If you have been addicted to drugs and alcohol, you know that you cannot recover just by stopping. You recover by creating a brand new life where it is so much easier for you not to drink or use drugs. If you fail to create that brand new life, all the influences that led to your addiction will eventually catch up with you once more.
You don’t need to change absolutely everything, but there are certain things you can do to help you overcome addiction.
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Avoid High-Risk Situations
The 12 step program for drug and alcohol rehabilitation recommends avoiding high-risk situations such as feeling tired, hungry, lonely or angry. This means taking care of yourself and being aware of your body’s requirements.
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Learn to Relax
Most people use drugs and alcohol to relax, reward themselves or as an escape. So they use their addiction to relax. One of the first rules of recovery is that you need to change your lifestyle. You need to find healthier ways to relieve tension, whether it is simple techniques such as going for a walk or a workout at the gym, or something more structured like meditation
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Be Honest
Addiction usually goes hand-in-hand with lying. You lie about your drug; lie about using it, hiding it and so on. The other thing about lying is that you can’t be yourself. Lying serves to trap you into addiction and the more you lie the less you actually like yourself. And that makes you want to escape – it’s a vicious cycle. Recovery, whether alone or at an Addiction Rehab Center in Thailand, requires complete honesty. You need to be honest with the people who support you, including your doctors, family and therapist.
Often, people in the early stage of recovery make the mistake of thinking that honesty refers to being honest about others. They think they should tell people what is wrong with them. But recover is not about fixing other people; it’s all about fixing yourself.
It will be tough for honesty to come naturally at first, especially if you’ve spent so much time learning how to lie. You’re going to have to practice telling the truth hundreds of times before it starts to get easier and become a natural habit.
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A Chance to Change Your Life
Addiction gives you the opportunity to change your life. This is what makes recovery both highly rewarding and exceptionally difficult. Recovery is hard because you need to change your life and the change is tough, even if it’s for the better. However, recovery is incredibly rewarding because you get to change your life. So many people just sleepwalk through their life, not thinking about who they are or what they want to achieve and then one day they wake up wondering why they are miserable.
If you use recovery as the opportunity to change, you are sure to look back and think of it as the best thing that has ever happened to you. You are also more likely to make sure you do not go back to your addictive ways.