “now that I think of it, it was more like this…”

Mental relapse

When you are trying to recover, doing it alone can be difficult and impossible. Places – Places where you use or where you went to get drugs or alcohol are common triggers. Research has found that recovery—and most relapses—can be explained in terms of a few basic rules. It is useful to understand these basic rules and start to live by them to help your chances of avoiding relapse. Honesty is about self-honesty involving the reality of your addiction and its impact on your life, but also being completely honest within your recovery support group. Recovery requires creating a new life for yourself, so it’s easier not to use.

In my role as an addiction counselor, one of the most powerful truths I share with those embarking on the path to recovery is the critical importance of honesty. This principle goes beyond simply not lying; it’s about embracing vulnerability and openness as the bedrock upon which recovery is built. We suggest starting with a past action that is giving you some discomfort, but not something that is crippling or giving you extreme distress, until you have more practice with this process. As you take active steps toward healing, you’ll likely experience an increased sense of self-respect. Each day of commitment is a powerful testimony to your strength and resilience.

About our addiction rehab center

Clients sometimes think that they have been so damaged by their addiction that they cannot experience joy, feel confident, or have healthy relationships 9. People often turn to drugs and alcohol because they feel broken, stressed, unappreciated, depressed, isolated, or lonely. Recovery is finding a way to practice healthy coping mechanisms in the form of self-care. If you want healthy mental well-being, you need to take care five rules of recovery of yourself. Find ways to engage in self-care that start with healthy eating, exercise, getting enough sleep, and keeping your stress levels down.

Change Your Life

Clients are encouraged to challenge their thinking by looking at past successes and acknowledging the strengths they bring to recovery 8. When these are overlooked or ignored, the journey to sobriety becomes significantly harder, often leading back to square one. It’s a stark reminder that recovery is a comprehensive process, demanding a holistic commitment. Embracing these principles fully offers not just a path away from addiction, but a roadmap to a new, fulfilling life. Time and again, I’ve seen individuals who strayed from these guidelines find themselves facing eventual relapse.

There are many different aspects of your life that need tending to if you want to ensure that you stay sober and prevent relapse. Ask yourself, will more lying, more isolating, and more of the same make you feel better? If you don’t change your life, then why would this time be any different? You have to lie about getting your drug, using it, hiding its consequences, and planning your next relapse. By the time you’ve developed an addiction, lying comes easily to you. After a while, you are so good at lying that you end up lying to yourself.

This includes family, doctors, sponsors, group members, and therapists. It is up to your discretion if you want to divulge information about your recovery in your relationship or at your place of work. In this stage, the craving hasn’t yet occurred, but the process of relapse has already begun. If you are feeling angry, anxious, or overwhelmed and you aren’t using recovery strategies to deal with them, you’re at risk of relapse.

The study concluded that after 5 years of abstinence relapse is rare.12 Recovery is possible. After all who has time to escape, relax, and reward themselves. But that is exactly what people do when they turn to their addiction. This is one of the reasons that self-help groups are important.

These five rules of recovery will help ensure that you are taking care of yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally in your recovery. There are only a few reasons why people use drugs and alcohol. In other words, people use drugs and alcohol as a form of self-care and self-medication.

The importance of self-care helps to understand why people turn to drugs and alcohol— to reward themselves. The purpose of recovery is to practice healthy alternatives to escape and relax. Many people try to recover from their addiction on their own, but research shows that recovery is most successful when done in a group setting.

It’s essential to recognize the signs of emotional relapses, such as poor self-care or bottling up emotions. Practicing self-care and addressing emotional triggers can help develop healthy coping skills and minimize relapse risk due to emotional distress. Cognitive therapy is one of the main tools for changing people’s negative thinking and developing healthy coping skills 9,10.