Addiction to substances, food, people or behaviors can be a tricky thing to overcome. Ask anyone in recovery. Relapse is a natural part of recovering from an addiction or mental health issue but there are some things that you can do to minimize your risk for relapse and it’s not hard to learn.
Watch Your Stress Levels
As you know when stress increases or life becomes unbalanced it may be difficult to manage cravings or urges to use. In the field, we often tell people to ride the urge out. Urges and cravings do not last long (minutes) and distraction is the key to overcoming them. However, if you are feeling very stressed out due to relationship, career or just general life difficulties it will be hard to not go with the craving.
Effective coping with stress is the way to minimize the risk of relapse. So you have to get really good at looking at your life. There are key signs to people that are over stressed which are increased irritability, difficulties sleeping (not enough or too much), not eating or eating too much and/or a general “life sucks” attitude. If you find that you have fallen victim to any of these, using good self-care and putting in healthy boundaries in your life can help.
About Change
I know easier said than done but a really wise 12 stepper once said, “nothing changes if nothing changes” and really they hit that nail on the head. If you do not change anything, nothing in your life will change.
And here’s where relapse enters the picture, at some point your ineffective way of coping with increased stress in your life will cause you to make poor choices which will cause more problems in your life and increase your stress. A vicious cycle, right???
We all know typically how drug or alcohol addiction plays out which is unfortunately death, jail or losing a lot of things in your life also known as hitting rock bottom.
Ways to Decrease Risk of Relapse
Let’s say you have identified yourself as having way too much stress in your life. So let’s get into changing that so that you will feel better, happier, more peaceful. If your mind, body and soul are healthy your relapse risk will decrease as you begin to enjoy your life.
Here is a quick list of things that you may try:
- Set healthy boundaries with family, friends and work
- Start eating regularly and healthy
- Exercise, meditate or nap
- Identify the triggers to your bad mood
- Limit contact with people that are triggering a bad mood or making you more irritable
- Go to an AA or NA meeting
- Do things you used to like to do (look back before you starting using drugs or drinking)
- Look at the 24 hour period before your last relapse, what was happening? How were you feeling? Look closely at these and the thoughts the feelings generated (remember anger is basically hurt feelings) Consider how can you cope with that better in the future?
This is just a basic list but seriously managing stress is the number 1 key to relapse prevention. Focusing on self-care is very important.
If you should find difficulty being able to manage stress, seek out a trained professional. Counseling can help you identify the issues and help you devise a strong relapse prevention plan.
If you would like help revamping your relapse prevention plan please book your Free 15 Min Recovery Journey Call
For more info about me, check out my LinkedIn profile
Comments are closed.