Healthy Living

In each individual’s journey to sobriety, the recovery process can present many difficult and unique hurdles. Not only is it important to address one’s relationship with drugs or alcohol and learn how to cope with urges, but each individual is also asked to confront feelings of shame or guilt and address the complex nature of their changing relationships. One of the most profound parts of tackling addiction is the relationships that may have become strained due to drug or alcohol use. Because of this, forgiveness is a crucial part of the recovery process, both in learning to forgive others and oneself. It is essential for both those in the recovery program and supporters to explore the profound nature of forgiveness. However, that doesn’t mean that forgiveness will come at the same time for each person. Learning the different ways in which forgiveness can be explored and why such a practice is so essential can create the necessary space for further growth both inside and outside of the recovery sphere.

With concerts, festivals, and other gatherings now being scheduled again, the challenge of navigating social events without drinking or using them once again arises. These situations often feel triggering, especially for individuals in early recovery. For some, this may be their first time attending social events sober if they recently entered recovery sometime in the past year during the pandemic. Mentally preparing yourself before attending one of these social events is the first step to being ready for the emotions that might come up. Before you get to the event, visualize yourself having a good time and being fun without needing alcohol or drugs. Take out any of the false beliefs in your mind that you will feel isolated or everyone will notice that you aren’t drinking. Choose your intention for the event, like catching up with old friends and enjoying their company or wanting to dance all night long. Once you’ve mentally prepared yourself to feel comfortable not drinking, follow some of the tips below at the event:

A major part of recovery is changing your lifestyle to fit the healthier way of life you are choosing to create for yourself. With this comes along filtering out certain influences that do not align with your sober life. Sometimes, negative influences aren’t always obvious, especially if something or someone has been a significant part of your life for a considerable amount of time. Looking closely at your behavior and the behavior of others will help you be able to identify who or what is bringing positivity or negativity into your space. Negative Influences to Remove From Your Life in Recovery

Does the phrase “stuffing your emotions” resonate with how you handle your feelings and emotions? In case you aren’t familiar with this phrase, stuffing your emotions refers to burying hurt feelings down only for them to resurface later on as unresolved pain that still needs to be felt and heard. When you stuff your emotions, you will have to deal with many unintended consequences down the line. If you learn how to avoid stuffing your feelings, it will help you build strong relationships, enjoy better mental health, let you healthily deal with your emotions, and you will feel better without repressed feelings weighing you down. Why We Stuff Our Emotions Stuffing our emotions isn’t a healthy way to deal with our emotions, but it is a pattern that many of us fall into regardless. There can be many reasons a person can stuff their emotions, and usually, it is a combination of several factors.

Since April is Stress Awareness Month, it’s the perfect time to declutter anything causing extra stress in your life. One of the things you may find causing you unnecessary stress is an excess of decisions to make, resulting from the hefty mental and emotional strain of being weighed down by too many choices and decisions to make. This severe overwhelm, or what is known as decision fatigue, not only causes stress but can lead to someone shutting down and incapable of making decisions altogether.

Judging when someone else has an anger problem is usually pretty obvious, but knowing when you are the one who has anger issues is another story. Especially if you are someone who struggles with flash anger who feels fine and peaceful most of the time but will fly off the handle in a second. You may think that because you are calm 99 percent of the time, you don’t have any anger issues but do those fleeting moments of rage or “flash anger” amount to something that requires some personal work? It turns out, yes, they do.

Learning something new may be difficult, but the task of unlearning deeply held false beliefs proves even more challenging for most people. Whether you realize it or not, we all hold on to beliefs about ourselves and life that we have accepted as truths from our families, society, TV, education, or experiences. Most of what we learn as we grow and mature molds and shapes us in beautiful ways, making us more intelligent and more aware of ourselves, but in the mix of all of the good we absorb are false beliefs that can be holding us back and poorly affecting our mental health. Looking critically at your actions and why you say or do things will help you identify the underlying beliefs you hold about yourself. When we carry negative beliefs about ourselves that weigh us down internally, this will manifest downstream as negative self-talk and a poor state of mental health. Retraining how we think about ourselves by unlearning these false beliefs will help bring about positive self-regard and positive changes to our mental health. Below are some common false beliefs that deep down people believe to be true, perpetuating poor mental health.

We can’t outrun technology’s influence over our lives, and whether we like it or not, the way we use technology has affected our brains and bodies. Today’s younger generations are growing up with brains wired differently than kids of previous generations, and only time can show the effects this will have. With our constant use of technology, we end up with brains fatigued from constantly jumping from one thing to the next and strained from communicating so much from behind a screen.

Most people have experienced what anxiety feels like since anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the US. Women are more affected by anxiety disorders than men, but it is estimated that 31% of people will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. With anxiety rates on the rise and ever more common, knowing how to treat anxiety is paramount, so it doesn’t infringe on your quality of life. Often making small lifestyle adjustments can result in significant improvements to someone’s anxiety, with some fixes so simple you can do them in your sleep. Medical professionals have been using weighted blankets for years to ease patients’ anxiety and stress during medical procedures and therapies. Just using a weighted blanket when you sleep or taking breaks to rest under a weighted blanket can help decrease feelings of anxiety.

Our modern lifestyles don’t offer us many ways to spend time outside naturally. Make a conscious effort this spring to get outdoors to enjoy the beauty this season offers. Spending time outside supports the health and well-being of every person. For those in recovery, the advantages of time outdoors bring an even more profound beneficial impact. Although time outside cannot cure addiction independently, it builds upon the healthy lifestyle that recovery encourages and provides a space for healing and connection. Here are some ways spending time outside promotes your recovery.

The words “recovery” and “treatment” are often used interchangeably through each individual’s journey to sobriety. However, they refer to two distinct parts of the process. While “treatment” is the actual program in which a person is enrolled, such as their detox or residential treatment that has a distinct start and end date, the term “recovery” refers to the entirety of an individual’s journey to sobriety. Recovery is not just the things an individual learns during treatment but also incorporates how a person conducts themselves outside of the treatment sphere, reflecting the entirety of one’s new journey through their sober life. This recovery may have a start date that coincides with their treatment depending on the individual, but recovery as a whole will often extend far beyond when a person may have graduated from a treatment program. Completing a treatment program is undeniably an impressive and difficult feat, but it doesn’t mean that one has completed recovery as a whole. Because of this, aftercare planning and preparation are paramount for maintaining many of the skills and mindset initially instilled during treatment.

March 2020 was the month that marked a complete 180 turn in every American’s lives (along with everyone around the globe). Now one year later, for better or for worse, we have all learned a thing or two about how to better care for ourselves in totally new ways. Some of the most important lessons we learned were how to better care for our mental health through self-care routines. We realized that contrary to what we believed self-care to be, it turns out to be some of the least glamorous things we may have to do in our day.