The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success and a of focus is Health/Wellness. If you’ve become addicted to a drug of abuse, a challenging facing you is recovery and then avoiding relapse. Some former users can avoid relapse, while for others it’s an ongoing battle. The following contributed post is entitled, 4 Ways For Recovering Addicts To Avoid A Relapse.
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Overcoming an addiction is an incredibly difficult thing to do, but even once you have beaten it, your journey doesn’t end there. There is no simple cure to addiction and it’s something that you will live with for the rest of your life. That means that there is always the risk of relapse, so you need to be very careful. However, there are ways that you can reduce the chances of a relapse and continue on your recovery journey. Whether you are recovering from addiction yourself or you have helped a loved one through it, these methods for avoiding relapse can be very useful to you.
Continued Treatment
The most effective way to avoid relapse is to continue with treatment in some form. A lot of people find that they leave a rehabilitation facility feeling as though they will never return to their addiction, but that doesn’t last forever and they may end up relapsing. But if you continue with outpatient treatment for addiction, it makes things a lot easier. You will be reminded of the tools that you used to beat the addiction in the first place and you can also learn new methods to help you rebuild your life and resist the temptations of your addiction. Having a support network there is incredibly important if you want to avoid relapse.
Avoid Dangerous Situations
One of the biggest issues that recovering addicts have is that a lot of their social circles are built around their addiction. But if you continue to put yourself in dangerous situations with other addicts, it makes it incredibly difficult to avoid temptation. It can be difficult to leave old friends behind but you need to put yourself first and consider your own health. Try to find new hobbies or groups to join so you can build a social circle outside of your addiction.
Create A Healthy Schedule
Having a healthy schedule in place will give structure to your life and help you to move forward and achieve your goals. This schedule will include things like treatment times, spending time with family, working, and exercising. As you build a healthy schedule and start to do more positive things in your life, it helps to remind you why you wanted to get away from your addiction in the first place.
Don’t Get Complacent
Complacency is the biggest danger for people that are in recovery. It’s important to remember that your addiction will always be there and you can never take your recovery for granted. Even if it has been years, there is always the chance that you will relapse. But when people get complacent and think that they’re going to be fine, that’s when they start to let things slip. They stop keeping up with their schedule or they visit old friends that may put them in dangerous situations. This is when a relapse is most likely to happen, so make sure that you never get complacent.
You can never take your recovery for granted and there is always the risk of relapse, but if you follow these tips, you can reduce the chance of that happening.
