Addiction

Your body and mind respond to situations and circumstances, but you can use willpower to mold your choices. Willpower is highly contagious, especially in treatment and especially when it creates positive results. Many people understand that by using your strength and mindset, you can achieve anything. Willpower gives you the motivation to pursue a goal in life and offers self-control, but how does willpower work with addiction recovery? Can it influence others?

When jumping into the ocean of recovery, you are not expected to know how to swim right away. You may feel terrified of the waves when looking upon recovery and fear drowning. Fortunately, recovery is your lifeboat. The experience of a tranquil and comfortable environment in addiction recovery centers renews your sense of peace and serenity, all while providing you healing and enlightenment to live a fulfilling life.

Replenishing nutrition and boosting metabolism after neglecting your body during addiction is part of the addiction recovery process. When you establish a healthy eating pattern, you allow your brain and body to get properly nourished. This boosts your recovery goals and creates a healthy habit for achieving your long-term recovery goals. What you eat while in recovery matters, as your body might have been deprived of essential nutrients during active addiction.

Sometimes we unintentionally reinforce good and bad behaviors in people. Those that struggle with addiction can use positive reinforcement to help them change for the better.

The recovery process teaches you how to learn and identify your triggers with coping mechanisms, and when those triggers occur, you need a prompt response. Everyone, at some point or another, is going to experience triggers. It is important to understand how to manage them to avoid relapse or other deconstructive outcomes and address them right away.

What is the opposite of addiction? On first thought, it appears to be sobriety, but in actuality, the answer isn’t so black and white. The opposite of addiction is connection, and incorporating ways to bring increased feelings of connection into your life should be a focus for anyone in recovery. Connection on a basic level is what makes us feel seen and heard, but in a larger sense, it’s what makes us feel alive and excited for life.

Being addicted can feel like a full-time job since it occupies so much of your thoughts, time, and energy. Keeping up with this lifestyle is not easy and because of the shame often felt surrounding your actions, hiding your addiction becomes a huge part of your life. Lying and hiding your addiction contributes more to the shame and creates a vicious shame cycle.

Terminology in the addiction community may sound like a new language to someone first introduced to the vocabulary unique to recovery. Two words often confused and misused are dependence and addiction. These are two fundamental terms in the addiction world, as they differentiate between someone having a physical dependence on a substance or a full-blown, life-impinging addiction.

For many, addiction is a selfish disease, and when stuck in the depths of the disease, they put their addiction above everything and everyone in their life. Selfishness is taking care of your wants and needs first, and in addiction, your wants and needs are monopolized by using your drug of choice. The selfishness seen in addiction is not to be confused with taking good care of yourself, but rather taking care to feed your addiction.

Adolescents today face a world with different challenges than what adults grew up experiencing. To parents of adolescents, understanding your children’s internet habits and determining how much time spent online is too much is difficult to discern when your child’s daily lives are so deeply interwoven with it. If you are concerned about your teenager’s internet habits, understanding the warning signs of internet addiction and how your child may be affected can help you encourage a more positive relationship between your adolescent and their time online and find help if necessary. What is Internet Addiction? Just because your teenager doesn’t want to put their phone down doesn’t mean they have a full-blown internet addiction. Internet use disorder, or internet addiction, doesn’t happen unless the uncontrolled use of the internet interferes with your teen’s daily life out in the real world. The use of the internet in this disorder is not limited to just one activity but covers several different activities, including excessively using social media, blogging, gaming, gambling, or pornography. When constantly going online for one or several of these activities affects a teen’s physical health or social skills, this becomes a reason for concern of addiction. Underlying Causes Discussing internet addiction in teens can not be complete without discussing one of the major underlying causes of developing this type of addiction. Mental health conditions like depression and anxiety are an underlying thread that makes teens more susceptible to developing an internet addiction. Other co-occurring disorders may be influencing factors developing this addiction, like obsessive-compulsive disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Warning Signs in Your Teen of Internet Use Disorder

When you are battling addiction, your brain will work at any angle to keep you in the cycle of using. Even if you feel shame every time you drink or use drugs and don’t feel the same high like you used to, you still feel stuck in your need to continually use. Part of what may not be allowing you to stop using can be attributed to the different types of cognitive biases happening in your brain. If you aren’t versed in what a cognitive bias is, it is our way of distorting our intake of information to match what we already believe. There are three main types of cognitive biases in play with addiction that we will explore below to understand why you think the way you do in addiction. #1: Attentional Bias to Support Behaviors Attentional bias affects your mind by clinging onto anything that supports the desired behavior, even if it’s harmful or dysfunctional. In attentional bias related to addiction, your brain directs your attention to your drug use, and you focus more on your triggers and what makes you want to use. By diverting your focus to anything encouraging you to use, you simultaneously ignore what is in front of you telling you to stop using, like concerned loved ones. #2: Optimism Bias Meets Reality In optimism bias, you grasp on to the unrealistic belief that everything will be okay in the future, and you’ll be able to get your drinking or using under control without it becoming a problem. Thinking that this time quitting will be different, even though you’ve failed to quit every time so far, is a common belief to prolong addiction. With the optimism bias, you find yourself always pushing the responsibility of quitting into the future and believing that you will recover all on your own when you decide to stop your drug use in the future. #3: Coloring Your Memories with Recall Bias With the recall bias, you recall the feelings or events as you want to believe them. In recovery, you selectively remember your times using or drinking as fun or liberating and choose not to remember all the bad times, too. When you experience the recall bias, you associate your substance use days as the good times and leave out the details of hurting others or the ugly sides of yourself that would come out when you used. Cognitive biases like attentional bias, optimism bias, and recall bias hold you back from thinking realistically about your addiction. Growing your awareness of the cognitive biases that perpetuate your addiction can help you correct your thinking and get you one step closer to sobriety. At Avalon Malibu, we specialize in tailoring individual treatment programs to give our clients safe, supported recovery treatment. With our team of professionals, we will find the right blend of holistic and clinical treatment to help you overcome your addiction obstacles and restore your mind, body, and spirit. Call us at (888) 958-7511 if you are finally ready to say “Yes!” to recovery.

Learning to cope with stressors, triggers, and urges is a part of each step of the recovery process. Whether an individual is just beginning their detox program or is preparing to celebrate their first year sober, managing triggers is essential for maintaining sobriety. However, that doesn’t mean that triggers can’t also be a guiding force. After addressing a trigger or particularly stressful event, the scenario can be a great source of information on how an individual can further fine-tune their recovery strategies or better understand the kinds of triggers that are more difficult than others. This approach can empower each individual to overcome stressors or triggers in the moment and further understand their relationship with recovery and how they can mold their environment and lifestyle to avoid such triggers in the future. What Are Triggers in Recovery? Triggers are commonplace throughout recovery and can take any number of forms. Objects, topics of discussion, commercials, specific environments, or anything else that reminds a person of their previous engagements with an addictive substance and tempts them to use substances again are classified as triggers. Reminders of past guilt, anniversaries of traumatic experiences, and stressful experiences can all influence one’s recovery. The brain might be programmed to react to this extreme stress by demanding an addictive substance if it is how an individual used to cope with stress in the past. These are intense experiences where an individual comes into contact with a thing or situation that causes an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, guilt, and desire to reengage with addictive substances. Learning to navigate these experiences and ground oneself in their sobriety is a complicated and essential task for those in recovery. While it may be common to slip or relapse during the recovery process because of the intense nature of triggers, it is not a necessary part of the recovery process. Preparing to cope with the inevitability of these triggers is essential from the beginning of one’s recovery journey. It is never too early to begin searching for and building upon effective grounding techniques to cope with them daily. How Triggers Can Guide You Despite the potential for a destructive outcome, triggers can also help guide an individual if looked at objectively. Experiencing a trigger can indicate that certain aspects of one’s life may need more direct attention than others. For some, experiencing triggers more often while tending to errands or otherwise engaging in social events can indicate that such interpersonal skills may need to be further tuned. Those in recovery and the professionals involved can begin to explore more interpersonal strategies. This can result in a heavier focus on group therapy, team-based activities and practices, and effective communication techniques to help express themselves to supports effectively during grounding. Others may find that triggers become more prevalent when moving through certain physical spaces. This can indicate a need to look at one’s various environments and turn a heavier focus on one’s living situation and the availability of supports. It can also prompt the repurpose of certain rooms or spaces to take on new connotations. Exploring more experiential therapies, such as art, writing, or music, can help create new hobbies in an area that previously caused a trigger and helps to ascribe a new connotation to that place. Finding Ways To Objectively View Triggers Using a trigger to inform one’s recovery path is a powerful tool, but it can only be adequately utilized if an individual can objectively understand the nature of that trigger. Experiencing triggers is an incredibly intense experience, and all of one’s focus needs to be set on trying to ground oneself. However, after a trigger has passed and an individual has successfully grounded themselves, it can be essential to look back on the different factors involved. Journaling about which people were present, what was going on, and the location can provide important information, even if they seem innocuous at first. By looking back on these things, especially if an individual experiences another trigger that seems to share certain traits, they can become more empowered to understand their unique situation and hone in on unique elements, strengths, and difficulties throughout their recovery journey. Texting supports in the moment can also be another way of recording certain pertinent pieces of information and can be used to get another opinion on the intricacies of one’s unique situation. Comparing one’s notes over time and sharing these things with professionals can uncover otherwise latent areas that may need more focus. Triggers are an unfortunate inevitability throughout the recovery process. Learning how to handle their intense effects and how they can guide you through refocusing your recovery efforts can be a crucial skill. We at Avalon Malibu understand the unique and challenging role that triggers and stressors play in addiction recovery and invite you to embrace your unique recovery story. We offer an array of therapeutic approaches, including art, writing, music therapy, neurofeedback, and individual and group approaches, all designed to help you better understand your triggers, work on relapse prevention, and thrive in your newfound recovery strategies. All of these services are available on our beautiful campus, which provides an atmosphere of fresh air, support, healing, and community. For more information on how we can individualize your time with us or speak to a caring, trained staff member about your unique situation and recovery, call us today at (888) 958-7511.